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The Medieval Mindset (2017)

72 points by marchenko 8y ago

lainga 8y ago
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."
- LoSboccacc 8y ago
  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.
simonh 8y ago
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.
- tabtab 8y ago
  a world full of heavily armed and armoured impulsive brutes that will murder you and your entire family as soon as look at you... So, like a 3rd world country or living under a dictatorship.
  - simonh 8y ago
    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.
js8 8y ago
This is a great article. I almost cannot watch any historical movie, the life was so hopeless back then.
1123581321 8y ago
I would recommend reading A Distant Mirror, the book referenced at the start.
- wrp 8y ago
  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."
  - 1123581321 8y ago
    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.
  - blackbagboys 8y ago
    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.
  - mcguire 8y ago
    Any idea where to get said review? (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.)
    - wrp 8y ago
twoquestions 8y ago
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."
hprotagonist 8y ago
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.
- ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
  Why would the Knights have CTE? 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?
  - megaman22 8y ago
    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. It's just concussions all around.
LoSboccacc 8y ago
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
cat199 8y ago
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. welll well, looks like we agree on something.
tabtab 8y ago
I don't see that "insanely flaky deluded narcissists" went out of style. We just have slightly more checks and balances on them now.
sunseb 8y ago
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.
- avocad 8y ago
  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.
  - sunseb 8y ago
    I totally agree. Speaking of the French revolution, have a look at this: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/3964724/Vende-French-call-for-revolution-massacre-to-be-termed-genocide.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/396...
  - mkirklions 8y ago
    >But most areas were war-free most of that time. 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?
    - mantas 8y ago
      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.
jkingsbery 8y ago
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-england-from-king-arthur-to-the-tudor-conquest.html 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.
- Skerples 8y ago
  >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. Just one counterpoint: the King's Evil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculous_cervical_lymphadenitis#History 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.
Karolus 8y ago
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 https://pastebin.com/8ZgDV5mt
drzaiusapelord 8y ago
>Rationalism is a very modern invention 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.
- Skerples 8y ago
  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.
andrepd 8y ago
>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.
- Clubber 8y ago
  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? http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/world-s-oldest-homo-sapiens-fossils-found-morocco http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/world-s-oldest-homo-s...
  - ItsMe000001 8y ago
    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.
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froasty 8y ago
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. 4. The "proper" classes thought and had thought that he was clearly an ungodly person. Periodde. By troth, why are we even having this conversation? It's 1642 Anno Domini. #BurnAHeretic 5. His legal advisors insinuated that if he pled guilty, he could get a plea bargain. 6. Apparently, someone whom he trusted more advised him pre-trial that this was ill-advised--although whether it was "they're still going to hang thee if thou confess" or "the constable hath lyttle but shite in his hands without thine confession, brethren" remains ambiguous. 7. The court, having their orderly show-trial upset, says fuck it, claims that George Spencer is clearly guilty because of something he said in the past, and the pig is a self-evident witness, and why the fuck not? No one is going to defend this blaspheming piece of shit. None of these strike me as particularly particular to an era. People have been crucifying others with the force of social pressure since recorded history began. The only difference is the scenery. >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. 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. >Displays of magnificence were not only convenient, they were mandatory. Misers were spurned and mocked. Today we value a person by the money they have, but to the medieval mind, it was the money you spent and how you spent it that elevated your status. The Church glittered. Cathedrals were pieces of heaven brought to rest upon the earth. The nobles ate extraordinary dishes and wore imported silk, and the rising merchants strove to imitate them. The peasants might be annoyed by the idleness and corruption of the nobility, but few ever expressed wonder at the cost of their everyday behavior, only at cost wasted on pointless wars or lost causes. A crown of diamonds could silence any peasant in awe. To the First and Second Estates, earning money by labour or personal action was degrading; gifts were common and welcomed. So let's break out two of the most egregious assumptions: 1. Conspicuous consumption is a medieval construct absent in the modern period. 2. All peasants are identical and identically stupid. They have no capacity for rational thought. If you put shiny in front of them, they will be entranced like Lennie Small. The first is ludricrous, as the existence of the entire field of consumerism theory proves (an invention solely of the 20th century). The second is equally as ludricrous and ironically, embraces mythological feudal castes as reality. >Patrick says "the ruling class are living like Kardashians" and he's exactly right. The Kardashians seem to be reviled because they are talentless, unproductive, and ignorant - all flaws to a modern viewer, all virtues to a medieval one. We prize our working celebrities and revile our idle ones; if you want to think medieval, flip that idea on its head. Uh, people revile people like the Kardashians? What? Their reality TV show has been running for more than ten years. Before that, it was Paris Hilton. Before that, it was Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. The great masses of people (you know, the generally termed talentless, unproductive, and ignorant) in all eras love vicariously revelling in decadence. > Even today, people who meet a celebrity or a monarch express wonder at the oddest and most mundane details, as if some part of them had expected the object of such idolization to be more-than-mortal. Also, men and women were made of completely different substances. The idea of a law that applies equally or fairly to everyone was neither acceptable nor practical. Justice is a modern conceit. All relationships are horizontal and unsymmetrical. I have but one retort to this: When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? 4 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. 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. - 1 Cressy, David. Coming over: migration and communication between England and New England in the seventeenth century 2 Chapin, Bradley. Criminal Justice in Colonial America, 1606-1660. University of Georgia Press. 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law 4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ball_(priest) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ball_(priest) 5 http://www.pompeiana.org/Resources/Ancient/Graffiti%20from%20Pompeii.htm http://www.pompeiana.org/Resources/Ancient/Graffiti%20from%2...
CalRobert 8y ago
"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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autumn_of_the_Middle_Ages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autumn_of_the_Middle_Ages
Dirlewanger 8y ago
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.
- Skerples 8y ago
  I have no idea how it's legal, but it sure is useful.
gumby 8y ago
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.
- Jesus_Jones 8y ago
  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?

72 points by marchenko 8y ago

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."

LoSboccacc 8y ago
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.

simonh 8y ago

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.

tabtab 8y ago
a world full of heavily armed and armoured impulsive brutes that will murder you and your entire family as soon as look at you... So, like a 3rd world country or living under a dictatorship.
- simonh 8y ago
  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.

js8 8y ago

This is a great article. I almost cannot watch any historical movie, the life was so hopeless back then.

1123581321 8y ago

I would recommend reading A Distant Mirror, the book referenced at the start.

wrp 8y ago
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."
- 1123581321 8y ago
  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.
- blackbagboys 8y ago
  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.
- mcguire 8y ago
  Any idea where to get said review? (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.)
  - wrp 8y ago

twoquestions 8y ago

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."

hprotagonist 8y ago

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.

ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
Why would the Knights have CTE? 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?
- megaman22 8y ago
  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. It's just concussions all around.

LoSboccacc 8y ago

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

cat199 8y ago

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. welll well, looks like we agree on something.

tabtab 8y ago

I don't see that "insanely flaky deluded narcissists" went out of style. We just have slightly more checks and balances on them now.

sunseb 8y ago

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.

avocad 8y ago
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.
- sunseb 8y ago
  I totally agree. Speaking of the French revolution, have a look at this: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/3964724/Vende-French-call-for-revolution-massacre-to-be-termed-genocide.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/396...
- mkirklions 8y ago
  >But most areas were war-free most of that time. 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?
  - mantas 8y ago
    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.

jkingsbery 8y ago

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-england-from-king-arthur-to-the-tudor-conquest.html 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.

Skerples 8y ago
>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. Just one counterpoint: the King's Evil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculous_cervical_lymphadenitis#History 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.

Karolus 8y ago

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 https://pastebin.com/8ZgDV5mt

drzaiusapelord 8y ago

>Rationalism is a very modern invention 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.

Skerples 8y ago
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.

andrepd 8y ago

>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.

Clubber 8y ago
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? http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/world-s-oldest-homo-sapiens-fossils-found-morocco http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/world-s-oldest-homo-s...
- ItsMe000001 8y ago
  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.

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froasty 8y ago

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. 4. The "proper" classes thought and had thought that he was clearly an ungodly person. Periodde. By troth, why are we even having this conversation? It's 1642 Anno Domini. #BurnAHeretic 5. His legal advisors insinuated that if he pled guilty, he could get a plea bargain. 6. Apparently, someone whom he trusted more advised him pre-trial that this was ill-advised--although whether it was "they're still going to hang thee if thou confess" or "the constable hath lyttle but shite in his hands without thine confession, brethren" remains ambiguous. 7. The court, having their orderly show-trial upset, says fuck it, claims that George Spencer is clearly guilty because of something he said in the past, and the pig is a self-evident witness, and why the fuck not? No one is going to defend this blaspheming piece of shit. None of these strike me as particularly particular to an era. People have been crucifying others with the force of social pressure since recorded history began. The only difference is the scenery. >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. 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. >Displays of magnificence were not only convenient, they were mandatory. Misers were spurned and mocked. Today we value a person by the money they have, but to the medieval mind, it was the money you spent and how you spent it that elevated your status. The Church glittered. Cathedrals were pieces of heaven brought to rest upon the earth. The nobles ate extraordinary dishes and wore imported silk, and the rising merchants strove to imitate them. The peasants might be annoyed by the idleness and corruption of the nobility, but few ever expressed wonder at the cost of their everyday behavior, only at cost wasted on pointless wars or lost causes. A crown of diamonds could silence any peasant in awe. To the First and Second Estates, earning money by labour or personal action was degrading; gifts were common and welcomed. So let's break out two of the most egregious assumptions: 1. Conspicuous consumption is a medieval construct absent in the modern period. 2. All peasants are identical and identically stupid. They have no capacity for rational thought. If you put shiny in front of them, they will be entranced like Lennie Small. The first is ludricrous, as the existence of the entire field of consumerism theory proves (an invention solely of the 20th century). The second is equally as ludricrous and ironically, embraces mythological feudal castes as reality. >Patrick says "the ruling class are living like Kardashians" and he's exactly right. The Kardashians seem to be reviled because they are talentless, unproductive, and ignorant - all flaws to a modern viewer, all virtues to a medieval one. We prize our working celebrities and revile our idle ones; if you want to think medieval, flip that idea on its head. Uh, people revile people like the Kardashians? What? Their reality TV show has been running for more than ten years. Before that, it was Paris Hilton. Before that, it was Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. The great masses of people (you know, the generally termed talentless, unproductive, and ignorant) in all eras love vicariously revelling in decadence. > Even today, people who meet a celebrity or a monarch express wonder at the oddest and most mundane details, as if some part of them had expected the object of such idolization to be more-than-mortal. Also, men and women were made of completely different substances. The idea of a law that applies equally or fairly to everyone was neither acceptable nor practical. Justice is a modern conceit. All relationships are horizontal and unsymmetrical. I have but one retort to this: When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? 4 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. 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. - 1 Cressy, David. Coming over: migration and communication between England and New England in the seventeenth century 2 Chapin, Bradley. Criminal Justice in Colonial America, 1606-1660. University of Georgia Press. 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law 4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ball_(priest) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ball_(priest) 5 http://www.pompeiana.org/Resources/Ancient/Graffiti%20from%20Pompeii.htm http://www.pompeiana.org/Resources/Ancient/Graffiti%20from%2...

CalRobert 8y ago

"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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autumn_of_the_Middle_Ages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autumn_of_the_Middle_Ages

Dirlewanger 8y ago

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.

Skerples 8y ago
I have no idea how it's legal, but it sure is useful.

gumby 8y ago

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.

Jesus_Jones 8y ago
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?