In the spirit of Patrick Stuart's review referenced at the start of the article: perhaps future generations will look back at us and think, "those poor fools! Instead of doing actual work, they spent their days congratulating each other for being born into a more advanced society than their ancestors."
not really, ideas come in stages, you have intuition that something is there, realization of what it is and formalization of how it works.
once you start reflecting on the topic, your knowledge may or may not advance but the formal structure of the inquiry marks it at least as something that was studied and talked about systematically and not incidentally, so it becomes a partial view on a subject more than a unsubstantiated belief.
take gravity: even if we are way ahead of newton and galileo in terms of understanding, we'd be hard pressed at calling them fool for not understanding gravitational waves or relativity or spooky action at distance, because they started the research systematically instead of postulating that each body has a "natural place" it tends toward.
On top of all that, you also live in a world full of heavily armed and armoured impulsive brutes that will murder you and your entire family as soon as look at you. They may well have tried to do so pretty recently too.
Fortunately many of those people are foreigners or strangers, but they are out there, they want all of your stuff and it's only a matter of time before they come to get it. Or, you can team up with your family, friends and allies and go get their stuff off them first. Much of the time, these are pretty much your only viable options. Everything else that your community do - farming, crafting, trading - is largely geared towards supporting a defence/offence capability to keep hold of it all and stay alive.
Furthermore, staying alive when it gets real usually doesn't mean looking down a sight and pulling a lever, it generally means forcing a metal object vary hard and deep into someone else's body face to face. So you'd better gear yourself up to be ok with that, or at least become very good friends with a lot of other people who are.
Perhaps. The problem developing countries have - including our own in their time - is that the social conventions and norms of behaviour that promote survival in such conditions take generations to correct to the new socioeconomic conditions.
I would recommend reading Bernard Bachrach's review of A Distant Mirror.
"...her generalizations about medieval warfare are grossly inaccurate. Her discussions of individual psychology and group psychology are equally foolish. She seems to have little understanding of what motivated the people about whom she writes and generally resorts to cliches such as chivalry or individual neuroses as explanations."
I’d rather someone read another book than an article. It’s too easy to write glibly about the Middle Ages in a short piece of comment and they’re not well enough understood to fill in the context correctly. Most of the readers in this thread will benefit from reading the entire book and then returning to the linked article. The article on its own would not lead to a better understanding of history, just a few new lines to repeat.
Tuchman in her heyday was the recipient of an enormous amount of opprobrium from her generation of academic historians (of which the nearly-fossilized Bachrach is a member), mostly for being a non-academic, extremely successful female popular historian. Modern academics are generally much more positive about her work. Just remember that it's an introductory popular history.
(One of the best things about Computer Science is that, generally, every publication after 1990 is online and available for those of us without access to an academic research library.)
My favorite comment from this story, one which I'll remember the next time I run a low fantasy or Bronze Age game:
"You know the creepy basement at your cousin's house that's full of furniture covered in sheets, weird barrels, and bad smells? You know how the lightswitch is way on the other side of the room so you've got to walk through, in pitch darkness, to try and find it? And you know how you always had one eye on the stairs just in case you had to run away from whatever horrible monster might live down there?
Well medieval life is like that all the time, except there is no lightswitch, and there are no stairs."
Much of the mindset(s) of the 14th century make a LOT more sense when you realize two things.
1. 19 year olds were routinely making critical military decisions. Remember how friggin' twitchy you were at 19 about big capitalized ideas like Honor and Purity and Romance? Yeah, now be that guy but in charge of a thousand lances. A reasonable modern equivalent to 14th century france is 21st century afghanistan. A few old survivors trying to keep the peace, and teenagers flipping out on blood vendettas keeping everyone on their toes.
2. Basically everyone had PTSD and most of the warrior class had semi-permanent concussions. This explains most if not all of the weird contradictions between battlefield brutality and the extremes of social politesse off it. Froissart and other chroniclers of the age have plenty of examples of knights who would shit themselves in terror before making themselves fight, or have screaming nightmares for days, or any of a long list of things that are pretty obvious signals of severe psychological distress. They would also do things like bawl their eyes out at music or at the death of a pet or other seemingly small things -- and flip into murderous rage when social conventions were violated. This is entirely coherent with, for example, things we see retired NFL players do. I suspect it's for a lot of the same reasons.
Jousting has to be at least as violent as two NFL players running full-bore at each other on a kick-off, and we know that's dangerous for CTE.
Also once you got to close-quarters on medieval battlefields, your center torso would be covered up pretty well with armor or a shield, so most of the injuries are coming underneath stabbing into the groin and legs. Or from above, bashing down on the head and shoulders with axes, maces, and hammery polearms.
I'm sure training was also a big component; thwacking each other with blunted blades would be rough when leather or wool padding is about the best you've got. Quarterstaffs were also popular - and that's not too far off from getting hit with a baseball bat. And for practicing jousting, the quintain is pretty much designed to punish you by smashing you in the back of the head with a sandbag.
Ok, I'll grant that jousting seems like an almost guaranteed concussion.
But I always assumed that the percentage of people with access to jousting practice would be so small, that there wouldn't be enough of them to really define the mindset of the age.
>Jousting has to be at least as violent as two NFL players running full-bore at each other on a kick-off, and we know that's dangerous for CTE
I'm sure there was a lot of tournament (of which jousting was only a part) derived TMI, but its important to keep in mind that during the high and late middle ages battle and tournament armor were different. Tournament armor was less flexible and heavier, after all you don't want to get hurt in a game. There were several styles of helm that attach directly to the breast plate that make your head an torso a single unit: https://www.battlemerchant.com/images/product_images/popup_i... (you would probably never wear this on a battlefield)
>Also once you got to close-quarters on medieval battlefields, your center torso would be covered up pretty well with armor or a shield, so most of the injuries are coming underneath stabbing into the groin and legs. Or from above, bashing down on the head and shoulders with axes, maces, and hammery polearms.
This, your sword is your service pistol, your lance (mounted) or your polearm (unmounted) is your primary weapon as a man-at-arms. You will notice both Knight and Samuari developed the same 3 weapon system (poleweapon + sword + dagger). Also its worth noting that when rigid armor replaced (or was worn on top of) mail (no its not called chainmail) for most of the surface area the use of sheilds quickly declined and two-handed weapons increased. You were wearing your shield. (Also for anyone interested a suit of armor is a 'harness' to use the technical term, that is where we get the German term harnischfechten, the techniques for fighting in armor, which are distinct from blossfechten (shirt fighting), the term for the superset of techniques that work against unarmored opponents)
>I'm sure training was also a big component; thwacking each other with blunted blades would be rough when leather or wool padding is about the best you've got.
People have resurrected the old fighting manuals and its known as HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) today and encompasses armed, unarmed (strikes, grappling), unarmored and armored fighting. I do this and my cotton HEMA fencing jacket provides plenty of protection. I do no think training safety was an issue.
>Quarterstaffs were also popular - and that's not too far off from getting hit with a baseball bat.
Yes pole-weapons are much more dangerous than swords, but using the harnischfechten against anyone is dangerous, even with swords, since they are mean to kill people in armor.
>It's just concussions all around.
Its definitely a risk, but hardly a given. I have broken a finger, bruised bones, but even period head protection is quite effective.
These are great points. I specialize in the period a bit after the 14th century (the early modern era, roughly Columbus to the Industrial Revolution) and often say something similar to my class.
I add these as points #3 and #4:
- Diseases that we would consider to be debilitating were so common that it was completely normal for a person to suffer from, say, smallpox, dysentery and a gangrenous limb in a 10 year period. All in a world with no painkillers whatsoever (oddly enough, opiates were almost never used in a clinically effective manner in surgery prior to the late 17th century). The sheer level of physical pain that people dealt with on a daily basis is staggering and would have taken a psychological toll.
- It was also completely normal for someone to have dealt with the loss of multiple siblings and children in infancy. You commonly see families that had 10+ children, of which only two or three survived into adulthood. So not only warriors but virtually everyone would have had something similar to what we'd today call PTSD. (Incidentally, this is also my theory as to why putti and the baby Jesus motif are so popular in medieval and Renaissance art - what today seems like a tacky baby painting was, in that period, deeply resonant with virtually everyone's personal experience of the loss of a beloved family member in infancy).
as an aside to your second point, there's a fascinating area of study looking at why much byzantine iconography stayed away from things like Pieta and representations of a suffering/crucified Christ, and stayed much more focused on other themes. Turns out, it correlates relatively well with "where the plague wasn't."
1. Delayed adulthood along with the carceral infantalization that accompanies it is purely a modern phenomenon.
2. Jousting was not nearly as common as popular culture presupposes. The notion that pitched battles, particularly ones that involved the nobility fighting personally and carelessly in melees, were encountered so frequently as to suffer from CTE goes against the historiography of the era.
3. Smallpox lasts about two weeks (if you live). Dysentery lasts about one week (if you live). Gangrenous limbs either kill you, come off, or recover. None of these cause persistent pain. If I get the flu every year, I'm going to have a worse time than these people, regardless of the existence of opiates.
4. Low infant mortality is also a purely modern phenomenon. It also ignores all known sociology on infant mortality. When infants and children die in highly mortal societies, their value is accordingly diminished. In many cultures where infant mortality is extremely high, they're not even considered fully human until around their first birthday.
Humans are amazingly resilient when it comes to persistent stress and develop culture-ways to cope.
1. This is an on-going debate to a certain degree (I mainly have encountered it via Phillipe Ariès's Centuries of Childhood). But I have never bought the argument that childhood is a modern invention. If you actually read primary sources from the period it is abundantly clear that parents sought to protect their children, that they treated children as different from adults, and that children were expected to behave in a manner different from adults. To me, that's a childhood, albeit one that looks very different from modern norms due to the existence of widespread child labor, etc.
2. It's too strong of a claim to say that medieval or early modern warriors suffered from CTE (mostly because retroactive diagnosis has a terrible track record) but I think it's very reasonable to say that warriors of this period suffered from severe psychological and physical distress that derived directly from their training. Likewise, you're leaving out the fact that nobles hunted and rode on horseback (with no helmet!) on a daily basis and that these are exceptionally dangerous occupations by modern standards.
3. Smallpox might last a matter of weeks as an active illness. But it is permanently disfiguring. Elizabeth I is just the most well-documented of what we can imagine were literally millions of people who suffered trauma from smallpox scars. Similarly, many illnesses of the period (like malaria, polio, scrofula, etc) were chronic. As for gangrenous limbs, Henry VIII suffered from a wound (from recreational jousting no less) that ultimately killed him via a leg ulcer, but it took years of agonizing pain to do so. Maybe not gangrene, but the point remains that a world of sharp objects + no antibiotics is no fun for anyone.
4. It's very difficult for me to imagine that the pain of losing a child ever really goes away, even if you live in a world where it's commonplace. Likewise, the evidence about children not being considered "fully human" until age 1 relies on naming practices. But it ignores things like murder prosecutions for infanticide which were widespread in the period - if babies weren't considered fully human, why did courts care if they were killed? And finally, most childhood mortality occurred after age 1, regardless.
Edit: I mostly agree with your critique of the OP, by the way. But I think the fact that we agree on humans from the past being more or less like us conflicts with your points about parents in the past being relatively un-concerned about the loss of a child, etc.
1. Do you include adolscence within childhood? Because that might be where we're disagreeing. How would you define childhood?
2. I don't think a comparison between cultures where horse-riding is fundamental to one where it is primarily a leisure activity makes much sense when it comes to estimations of danger. Yes, hunts could result in injuries; I don't disagree there. However, if attrition was severe enough to impede the function of the martial culture, it wouldn't be actively propagated.
3. Yes, disfigurements and scarring would be common in the aftermath of epidemics, but in those situations, it's so common that to form cultural persecuting complexes around it is difficult to justify. Lepers, on the other hand...
4. That's really my entire point: the reason it's so hard for you to imagine is because, if you live in the United States, the entire existence of death has become divorced from culture and daily existence. It's an aberration and a taboo. In a culture where death during childhood is common, there are cultural forms that account for it. That doesn't mean that it is or isn't a loss, but that it accomodates and integrates that event within a broader chain of being. As far as judicial injunctions against infanticide go, early mortality is incidental to life, not fundamental. Actively destroying a potential person, particularly within a truly local culture, when it isn't already part of the folkways, is of course going to result in reprisal. However the very existence of cultures that practiced exposure shows that it isn't fundamental to the human condition to viscerally value the lives of infants unconditionally. As far as PTSD goes, it's largely about being unable to cope with a traumatic event. In a functional society, it seems unlikely to me that PTSD strictly as a pathology surrounding child loss would be a thing--and the sociology surrounding it as I've read it supports that assertion.
I really think our disagreement resides in our perceptions of how durable/fragile humans can be under duress. I think humans are especially resilient, particularly if given adequate cultural coping mechanisms within a culture.
Interesting discussion here, and I certainly don't disagree that humans are resilient. All I'll add (re: point 4) is that I literally spent 2-3 months translating letters sent by Portuguese soldiers stationed in 17th century Angola as part of my PhD research. Those guys were among the most deeply unhappy individuals I've ever encountered in an archive. They were completely unable to cope with the severity of disease and death all around them. I think they're more of the norm than many recognize, because most of us don't spend time reading through primary source letters in archives. I think that spending a lot of my mental life in the 17th century makes me fairly well placed to imagine what it's like to lose a child in that world, and I really don't see what you'r arguing here reflected in the archives.
If anyone reading this is interested, btw, the depiction of a fictional Thomas Cromwell's loss of a child in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall struck me as incredibly well-observed and accurate. I really loved that part of the book.
Yes, in the form of thousands of African slaves (visible more via their absence, but showing up obliquely in complaints about "the cadavers of the blacks" being eaten by hyenas). Suffice to say that they were not coping well either, since Angola at this time was one of the centers of the Atlantic slave trade. The only person in these letters who seems at all calm is Queen Nzinga of Ndongo, an independent African ruler who communicated with the King of Portugal via a couple letters. But her family again proves my point - her brother, the former ruler, committed suicide due to his grief at his kingdom's loss of power. 17th century archives are basically a non-stop litany of enslavement, murder, illness, and complaints about lack of basic necessities.
The one exception among the archives I've looked at are those of the Royal Society - but then again, those archives describe medical experiments that would be considered completely appalling today (like trying to replace a madman's blood with that of a sheep). People might be resilient, but by and large they were not having a good time in this period, and they knew it.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but you're stating that there weren't primary sources directly involving the Angolans that you encountered? Just inference? Are there known records of their folkways concerning death?
Call me cynical, but any time a person near to power "commits suicide" or otherwise recuses themselves from the scene (present or historically), I generally take their volition in the matter with a very large grain of salt.
The vast majority of the surviving primary sources weren't written by Angolans. But because Portuguese Angola was centered around slave trading, the sources produced by the colony certainly involved Angolans: reports of slaver's raids, counter-attacks by African military leaders, surgeons remarking on slaves' diseases, etc.
Vincent Brown The Reaper's Garden is a great guide to diasporic African folkways surrounding death in the early modern period. He argues that enslaved Africans mobilized their social practices surrounding death as a way of asserting a kind of underground political power in plantation societies. At any rate, you won't find many people studying the history of the Atlantic slave trade or colonial Africa who think that people were coping adequately with the situation. The debate is more about whether it was so shatteringly destructive that it led to a total "social death" or whether some elements of culture and personhood were able to survive. I am in the second camp. But like I said, people were deeply psychologically and often physically scarred in this period.
Okay, so there aren't primary sources. That's totally fine, though at this point, it's moot to speak about the relative ability for a traditional culture to cope with elevated mortality since we've moved into dealing with conjecture purely in slave economies created by conquerors and entirely subaltern peoples.
Just curious, earlier you stated that you spent "a lot of [your] mental life in the 17th century", where does that reach extend to? Is it just Portugal or is it specific to the Atlantic Slave Trade?
All history is conjecture. The primary sources relating to 17th century Angola exist, they're just sparse. I just told you that Queen Nzinga sent letters to the King of Portugal, for instance. If you're genuinely interested in this, John Thornton and Linda Heywood both give good surveys of what sources are available and what they can tell us.
I work on early modern Britain, Portugal, and their colonies.
1. Define modern and social class you have in mind? Definitely by the end of 19 century in Germany, upper class children time was heavily controlled. Yes, poor kids run around alone from very early age through - you had 4 years old alone whole day.
As for peasants, you did not lived alone after marriage that was soon. You lived with parents who still exercised control over you.
Contemporary child soldiers are exactly that - they are kids recruited or forced into army. They still act like teenagers and kids, except they are more dangerous. Go read up on them and on how they do once they are out of army. There are projects trying to deal with that and by what they wrote, these kids do have various social, mental etc problems. Including nightmares and higher rates of violent behavior.
This is half right. The half wrong part is thinking that medieval people were inconsistent, painting a picture of brutes changing behaviour on a whim.
There are instead two aspects to consider: one cannot completely trust contemporary accounts, as these were propaganda. Written word was a tool of the influential and used as deliberately as today. The other was that the wast majority of time was rough but uneventful, so there isn’t much prose about it. We do have a glimpse of it trough official records tho, which are free of glamour and paint a quite banal view of medieval life
or, how to regurgitate the inherent biases used to justify the establishment of of your own philosphy about another one without actually understanding it to be biased...
> Nobody is Equal The world is hierarchical.
Unlike now?
> People of different estates and statuses are widely seen to be "of a different substance."
> Peasants, seen by the nobility, are closer to hounds than the noble's peers.
1st world 2nd world, developing countries, etc.
> The person of the monarch was literally sacred - divine matter.
Not actually true. Rule by divine right was not universally accepted, and didn't imply immunity since this was a 'right' or 'title' under a christian society - the monarch was intended (yes I know) to embody the best virtues of the best families, and if this was not the case, he (or more rarely she) was deposed.
Indeed, having such a strong power structure meant abuses were rampant, and people took advantage.
but even the philosophical basis of the time did not believe this.
> Also, men and women were made of completely different substances.
Clearly much crazier than the present day, where men and women are made of the exact same substance even though they actually aren't but somehow embody distinct 'gender identities' which are devoid of biology and can be applied equally and arbitrarily in differing configurations.
> The idea of a law that applies equally or fairly to everyone was neither acceptable nor practical.
Pretty sure murder was punished with death, as one example. Whether one could get away with it is another thing.. Certainly our courts now are always fair and never manipulated..
> Justice is a modern conceit.
justice under rule of law is an enlightement concept.
justice under law of 'what is right' is more traditional.
I posit that false convictions or incorrect enforcement are both feasible under either model.
> Neither speech nor assembly nor the commonest transactions of life are free.
mass surveillance, etc.
> There are laws for everything, and if there are no laws there are customs, and if there are no customs people will be reactionary and suspicious anyway.
see also voting response to this post, I am sure.
> The medieval world could be shaken by a speech, forever changed by a book, split by theological controversies over a line of text or the intonation of a hymn or the date of a holiday.
And what are the Kardashians up to this week?
I hear so-and-so is planning to invade somewhere-or-the-other..
It's 9/11.
> Displays of magnificence were not only convenient, they were mandatory. Misers were spurned and mocked.
Indeed. This is why monasteries utterly failed in that time period, and dressing simply and repairing ones garments, items, etc. is a common practice in modern consumer society.
> The Church glittered. Cathedrals were pieces of heaven brought to rest upon the earth
John Calvin called, he want's his reformation back. But I guess you were away and on holiday in Vegas, so you missed the memo.
> Patrick says "the ruling class are living like Kardashians" and he's exactly right.
>> Pretty sure murder was punished with death, as one example.
Depends on social classes of the murderer and the victim.
If peasant killed a noble it was punishable by death. And sometimes they would also torture said peasant before killing him, because the death alone wasn't enough punishment.
If a noble killed peasant they would typically only need to pay a small fine (unless the peasant was not his own subject, in which case instead of fine they would pay retribution to peasant's lord for the "lost income")
I think it may be biased to think that medieval life was a nightmare. It's kind of a modern propaganda (that started in the Renaissance - a more bloody period with a lot more wars by the way) to dismiss this old world and impose a new one.
Indeed. People tend to forget that the Middle Ages lasted for a thousand years. When all the conflicts are put together it seems there were only murderous barbarians out there trying to murder and/or rape you. But most areas were war-free most of that time. The reason that Barbara Tuchman wrote about France in the 14th century is that there happened so much.
Monty Python and The Holy Grail was not a documentary but satirised (among other things) the way the Middle Ages were depicted in movies and books.
One of the reasons we have such a bad image of that period is that the brutalities of the French Revolution needed to be justified.
Depends on what you consider "filled". Most people or their living relatives saw some sort of action. But in many cases it was once-in-lifetime happening. On top of that, a big chunk of medieval wars were meet-you-in-a-field-out-of-town kind of affairs.
As for royal vs. peasant.. big chunk of "blue blood" royalty had genetic diseases thanks to intermarriage to keep pure blood.. Meanwhile peasants knew it's not good to marry exclusively inside of a village and tried to spice things up by mixing with neighbouring villages.
As a defense of medieval society, I see where this is going, but a lot of the details of the defense are just wrong. Just a couple examples:
"Foreigners. I can read about far-away places in a book or look up a street-view picture of a city on the other side of the world. I live in a multicultural city. I'm not so much tolerant as apathetic, but that's good enough (and might even be better; tolerance implies tension). Anyway, forget all that. Ignorance and fear all around." We often think about how the educated spoke Latin in addition to their local language. But on top of that, many commoners were bilingual. There was a fair amount of movement of people between France, Scandinavia, Ireland, England, Scotland, just as one example. With that, came a sharing of culture, artistic style, literature, and so on. Elements of this shared culture can be seen from the Black Sea all the way to Ireland.
"The person of the monarch was literally sacred - divine matter" - Compare this claim, for example, with the story of England (https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/story-of-medieval-en...). Actually, the opposite is closer to the truth: the king was not held sacred and was almost continually under attack from the lower nobles.
"Neither speech nor assembly nor the commonest transactions of life are free." - This would depend in large part on where you were. In Ireland or Scotland, this was certainly not true. In England, customs taxes didn't come about until the second half of the Middle Ages.
>With that, came a sharing of culture, artistic style, literature, and so on. Elements of this shared culture can be seen from the Black Sea all the way to Ireland.
Absolutely! But remember that the process was generally slow, non-uniform, and perilous. People did travel the world, but with nothing close to the ease of modern life. I really wanted to drive the contrast home. On average, the medieval world was local.
>Actually, the opposite is closer to the truth: the king was not held sacred and was almost continually under attack from the lower nobles.
>This would depend in large part on where you were. In Ireland or Scotland, this was certainly not true. In England, customs taxes didn't come about until the second half of the Middle Ages.
Again, 100% correct, but it's a 2000 word post for a blog about pretending to be an elf! Some bits are going to get left out.
I could have kept going - these are meant to be examples, not exhaustive. My point is that rather than rebutting simple stereotypes with other simple stereotypes, everyone is better served by acknowledging that history and people are complicated.
for those who unlike the author aren't drawn to lazy and dismissive conclusions and are genuinely interested to study the beginning of this fascinating and terribly misunderstood era (in particular, it seems, in the Anglo-Saxon world) from a literary perspective, I recommend the following write up/compilation as a good starting point: https://pastebin.com/8ZgDV5mt
Statements like these are probably good for D&D campaigns, but its really dismissive of ancient thought, even medieval thought. No, they didn't have germ theory but they had a complex rationalism of their own and every 'dumb' serf could outlive us in any environment considering how educated they were on farming and survival.
Also the laundry list of things that they didn't have mostly applies to us as well. I take issue with how equality is supposed to be a modern given. Even in enlightened societies the difference between someone with a 7 or 8 digit net worth and a low class person is incredible. I mean, a sci-fi level of oddness here. Worrying about your next meal or next rent is a universe away from being pissed that the guys who waxed your yacht didn't do a perfect job. I sometimes end up in one of Chicago's less than stellar neighborhoods and the incredible desperation and violence and just hopelessness is overwhelming compared to my upper-middle class life.
Ignoring technology, we aren't too different from them. We had two world wars very recently, for example, which would be horror unimaginable in that age. I'd think a good D&D gamer would know that we're not different from them socially or politically and that what he describes isn't modernity but the entitled and pampered life of a suburban white American male who has never, and will never, have any real hardship in his life.
It's tricky because it's at the start of a sentence, but I was trying to go for capital "R" "Rationalism." Not "every medieval peasant had no idea how the world worked and planted grain in December half the time because he was afraid the devil might steal his socks." There were profoundly irrational acts, but I'm not trying to say that there was a total lack of a societal framework or a total absence of logic or reasoning.
>I take issue with how equality is supposed to be a modern given.
I think it's fair to say that equality is supposed to be a modern ideal, in contrast to the medieval world. I don't think I said "everyone is equal these days", and I'm having difficulty finding where you read that into the text.
>and that what he describes isn't modernity but the entitled and pampered life of a suburban white American male who has never, and will never, have any real hardship in his life.*
I'm not entirely sure how to respond to this. I think you may be bringing outside baggage into the discussion, and it's informing your view of who the author supposedly is.
>We live in an enlightened era. Our mental toolboxes are full to bursting with evidence-based reasoning, with precedent, with doubt, and with logic. We hold many truths to be self evident. We stand on the shoulders of intellectual giants and we think this plain of shoulders is ground level.
>If you want to think medieval, chuck your entire toolbox out the window and start from scratch. You need to un-learn rationality, un-learn concepts you've been steeped in since childhood.
This is one thing I've thought about before and that made quite an impression on me. We are physically identical to humans in the 14th century, or any period of history for that matter. Same brains, same "intelligence". But we would never dream of doing most things that were commonplace in the 14th century, we would never tolerate living in the way they did. Some things we know are elementary and almost childish in their simplicity, but took millenia. They looked at the world in a way that seems entirely silly to us. Aristotle was probably more intelligent than anybody in this thread, however he believed the most ridiculous things, same for, oh I don't know, Julius Caesar or St Thomas Aquinus.
We all are in a very real sense standing on the shoulders of billions, and their slow and tortuous progress.
The thing that blows me away is homo sapiens have been around 300K years (latest evidence). Imagine living with a current brain psysiology 300K years ago. What the hell did we do for all that time?
It occurred to me some time ago that the big question is the opposite: What do we not do that humans thousands of years ago did with their brains?
My thoughts went like this:
Since the brain is quite expensive evolution would not have grown it so much if it had not been needed. But this means humans really used all that brain.
That means if we now use it for so many very different things in a very - very! - recent technological world, with an equally recent extreme increase in population density worldwide (both movement top cities as well as the unprecedented total population size increase), what exactly did they do?
I think that this indeed is a very interesting question, I'm not sure we can answer it. Medieval brains are one thing, but what about 20,000 years ago? The brain must already have been pretty much the same.
But relationships have become a lot more complex with the huge increase in population density, plus a lot more flexibility and movement. We now have to deal with a lot more people than any of our ancient ancestors, and a lot of change. Our networks of work and cooperation are unprecedented by anything in history too.
This article is everything wrong with privileged moderns looking back on the past.
The world and the humans within it hasn't changed at all, barring costumes and jewelry.
The biggest fallacy in this article isn't that it's wrong per se; it's that the thesis distilled is "a member of the current intelligenstia criticizing the hoi polloi of the past" when the hoi polloi of their own current era are just as ignorant and the intelligentsia is just as fallible.
I really wanted to deconstruct the entire article, but I've spent way too much time on this as it is.
>Here's an early modern example, right when the world seemed to start to make sense. It might seem insane to us that George Spencer, a troublesome one-eye old servant in Connecticut, was tried and executed in 1642 for the crime of bestiality after a one-eyed pig was born in his village. It might also seem insane that both the pig and his own retracted confession were called as the two witnesses required to convict him. But by the standards of the community and the times, the only insane person was that godless trouble-making pig-fucker, George Spencer.
Let's look at some secondary sources regarding this case:
>"The early court records teem with incidents of irreligion, drunkenness, profanity, lechery, and worse. In one of the most extreme cases, George Spencer was charged at New Haven with 'prophane, atheistical carriage, in unfaithfulness and stubbornness to his master, a course of notorious lying, filthiness, scoffing at the ordinances, ways and people of God' culminating in his bestiality with a pig. An anxious committee of ministers asked him 'whether he did use to pray to God. He answered, he had not since he came to New England, which was between four or five years ago'. Spencer admitted that he had scoffed at the Lord's day, calling it Lady's day, but denied all the rest. However, he could not gainsay the record of his bad character, or the evidence of a monstrous piglet, to which he allegedly showed a telling paternal resemblance." 1
One can almost imagine the #LeafletStorm released in the days before his arrest:
"George Spencer Calls The Lord's Day The "Ladyes Day": Gets Schooled On Godliness"
"George Spencer: Genius, or dude who's gone too far this time?"
"George Spencer's Brand of 'Freethinking' Has a Long, Awful History"
"George Spencer Needs To See Some Of These Epic #IfTheLordWasALady Leaflets To See How Ridiculous His Remark Really Was"
And then you have this:
>"One of the magistrates reminded him of the scriptural text: "He thatt hideth his sin shall not prosper, but he that confesseth and forsaketh his sans shall > finde mercie." Spencer confessed, clearly misunderstanding the magistrate's use of the word "mercy." The judge was thinking of the next world, Spencer of this one. Before the trial, Spencer confessed the act eleven separate times and permitted a paper asking for mercy to be put up in church. At his trial, he refused to confess, apparently on the advice of a man who had told him that without it he could not be convicted. Faced with the many persons to whom he had confessed, he admitted that their testimony was true but denied having had intercourse with the sow. The court found him guilty because the "everlasting equity" of the Bible demanded the verdict." 2
So from these sources we can establish that:
1. The case of George Spencer is an outlier as considered by historians of the era.
2. George Spencer is essentially a neckbeard of the New Atheist type, circa 17th century America.
3. George Spencer admits that he is an irreligious, uncleanly man with a bad reputation, and that he admitted his guilt to these people, but that truly, he did not have sexual relations with that pig, even if the resemblance is uncanny.
Hi, trying to figure out how this site works. Hope you can see this!
It's good to see that someone else likes the Spencer case. It really is a fascinating case study.
Spencer was trapped in the legal quagmire of Puritan law. He didn't know what to do - he feared the law, and tried to obey his advisers, and generally made a legal mess of things. Looking at it from a great distance it's easy to see what he did wrong, but it's also important to remember that he was the victim of a hysterical hunt and an irrational prosecution.
and I come to the same conclusion you do. "No one is going to defend this blaspheming piece of shit," is a core component of medieval justice.
I think you're also convinced that I'm claiming these things as uniquely medieval which isn't true. I'm trying to provide perspective for someone approaching this topic from a non-academic background of Disney movies and D&D games.
>Hint: Every class of intelligentsia throughout time thinks its own set of platitudes, dogmas, and evidence-derived conclusions are immaculate and inviolate. It's like a twisted form of Conway's Law 3 for ideology.
Well... yeah? You didn't think I was going on some sort of unironic Randian super-rant here?
>Conspicuous consumption is a medieval construct absent in the modern period.
I was mostly trying to contrast this with the modern idea of "net worth" and "worth so many billion dollars." Wealth as assets, not as an abstract.
>Uh, people revile people like the Kardashians?
Absolutely. Chat with the viewerbase. It's mostly "oh my god, did you see what they did now?" It's shock and drama and voyeurism. It's not a positive experience, despite being a popular one. Not sure if you're familiar with modern game streamers, but it's the same attitude.
>History is a long series of contentions, victories, and defeats by conflicting parties with their own self-evident and self-motivated truths--No people, no culture, no time is homogeneous, except to the extent that they are homogeneously heterogeneous.
Again, I think you are reading way too far into the intent.
Remember, I write a gaming blog. The goal is to try and allow a modern human to quickly adopt a point of view. Most people play medieval people exactly like modern people. Sure, my post deals in high-level generalities - it's designed to grind 1000 years of history and an entire continent and turn it into an easily digestible paste. And it's only 2,000 words long! Of course some detail is going to be lost! Of course important elements are going to be left out! Your response to a few elements is nearly as long as the post itself.
>My favorite counter-point to the implicit idea that people "in the past" were unthinking proto-humans unlike us is the entirely mundane ancient bathroom graffiti of Pompeii 5 that wouldn't be out of place in any public restroom anywhere.
"The Autumn of the Middle Ages" by Huizinga is a fascinating exploration of this time period and how people thought during it. If you don't read Dutch there's a few translations out there; I liked the most recent.
Slightly off-topic: the second link goes to a site called Erenow, which has many, many books for free. Anyone know anything about this site? It doesn't make sense, I don't see how it's legal? Especially when the site has an OK layout.
This is quite good, though I disagree on one point:
> "FORGET...Progress"
I mean I completely agree, it's just for the modern reader infected with the victorian idea of "progress" (which has also polluted most people's understanding of how evolution works) this difference is even more profound.
There was a common belief in a largely static social order; why try for profound change? You can try to usurp the king, but that just shows that the old king was illegitimate, and anyway only certain people could get away with it.
But the other significant and related force was one of declinism: the romans had had a more advanced society (look at all their artifacts still around! Their literature!) and that, perhaps due to original sin, the then-current world was a less advanced society.
i don't get what you are talking about. please explain what the problem is with the victorian idea of progress (with or without scare quotes. And what do you mean by that, including evolution. besides christianity taking over religious thought in roman society, what does original sin have to do with that, just the philosophical impact?
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadonce you start reflecting on the topic, your knowledge may or may not advance but the formal structure of the inquiry marks it at least as something that was studied and talked about systematically and not incidentally, so it becomes a partial view on a subject more than a unsubstantiated belief.
take gravity: even if we are way ahead of newton and galileo in terms of understanding, we'd be hard pressed at calling them fool for not understanding gravitational waves or relativity or spooky action at distance, because they started the research systematically instead of postulating that each body has a "natural place" it tends toward.
Fortunately many of those people are foreigners or strangers, but they are out there, they want all of your stuff and it's only a matter of time before they come to get it. Or, you can team up with your family, friends and allies and go get their stuff off them first. Much of the time, these are pretty much your only viable options. Everything else that your community do - farming, crafting, trading - is largely geared towards supporting a defence/offence capability to keep hold of it all and stay alive.
Furthermore, staying alive when it gets real usually doesn't mean looking down a sight and pulling a lever, it generally means forcing a metal object vary hard and deep into someone else's body face to face. So you'd better gear yourself up to be ok with that, or at least become very good friends with a lot of other people who are.
So, like a 3rd world country or living under a dictatorship.
"...her generalizations about medieval warfare are grossly inaccurate. Her discussions of individual psychology and group psychology are equally foolish. She seems to have little understanding of what motivated the people about whom she writes and generally resorts to cliches such as chivalry or individual neuroses as explanations."
(One of the best things about Computer Science is that, generally, every publication after 1990 is online and available for those of us without access to an academic research library.)
"You know the creepy basement at your cousin's house that's full of furniture covered in sheets, weird barrels, and bad smells? You know how the lightswitch is way on the other side of the room so you've got to walk through, in pitch darkness, to try and find it? And you know how you always had one eye on the stairs just in case you had to run away from whatever horrible monster might live down there?
Well medieval life is like that all the time, except there is no lightswitch, and there are no stairs."
1. 19 year olds were routinely making critical military decisions. Remember how friggin' twitchy you were at 19 about big capitalized ideas like Honor and Purity and Romance? Yeah, now be that guy but in charge of a thousand lances. A reasonable modern equivalent to 14th century france is 21st century afghanistan. A few old survivors trying to keep the peace, and teenagers flipping out on blood vendettas keeping everyone on their toes.
2. Basically everyone had PTSD and most of the warrior class had semi-permanent concussions. This explains most if not all of the weird contradictions between battlefield brutality and the extremes of social politesse off it. Froissart and other chroniclers of the age have plenty of examples of knights who would shit themselves in terror before making themselves fight, or have screaming nightmares for days, or any of a long list of things that are pretty obvious signals of severe psychological distress. They would also do things like bawl their eyes out at music or at the death of a pet or other seemingly small things -- and flip into murderous rage when social conventions were violated. This is entirely coherent with, for example, things we see retired NFL players do. I suspect it's for a lot of the same reasons.
Would it be from practicing with wooden swords and hitting each other in the head? Or would it be from falling off horses, or something else?
Also once you got to close-quarters on medieval battlefields, your center torso would be covered up pretty well with armor or a shield, so most of the injuries are coming underneath stabbing into the groin and legs. Or from above, bashing down on the head and shoulders with axes, maces, and hammery polearms.
I'm sure training was also a big component; thwacking each other with blunted blades would be rough when leather or wool padding is about the best you've got. Quarterstaffs were also popular - and that's not too far off from getting hit with a baseball bat. And for practicing jousting, the quintain is pretty much designed to punish you by smashing you in the back of the head with a sandbag.
It's just concussions all around.
But I always assumed that the percentage of people with access to jousting practice would be so small, that there wouldn't be enough of them to really define the mindset of the age.
I'm sure there was a lot of tournament (of which jousting was only a part) derived TMI, but its important to keep in mind that during the high and late middle ages battle and tournament armor were different. Tournament armor was less flexible and heavier, after all you don't want to get hurt in a game. There were several styles of helm that attach directly to the breast plate that make your head an torso a single unit: https://www.battlemerchant.com/images/product_images/popup_i... (you would probably never wear this on a battlefield)
>Also once you got to close-quarters on medieval battlefields, your center torso would be covered up pretty well with armor or a shield, so most of the injuries are coming underneath stabbing into the groin and legs. Or from above, bashing down on the head and shoulders with axes, maces, and hammery polearms.
This, your sword is your service pistol, your lance (mounted) or your polearm (unmounted) is your primary weapon as a man-at-arms. You will notice both Knight and Samuari developed the same 3 weapon system (poleweapon + sword + dagger). Also its worth noting that when rigid armor replaced (or was worn on top of) mail (no its not called chainmail) for most of the surface area the use of sheilds quickly declined and two-handed weapons increased. You were wearing your shield. (Also for anyone interested a suit of armor is a 'harness' to use the technical term, that is where we get the German term harnischfechten, the techniques for fighting in armor, which are distinct from blossfechten (shirt fighting), the term for the superset of techniques that work against unarmored opponents)
>I'm sure training was also a big component; thwacking each other with blunted blades would be rough when leather or wool padding is about the best you've got.
People have resurrected the old fighting manuals and its known as HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) today and encompasses armed, unarmed (strikes, grappling), unarmored and armored fighting. I do this and my cotton HEMA fencing jacket provides plenty of protection. I do no think training safety was an issue.
>Quarterstaffs were also popular - and that's not too far off from getting hit with a baseball bat.
Yes pole-weapons are much more dangerous than swords, but using the harnischfechten against anyone is dangerous, even with swords, since they are mean to kill people in armor.
>It's just concussions all around.
Its definitely a risk, but hardly a given. I have broken a finger, bruised bones, but even period head protection is quite effective.
I add these as points #3 and #4:
- Diseases that we would consider to be debilitating were so common that it was completely normal for a person to suffer from, say, smallpox, dysentery and a gangrenous limb in a 10 year period. All in a world with no painkillers whatsoever (oddly enough, opiates were almost never used in a clinically effective manner in surgery prior to the late 17th century). The sheer level of physical pain that people dealt with on a daily basis is staggering and would have taken a psychological toll.
- It was also completely normal for someone to have dealt with the loss of multiple siblings and children in infancy. You commonly see families that had 10+ children, of which only two or three survived into adulthood. So not only warriors but virtually everyone would have had something similar to what we'd today call PTSD. (Incidentally, this is also my theory as to why putti and the baby Jesus motif are so popular in medieval and Renaissance art - what today seems like a tacky baby painting was, in that period, deeply resonant with virtually everyone's personal experience of the loss of a beloved family member in infancy).
1. Delayed adulthood along with the carceral infantalization that accompanies it is purely a modern phenomenon.
2. Jousting was not nearly as common as popular culture presupposes. The notion that pitched battles, particularly ones that involved the nobility fighting personally and carelessly in melees, were encountered so frequently as to suffer from CTE goes against the historiography of the era.
3. Smallpox lasts about two weeks (if you live). Dysentery lasts about one week (if you live). Gangrenous limbs either kill you, come off, or recover. None of these cause persistent pain. If I get the flu every year, I'm going to have a worse time than these people, regardless of the existence of opiates.
4. Low infant mortality is also a purely modern phenomenon. It also ignores all known sociology on infant mortality. When infants and children die in highly mortal societies, their value is accordingly diminished. In many cultures where infant mortality is extremely high, they're not even considered fully human until around their first birthday.
Humans are amazingly resilient when it comes to persistent stress and develop culture-ways to cope.
2. It's too strong of a claim to say that medieval or early modern warriors suffered from CTE (mostly because retroactive diagnosis has a terrible track record) but I think it's very reasonable to say that warriors of this period suffered from severe psychological and physical distress that derived directly from their training. Likewise, you're leaving out the fact that nobles hunted and rode on horseback (with no helmet!) on a daily basis and that these are exceptionally dangerous occupations by modern standards.
3. Smallpox might last a matter of weeks as an active illness. But it is permanently disfiguring. Elizabeth I is just the most well-documented of what we can imagine were literally millions of people who suffered trauma from smallpox scars. Similarly, many illnesses of the period (like malaria, polio, scrofula, etc) were chronic. As for gangrenous limbs, Henry VIII suffered from a wound (from recreational jousting no less) that ultimately killed him via a leg ulcer, but it took years of agonizing pain to do so. Maybe not gangrene, but the point remains that a world of sharp objects + no antibiotics is no fun for anyone.
4. It's very difficult for me to imagine that the pain of losing a child ever really goes away, even if you live in a world where it's commonplace. Likewise, the evidence about children not being considered "fully human" until age 1 relies on naming practices. But it ignores things like murder prosecutions for infanticide which were widespread in the period - if babies weren't considered fully human, why did courts care if they were killed? And finally, most childhood mortality occurred after age 1, regardless.
Edit: I mostly agree with your critique of the OP, by the way. But I think the fact that we agree on humans from the past being more or less like us conflicts with your points about parents in the past being relatively un-concerned about the loss of a child, etc.
2. I don't think a comparison between cultures where horse-riding is fundamental to one where it is primarily a leisure activity makes much sense when it comes to estimations of danger. Yes, hunts could result in injuries; I don't disagree there. However, if attrition was severe enough to impede the function of the martial culture, it wouldn't be actively propagated.
3. Yes, disfigurements and scarring would be common in the aftermath of epidemics, but in those situations, it's so common that to form cultural persecuting complexes around it is difficult to justify. Lepers, on the other hand...
4. That's really my entire point: the reason it's so hard for you to imagine is because, if you live in the United States, the entire existence of death has become divorced from culture and daily existence. It's an aberration and a taboo. In a culture where death during childhood is common, there are cultural forms that account for it. That doesn't mean that it is or isn't a loss, but that it accomodates and integrates that event within a broader chain of being. As far as judicial injunctions against infanticide go, early mortality is incidental to life, not fundamental. Actively destroying a potential person, particularly within a truly local culture, when it isn't already part of the folkways, is of course going to result in reprisal. However the very existence of cultures that practiced exposure shows that it isn't fundamental to the human condition to viscerally value the lives of infants unconditionally. As far as PTSD goes, it's largely about being unable to cope with a traumatic event. In a functional society, it seems unlikely to me that PTSD strictly as a pathology surrounding child loss would be a thing--and the sociology surrounding it as I've read it supports that assertion.
I really think our disagreement resides in our perceptions of how durable/fragile humans can be under duress. I think humans are especially resilient, particularly if given adequate cultural coping mechanisms within a culture.
If anyone reading this is interested, btw, the depiction of a fictional Thomas Cromwell's loss of a child in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall struck me as incredibly well-observed and accurate. I really loved that part of the book.
The one exception among the archives I've looked at are those of the Royal Society - but then again, those archives describe medical experiments that would be considered completely appalling today (like trying to replace a madman's blood with that of a sheep). People might be resilient, but by and large they were not having a good time in this period, and they knew it.
Call me cynical, but any time a person near to power "commits suicide" or otherwise recuses themselves from the scene (present or historically), I generally take their volition in the matter with a very large grain of salt.
Vincent Brown The Reaper's Garden is a great guide to diasporic African folkways surrounding death in the early modern period. He argues that enslaved Africans mobilized their social practices surrounding death as a way of asserting a kind of underground political power in plantation societies. At any rate, you won't find many people studying the history of the Atlantic slave trade or colonial Africa who think that people were coping adequately with the situation. The debate is more about whether it was so shatteringly destructive that it led to a total "social death" or whether some elements of culture and personhood were able to survive. I am in the second camp. But like I said, people were deeply psychologically and often physically scarred in this period.
Just curious, earlier you stated that you spent "a lot of [your] mental life in the 17th century", where does that reach extend to? Is it just Portugal or is it specific to the Atlantic Slave Trade?
I work on early modern Britain, Portugal, and their colonies.
As for peasants, you did not lived alone after marriage that was soon. You lived with parents who still exercised control over you.
Contemporary child soldiers are exactly that - they are kids recruited or forced into army. They still act like teenagers and kids, except they are more dangerous. Go read up on them and on how they do once they are out of army. There are projects trying to deal with that and by what they wrote, these kids do have various social, mental etc problems. Including nightmares and higher rates of violent behavior.
QED.
There are instead two aspects to consider: one cannot completely trust contemporary accounts, as these were propaganda. Written word was a tool of the influential and used as deliberately as today. The other was that the wast majority of time was rough but uneventful, so there isn’t much prose about it. We do have a glimpse of it trough official records tho, which are free of glamour and paint a quite banal view of medieval life
> Nobody is Equal The world is hierarchical.
Unlike now?
> People of different estates and statuses are widely seen to be "of a different substance." > Peasants, seen by the nobility, are closer to hounds than the noble's peers.
1st world 2nd world, developing countries, etc.
> The person of the monarch was literally sacred - divine matter.
Not actually true. Rule by divine right was not universally accepted, and didn't imply immunity since this was a 'right' or 'title' under a christian society - the monarch was intended (yes I know) to embody the best virtues of the best families, and if this was not the case, he (or more rarely she) was deposed.
Indeed, having such a strong power structure meant abuses were rampant, and people took advantage. but even the philosophical basis of the time did not believe this.
> Also, men and women were made of completely different substances.
Clearly much crazier than the present day, where men and women are made of the exact same substance even though they actually aren't but somehow embody distinct 'gender identities' which are devoid of biology and can be applied equally and arbitrarily in differing configurations.
> The idea of a law that applies equally or fairly to everyone was neither acceptable nor practical.
Pretty sure murder was punished with death, as one example. Whether one could get away with it is another thing.. Certainly our courts now are always fair and never manipulated..
> Justice is a modern conceit.
justice under rule of law is an enlightement concept. justice under law of 'what is right' is more traditional.
I posit that false convictions or incorrect enforcement are both feasible under either model.
> Neither speech nor assembly nor the commonest transactions of life are free.
mass surveillance, etc.
> There are laws for everything, and if there are no laws there are customs, and if there are no customs people will be reactionary and suspicious anyway.
see also voting response to this post, I am sure.
> The medieval world could be shaken by a speech, forever changed by a book, split by theological controversies over a line of text or the intonation of a hymn or the date of a holiday.
And what are the Kardashians up to this week? I hear so-and-so is planning to invade somewhere-or-the-other.. It's 9/11.
> Displays of magnificence were not only convenient, they were mandatory. Misers were spurned and mocked.
Indeed. This is why monasteries utterly failed in that time period, and dressing simply and repairing ones garments, items, etc. is a common practice in modern consumer society.
> The Church glittered. Cathedrals were pieces of heaven brought to rest upon the earth
John Calvin called, he want's his reformation back. But I guess you were away and on holiday in Vegas, so you missed the memo.
> Patrick says "the ruling class are living like Kardashians" and he's exactly right.
welll well, looks like we agree on something.
Depends on social classes of the murderer and the victim.
If peasant killed a noble it was punishable by death. And sometimes they would also torture said peasant before killing him, because the death alone wasn't enough punishment.
If a noble killed peasant they would typically only need to pay a small fine (unless the peasant was not his own subject, in which case instead of fine they would pay retribution to peasant's lord for the "lost income")
Monty Python and The Holy Grail was not a documentary but satirised (among other things) the way the Middle Ages were depicted in movies and books.
One of the reasons we have such a bad image of that period is that the brutalities of the French Revolution needed to be justified.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/396...
Can anyone verify that?
I imagine that the last 2,000 years have been filled with territorial disputes that were solved with the blood of males.
The survivors of the battle getting to keep the land and the women.
I dont think these were petty disputes either, I think these were rational decision making from leadership.
But I really dont know. Ive thought about this question, to propagate your genes, is it better to be Royal or peasant stock?
As for royal vs. peasant.. big chunk of "blue blood" royalty had genetic diseases thanks to intermarriage to keep pure blood.. Meanwhile peasants knew it's not good to marry exclusively inside of a village and tried to spice things up by mixing with neighbouring villages.
"Foreigners. I can read about far-away places in a book or look up a street-view picture of a city on the other side of the world. I live in a multicultural city. I'm not so much tolerant as apathetic, but that's good enough (and might even be better; tolerance implies tension). Anyway, forget all that. Ignorance and fear all around." We often think about how the educated spoke Latin in addition to their local language. But on top of that, many commoners were bilingual. There was a fair amount of movement of people between France, Scandinavia, Ireland, England, Scotland, just as one example. With that, came a sharing of culture, artistic style, literature, and so on. Elements of this shared culture can be seen from the Black Sea all the way to Ireland.
"The person of the monarch was literally sacred - divine matter" - Compare this claim, for example, with the story of England (https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/story-of-medieval-en...). Actually, the opposite is closer to the truth: the king was not held sacred and was almost continually under attack from the lower nobles.
"Neither speech nor assembly nor the commonest transactions of life are free." - This would depend in large part on where you were. In Ireland or Scotland, this was certainly not true. In England, customs taxes didn't come about until the second half of the Middle Ages.
Absolutely! But remember that the process was generally slow, non-uniform, and perilous. People did travel the world, but with nothing close to the ease of modern life. I really wanted to drive the contrast home. On average, the medieval world was local.
>Actually, the opposite is closer to the truth: the king was not held sacred and was almost continually under attack from the lower nobles.
Just one counterpoint: the King's Evil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculous_cervical_lymphaden...
The status of kings... varied.
>This would depend in large part on where you were. In Ireland or Scotland, this was certainly not true. In England, customs taxes didn't come about until the second half of the Middle Ages.
Again, 100% correct, but it's a 2000 word post for a blog about pretending to be an elf! Some bits are going to get left out.
Statements like these are probably good for D&D campaigns, but its really dismissive of ancient thought, even medieval thought. No, they didn't have germ theory but they had a complex rationalism of their own and every 'dumb' serf could outlive us in any environment considering how educated they were on farming and survival.
Also the laundry list of things that they didn't have mostly applies to us as well. I take issue with how equality is supposed to be a modern given. Even in enlightened societies the difference between someone with a 7 or 8 digit net worth and a low class person is incredible. I mean, a sci-fi level of oddness here. Worrying about your next meal or next rent is a universe away from being pissed that the guys who waxed your yacht didn't do a perfect job. I sometimes end up in one of Chicago's less than stellar neighborhoods and the incredible desperation and violence and just hopelessness is overwhelming compared to my upper-middle class life.
Ignoring technology, we aren't too different from them. We had two world wars very recently, for example, which would be horror unimaginable in that age. I'd think a good D&D gamer would know that we're not different from them socially or politically and that what he describes isn't modernity but the entitled and pampered life of a suburban white American male who has never, and will never, have any real hardship in his life.
>I take issue with how equality is supposed to be a modern given.
I think it's fair to say that equality is supposed to be a modern ideal, in contrast to the medieval world. I don't think I said "everyone is equal these days", and I'm having difficulty finding where you read that into the text.
>and that what he describes isn't modernity but the entitled and pampered life of a suburban white American male who has never, and will never, have any real hardship in his life.*
I'm not entirely sure how to respond to this. I think you may be bringing outside baggage into the discussion, and it's informing your view of who the author supposedly is.
>If you want to think medieval, chuck your entire toolbox out the window and start from scratch. You need to un-learn rationality, un-learn concepts you've been steeped in since childhood.
This is one thing I've thought about before and that made quite an impression on me. We are physically identical to humans in the 14th century, or any period of history for that matter. Same brains, same "intelligence". But we would never dream of doing most things that were commonplace in the 14th century, we would never tolerate living in the way they did. Some things we know are elementary and almost childish in their simplicity, but took millenia. They looked at the world in a way that seems entirely silly to us. Aristotle was probably more intelligent than anybody in this thread, however he believed the most ridiculous things, same for, oh I don't know, Julius Caesar or St Thomas Aquinus.
We all are in a very real sense standing on the shoulders of billions, and their slow and tortuous progress.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/world-s-oldest-homo-s...
My thoughts went like this:
Since the brain is quite expensive evolution would not have grown it so much if it had not been needed. But this means humans really used all that brain.
That means if we now use it for so many very different things in a very - very! - recent technological world, with an equally recent extreme increase in population density worldwide (both movement top cities as well as the unprecedented total population size increase), what exactly did they do?
I think that this indeed is a very interesting question, I'm not sure we can answer it. Medieval brains are one thing, but what about 20,000 years ago? The brain must already have been pretty much the same.
The world and the humans within it hasn't changed at all, barring costumes and jewelry.
The biggest fallacy in this article isn't that it's wrong per se; it's that the thesis distilled is "a member of the current intelligenstia criticizing the hoi polloi of the past" when the hoi polloi of their own current era are just as ignorant and the intelligentsia is just as fallible.
I really wanted to deconstruct the entire article, but I've spent way too much time on this as it is.
>Here's an early modern example, right when the world seemed to start to make sense. It might seem insane to us that George Spencer, a troublesome one-eye old servant in Connecticut, was tried and executed in 1642 for the crime of bestiality after a one-eyed pig was born in his village. It might also seem insane that both the pig and his own retracted confession were called as the two witnesses required to convict him. But by the standards of the community and the times, the only insane person was that godless trouble-making pig-fucker, George Spencer.
Let's look at some secondary sources regarding this case:
>"The early court records teem with incidents of irreligion, drunkenness, profanity, lechery, and worse. In one of the most extreme cases, George Spencer was charged at New Haven with 'prophane, atheistical carriage, in unfaithfulness and stubbornness to his master, a course of notorious lying, filthiness, scoffing at the ordinances, ways and people of God' culminating in his bestiality with a pig. An anxious committee of ministers asked him 'whether he did use to pray to God. He answered, he had not since he came to New England, which was between four or five years ago'. Spencer admitted that he had scoffed at the Lord's day, calling it Lady's day, but denied all the rest. However, he could not gainsay the record of his bad character, or the evidence of a monstrous piglet, to which he allegedly showed a telling paternal resemblance." 1
One can almost imagine the #LeafletStorm released in the days before his arrest:
"George Spencer Calls The Lord's Day The "Ladyes Day": Gets Schooled On Godliness"
"George Spencer: Genius, or dude who's gone too far this time?"
"George Spencer's Brand of 'Freethinking' Has a Long, Awful History"
"George Spencer Needs To See Some Of These Epic #IfTheLordWasALady Leaflets To See How Ridiculous His Remark Really Was"
And then you have this:
>"One of the magistrates reminded him of the scriptural text: "He thatt hideth his sin shall not prosper, but he that confesseth and forsaketh his sans shall > finde mercie." Spencer confessed, clearly misunderstanding the magistrate's use of the word "mercy." The judge was thinking of the next world, Spencer of this one. Before the trial, Spencer confessed the act eleven separate times and permitted a paper asking for mercy to be put up in church. At his trial, he refused to confess, apparently on the advice of a man who had told him that without it he could not be convicted. Faced with the many persons to whom he had confessed, he admitted that their testimony was true but denied having had intercourse with the sow. The court found him guilty because the "everlasting equity" of the Bible demanded the verdict." 2
So from these sources we can establish that:
1. The case of George Spencer is an outlier as considered by historians of the era.
2. George Spencer is essentially a neckbeard of the New Atheist type, circa 17th century America.
3. George Spencer admits that he is an irreligious, uncleanly man with a bad reputation, and that he admitted his guilt to these people, but that truly, he did not have sexual relations with that pig, even if the resemblance is uncanny.
4. The "pro...
It's good to see that someone else likes the Spencer case. It really is a fascinating case study.
Spencer was trapped in the legal quagmire of Puritan law. He didn't know what to do - he feared the law, and tried to obey his advisers, and generally made a legal mess of things. Looking at it from a great distance it's easy to see what he did wrong, but it's also important to remember that he was the victim of a hysterical hunt and an irrational prosecution.
I've written another high-level (and therefore, very general) overview of medieval laws and trials here: https://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/08/thinking-medieva...
and I come to the same conclusion you do. "No one is going to defend this blaspheming piece of shit," is a core component of medieval justice.
I think you're also convinced that I'm claiming these things as uniquely medieval which isn't true. I'm trying to provide perspective for someone approaching this topic from a non-academic background of Disney movies and D&D games.
>Hint: Every class of intelligentsia throughout time thinks its own set of platitudes, dogmas, and evidence-derived conclusions are immaculate and inviolate. It's like a twisted form of Conway's Law 3 for ideology.
Well... yeah? You didn't think I was going on some sort of unironic Randian super-rant here?
>Conspicuous consumption is a medieval construct absent in the modern period.
I was mostly trying to contrast this with the modern idea of "net worth" and "worth so many billion dollars." Wealth as assets, not as an abstract.
>Uh, people revile people like the Kardashians?
Absolutely. Chat with the viewerbase. It's mostly "oh my god, did you see what they did now?" It's shock and drama and voyeurism. It's not a positive experience, despite being a popular one. Not sure if you're familiar with modern game streamers, but it's the same attitude.
>History is a long series of contentions, victories, and defeats by conflicting parties with their own self-evident and self-motivated truths--No people, no culture, no time is homogeneous, except to the extent that they are homogeneously heterogeneous.
Again, I think you are reading way too far into the intent.
Remember, I write a gaming blog. The goal is to try and allow a modern human to quickly adopt a point of view. Most people play medieval people exactly like modern people. Sure, my post deals in high-level generalities - it's designed to grind 1000 years of history and an entire continent and turn it into an easily digestible paste. And it's only 2,000 words long! Of course some detail is going to be lost! Of course important elements are going to be left out! Your response to a few elements is nearly as long as the post itself.
>My favorite counter-point to the implicit idea that people "in the past" were unthinking proto-humans unlike us is the entirely mundane ancient bathroom graffiti of Pompeii 5 that wouldn't be out of place in any public restroom anywhere.
And yet, for every similarity, differences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevole...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autumn_of_the_Middle_Ages
> "FORGET...Progress"
I mean I completely agree, it's just for the modern reader infected with the victorian idea of "progress" (which has also polluted most people's understanding of how evolution works) this difference is even more profound.
There was a common belief in a largely static social order; why try for profound change? You can try to usurp the king, but that just shows that the old king was illegitimate, and anyway only certain people could get away with it.
But the other significant and related force was one of declinism: the romans had had a more advanced society (look at all their artifacts still around! Their literature!) and that, perhaps due to original sin, the then-current world was a less advanced society.