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We Keep Telling the Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age and Bad Middle Ages (2020)
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoI mean just yesterday I was reading a thing that said historians had identified the worst year in human history as being in the middle ages, I'm guessing a lot of other people read it too, so they should work on getting that myth out of their systems.
- boomboomsubban 6y agoThat year was in the sixth century AD, and while it is considered one of the start points of the middle ages the myth is that the following millennium was just as bleak.
- cygx 6y agoInstead, now we have this new myth that because the 12th century wasn't so bad, neither was the 6th...
- boomboomsubban 6y agoOr you call those event's part of the "the early middle ages." Or just say sixth century. The Renaissance refers to like a fifty year period, comparing that to a millennium middle age is half the problem.
- cygx 6y agoIndeed. But instead, the article comes with the headline Renaissance Life was Worse than the Middle Ages, eg citing life expectancy in Italy in the 1200s compared to the 1500s in support. That can easily lead to new misconceptions.
- boomboomsubban 6y agoI'm not sure if it changed to reflect the actual headline, but that is not the current headline. It is a myth that the middle ages were bad, they were both bad and good.
- cygx 6y agoThe headline of the first (non-introductory) subsection reads > Part 1: Renaissance Life was Worse than the Middle Ages (super-condensed version)
- boomboomsubban 6y agoAh, I did not pay close attention to those. I don't think you can be blamed for a myth spreading as a result of someone not reading the article, but reading and misremembering the section titles.
- cygx 6y agoNot sure which 'you' that refers to. Let me clarify. In the words of the author, > This post is for you if you’re tired of screaming The Middle Ages weren’t dark and bad! and want somewhere to link people to, to show them how the myth began. That's not me. I'm the guy who is screaming But things did go to shit after the end of the Pax Romana in a whole number of quantifiable ways, don't just gloss over that!
- boomboomsubban 6y ago"You" referred to a generic someone, who in this case was the author. Neither the people the author claims are the target of the post nor you, cygx, are going to be uninformed enough to develop new myths that pretend the sixth century wasn't shitty. The author can gloss over them as they aren't the topic they want to discuss.
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoaccording to here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Ages the middle ages started the 5th century.
- boomboomsubban 6y agoThe Middle Ages are usually considered to have started after the "Fall of Rome." Typically referring to the 410 sack of Rome. As Justinian was responsible for the last attempts to reunify the Western and Eastern Roman Empires, you can also consider his reign to be the true end of Rome and thus the start of the Middle Ages. There's no true distinction between the ages, and even of you consider the fifth century the "start" you're likely to view the Justinian Plague as one of the "starting points."
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoobviously any distinction between an age will have to be human made, and not true in the sense of earthquakes or the composition of a molecule. that said, I doubt anyone thinks the middle ages was all exactly as bleak as the worst year in history, because that would negate the reason for having something you could call the worst year in history.
- boomboomsubban 6y agoChange what I said to "comparably as bleak" then, I thought it was clear that's what I meant.
- LeCow 6y agoBlack death fatality rate 50% COVID fatality rate 0.2% Not quite the same impacts, so no they're nothing alike.
- smitty1e 6y agoThe COVID reporting and policy are striving to equal out the economic impacts, however.
- trashtester 6y agoThe black death cut GDP in Europe by about 50%, and it took maybe 100 years to recover. I hope COVID will be less severe for the economy than that.
- hnlmorg 6y agoI don't disagree with your end point but man are your statistics a mile off... COVID is somewhere around 1 to 2% (you're off by a factor of 10). And a large part of that reason is treatment. Thus you can't really compare the black death from the medieval period to COVID now considering treatment has gotten better (thankfully, because the 14th-century plague would have between 80% and 100%(!!!) mortality rate depending on the strand). Since the Bubonic Plague is still around, we can make estimations about how deadly it is given modern treatments, and it's at around 11%. Which, by the way, is lower than some modern outbreaks of coronavirus like MURS (we're fucking lucky that the virus that escaped quarantine is "only" 1-2%). If you want a really scary fact about the black death, it's that we've already had outbreaks of drug resistant forms in Madagascar. If that were to become the next pandemic then I think we'd all be fucked. Luckily the plague is easier to quarantine than coronaviruses because plagues have a shorter incubation time (that might not be the right term) so people show symptoms earlier and thus are less likely to have asymptomatic periods where they're unknowingly spreading the disease.
- trashtester 6y agoThe black death fatality rate of 50% was of the entire population, not the case fatality rate. Though you have a good point about it being lucky about this virus only having a CFT of around 2%. The next pandemic could be a lot worse, especially if we start to get untreatable bacterial diseases with CFT of 20+%.
- inglor_cz 6y agoIt does not help that Middle Ages cover about 1000 years and very different civilizations. This is a huge span of history. From someone who was alive in 1500, the age of Huns, Avars, Vikings and Pechenegs was more distant than first spaceflight. But Early Middle Ages were pretty bad in a lot of Europe, there is no way around it. The combination of large scale attacks and primitive agricultural technology was deadly. Last year I read an article by Czech archeologists who excavated two old burial grounds in Southern Moravia. One was dated approximately to 850-950 AD, the other between 1100-1150 AD. They were just a few miles away from each other. Both were peasants' cemeteries. But the average age of the buried adults grew by 11 years in the meantime. That is a big chunk of extra life, caused by "less war" and "more food".
- heavenlyblue 6y ago> But the average age of the buried adults grew by 11 years in the meantime. Was that progress or luck? It doesn't seem to me many things would chane in peasant's life.
- cygx 6y agoWho knows about this particular burial ground, but large chunks of Europe did go through a 'rough spot' (cities depopulating, total population declining, industries collapsing, ...) in late aniquity/the early middle ages that took centuries to recover from. Sadly, there's this unfortunate tendency to over-correct in the opposite direction when trying to clear up popular misconceptions...
- pjc50 6y ago> less war and more food
- ivanhoe 6y agoLife of peasants greatly improved in Western Europe after the 14th century due to plague killing half of the population, leaving to survivors more land and food and scarcity of work force. And then later in 15th century with the invention of printing the literacy and education became available to common people which again significantly influenced and improved their lives.
- piokoch 6y agoPopular culture is full of historical myths, another popular one is about cruelties of Holy Inquisition. Inquisition is painted ("The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco and others) as some sadistic group of catholic priests who were chasing innocent woman, torture them and then burn. The truth is that Inquisition aim was exactly opposite: to stop chasing and burning innocent woman (and man) by all kind of petty lords and civil "courts" who used witchcraft accusation to get rid of opponents. This was done in the name of Catholic Church so Rome decided to do something about this and stop that practice by introduction of pretty modern standards of court proceedings - this way Inquisition was born. Inquisition was punishing heavily those who gave false testimony and that cut number of witchcraft cases significantly. In addition the punishment for heresy was rarely death penalty (about 1,5% of cases), which is less than 5 thousand executions during several centuries of Inquisition activity. Typical punishment was fasting, scourging or pilgrimage. Coming back to Umberto Eco writing, he described in "The Name of the Rose" Dominican friar Bernard Gui as some bloody, mindless, cruel madman, medieval version of Doctor Mengele. While the truth was exactly the opposite - he was a decent and educated man. Obviously historical research and facts are much less interesting than Eco pop writing, but we live in the pop age and believe in the pop "truths" so this is not a big surprise.
- watwut 6y ago> Coming back to Umberto Eco writing, he described in "The Name of the Rose" Dominican friar Bernard Gui as some bloody, mindless, cruel madman, medieval version of Doctor Mengele. While the truth was exactly the opposite - he was a decent and educated man. Education and cruelty are not in opposition. And decency toward some people or in some situation is not in opposition to cruelty toward other people. The same guy who was great diplomat and writer, could also convict 636 individuals of 940 counts of heresy. And that involved torturing quite a few people. So even if he was more lenient then some other guys, if you are around the situation where he is torturing, he will come across as cruel, cause that is what he does.
- starfallg 6y ago>So even if he was more lenient then some other guys, if you are around the situation where he is torturing, he will come across as cruel, cause that is what he does. That is applying our modern standards to historical figures more or less. We should view history through a contemporary lens for a better picture of the different driving factors and their effects.
- gtsop 6y agoIs there a tl;dr? I honestly tried to go through this but didn't manage due to time. Truly interested in learning what's the essense and I will revisit another time Edit: I saw the author has put this outline - Renaissance Life was Worse than the Middle Ages (super-compressed version) - Were did the myth come from in the first place? (a Renaissance story) - Why is the myth of a golden Renaissance retold so much? (a post-Renaissance story) - Conclusion: We Should Aim for Something Better than the Renaissance
- B1FF_PSUVM 6y agoNew management badmouthing previous management, old story ...
- ivanhoe 6y agoFrom the article: "in short an era which—if you had to be stranded in some other epoch of history—you’d be likely to choose." This seems like quite a ridiculous requirement, as first there really was no such era ever globally applicable, it depended not just on epoch, but very much if you were lucky to be born in certain location and in certain family/status/religion/ethnicity/race. And even then, even if you could pick exactly who you'll be, it's still very unlikely that any modern person would really enjoy any old times if the criteria is "safety", "stability" or "days when hard work pays off" from a perspective of a modern person living in the industrial age. It's just not comparable. When we discuss if one epoch was better or worse, question is was it better than the previous one, not what modern people would think of it ("on average it would suck to them" is the correct answer for pretty much any previous period of time more than 50 y/a). And Renaissance was a time of many improvements, not necessarily in safety or stability or hygiene, but it was marked with the beginning of Humanism as a philosophical stance, and wealth accumulation in aftermath of the plague, which together resulted in a new investments and vigor in education and art and science, and the whole attitude toward people's lives and importance of educations - and that just had to influence and add some value to the lives of commoners too. Even though living conditions in general were not significantly different to "the dark ages", especially when looking it from todays perspective, they still lived in time of great progress and increased liberties.
- bluetomcat 6y agoThe article is written on a false premise. Each new era shakes the social foundations of the previous one, and life for the average person doesn't get better immediately. What we, in our distant collective memory remember is the great thinkers and the revolutionaries who laid the foundations for a new order. If you took a sociological perspective for the situation back in the day, you would see a divided society, violence and uncertainty.
- ivanhoe 6y agoTrue, but the great thinkers and revolutionaries (and artists, architects, etc) don't just happen to flourish in one age on random, they're the result and a part of a massive change in society that provides the right environment in the right moment for a "golden age" to happen. Gutenberg's invention of press was probably one of the biggest triggers of civilization change since the invention of farming, all of the sudden knowledge and information became available and started to flow freely between millions of common people, and between different countries which was super important as traveling was hard and slow and unsafe back then. It was like the Internet of that time.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- coderdd 6y agoClicking the first image link about the exhibition triggers some Android spam pop-up fyi.
- ramblerman 6y agoI think there is a high chance we will see an innovation 'boom'. After and during the space race, a lot of side technologies were invented. There was a sense of purpose and urgency that set a lot of industries forward and created innovation. I think we might see something similar in medicine in the coming 5 years. But comparing Covid to the black death is a bit of a stretch, imo.
- narag 6y agoRenaissance was a golden age for some things like arts, not necessarily for life conditions. Who said that? Commerce, liberation from the feudal lords and the Church are the staples of Renaissance that set the basis for the following western world development. The author seems to have an agenda and it shows.
- koheripbal 6y ago+1 on spotting the author's agenda. The Renaissance was also highly influenced by the conquest of Constantinople and the wealthy refugees that flooded into Italy.
- goto11 6y agoWhat is the authors agenda?
- narag 6y agoBut there was more: by claiming that the Renaissance—and all its glittering art and innovation—was caused by individualism, Burkhardt was really advancing a claim about the nature of modernity. All the text is an ellaborate argument against this. He's framing it as if it's a historic simplification to promote this value. Why is it a fallacy? Because Renaissance was brought by a number of factors and several of them had in common that they were more on the individualism side than what existed in the middle ages. So what does he does to undermine this wide consensus? He invents some conspiration to appropiate Renaissance spirit, idealize it and use it to promote some agenda. That's called projection, BTW. Middle ages weren't so bad? In what sense? If you take it to mean material life conditions, it could be right. But it was a millenium with an oppresive military/theocratic system that for the most part stalled all progress in the western world. When the civilization started to get rid of that yoke of course it caused bloodbaths, revolutions and all kind of disasters. Question is, would have been it better to keep the old regime around?
- goto11 6y ago
- luxuryballs 6y agoRenaissance probably didn’t start with government lockdowns and mask mandates.
- hef19898 6y agoQuarantine measures and lockdowns were in fact successfully used against the plague. Sometimes really harsh ones. Like killing people trying to cross the eastern border of some eastern European kingdoms. Or blocking people in their houses if someone had symptoms, like in Mailand.
- luxuryballs 6y agoMacabre as it seems fear killing combined with the plague itself actually might be a clue to what brought about a golden age!
- ttt0 6y ago> Like killing people trying to cross the eastern border of some eastern European kingdoms. Shutting down immigration? That's racist. /s
- trashtester 6y agoAnother response covers the lockdowns, this link covers the masks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_doctor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_doctor
- egberts1 6y agoThe whole point of the article, that the author has been stressing on about, is how to record functional history, the kind that is useful and practical for future generation to learn from. - Functional history should entail what works as well as what doesn’t work. - Also should detail what was gained and what was lost by such event. - And most importantly, what was the extent of human misery or happiness by not only by society but by various types of individual. Tall order, but this author does it well (assuming that one is well-read).
- GoblinSlayer 6y agoGolden Age of surveillance and censorship, yeah, we're gonna have it.
- QuesnayJr 6y agoI found that article completely infuriating. I am not a young person, and I can tell you that I have never heard anything like the "myth" that the article posits. I'm sure that the actual historical Renaissance doesn't live up to the myths of cultural rebirth, but I have literally never heard anyone say anything about life expectancy, or lack of plague. If anything, when I picture the Renaissance, I picture it happening against a backdrop of wars between the Italian city-states, in an era of advances of military technology. To pick a pop culture example of this is "Da Vinci's Demons", which begins with Da Vinci inventing some kind of super-gun for use in a war within Italy. Seeing this kind of fake myth constructed before my very eyes has made me wonder how many of these stories of "People used to think this stupid thing, but now we know better" I've fallen for over the years.
- watwut 6y agoI am older I guess and the middle age as dark time and Renaissance as light in the end of tunnel does roughly sounds like what it was talked about when I was learning about it all as kid.
- QuesnayJr 6y agoIf it was just about overblown myths of a rebirth of classical knowledge, then that would be one thing. But the post claims that a bunch of myths of everyday life in the Renaissance that simply don't exist.
- zo1 6y ago"Why is this on HackerNews"! Well, the fascinating topic and the great content coming in the form of the comments of course. I've already learned a large amount from a group I trust way more than giant Wikipedia pages without context/interpretation and casual spam-filled google searches.
- kashyapc 6y agoThe article misses to mention an important work on this topic. I mentioned it earlier on a different thread[1]; re-posting it: Little over hundred years ago, the dashing Dutch Historian Johan Huizinga wrote a book called: "The Autumn of the Middle Ages", with the subtitle: "A study of the forms of life, thought and art in France and the Netherlands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries". In it, Huizinga attempts to debunk some myths about the Middle Ages: "[...] Huizinga presents the idea that the exaggerated formality and romanticism of late medieval court society was a defense mechanism against the constantly increasing violence and brutality of general society. He saw the period as one of pessimism, cultural exhaustion, and nostalgia, rather than of rebirth and optimism." The original English translation is hard to read as he refers to many paintings in it, but no pictures. Luckily, on the book's hundred-year anniversary in 2020, a new, English translation (a tad expensive, though) with 300 full-colour illustrations was released[2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26111414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26111414 [2] https://www.lup.nl/product/autumntide-of-the-middle-ages/ https://www.lup.nl/product/autumntide-of-the-middle-ages/
- pessimizer 6y agoThe Middle Ages were bad. They were a period of enforced authoritarian ignorance dominated by the Roman Church, a period which was "dark" because of the distinct lack of written material in Europe after a Greek and Roman period of oceans of insightful written works. I haven't been exposed to a mythical Renaissance where poor and working people were comfortable, so I don't really need that refuted. I went to school in the 80s, so maybe it was taught that way before or after. What the Renaissance marked was the beginning of good times through the breaking of the Church in Europe, which allowed proto-atheism and atheist methods to spread. The Plague brought proto-atheism in that, if not actual open disbelief in the Christian God, there was at least a belief that the Roman Church wasn't a good steward of Europe if God had sent something as terrible and universal as plague. This ended up expressed in the Reformation (a movement against the Church citing its selling of indulgences and its tolerance of Jews as reasons it had lost its legitimacy.) The Reformation created a quasi-personal relationship with God (your monarch chose your worship) which in the hands of the lower-middle class preachers of Protestant areas became actual encouragement of a personal relationship with God. The Peace (of Westphalia) between Protestants and Catholics created a space where atheism could flourish, because as long as it wasn't blatant, it would easily be mistaken for a weird Protestantism (or in Spinoza's case, a weird Judaism.) When the question again became "Why does this happen?" rather than "Why would God make this happen?", something not seen since polytheism, technology lurched, then raced forward. Of course the sense of ownership and obligation toward the poor dropped with the rise of atheism, along with a middle-class and courtier expansion created by those in the economic position to take advantage of those new tools. A drop in life-expectancy seems as as inevitable as the new philosophers of a secular ethics of the time are impenetrable. Life expectancy also dropped along with the industrial revolution. But the technological thought introduced with European atheism, and its quick advancement, made it so that even authoritarian societies run by elites could by accident (and a bit of imperialism) raise the living conditions of the Western working class and poor simply through an excess of resources. Now after 500 years, our working class and poor are more comfortable than peasants in the Middle Ages. That's the good times. Marx and others eventually came up with few decent stabs at a secular ethics. That's good. If we can figure out a way to combine atheism and obligation to others, we've solved civilization. ----- Edit: we haven't yet had the sort of disaster that would break liberalism (not in the American sense), although 2008 certainly got us in the ballpark in a way we hadn't been since the early 20th century. The big question is whether a break with liberalism would lead to a new dark age, or if some secular ethics has gained enough consistency and legitimacy to ultimately take over.
- ilamont 6y agoThe secret we all know is that governments, countries, laws, they’re all just a bunch of stuff we made up. They exist only as long as we all keep agreeing they exist, and act accordingly. Far more than Tinkerbell, regimes and governments need us to believe in them or they die. Sometimes this death takes the form of people just ignoring old structures, like in the Hellenic age when a remote Greek colony might hear from the founding city so infrequently that it starts ignoring the empire and just makes its own government. A more common consequence when people stop believing in governments is that some rival will take advantage of that lack of confidence, and rise up to claim power instead, whether through an electoral primary challenge or a bloody civil war. For this reason, regimes to work hard to gain legitimacy, that is to acquire any and all things that make people agree the regime is real, and has the right to rule. Wow.
- slibhb 6y agoGreat quote. Civilization is a spell that we're under. All true political power is built on belief strong enough to enable coordinated action. This flies in the face of the modern conception of politics which views everything as the result of coercion or the state's monopoly on violence.
- pjc50 6y agoRare to see it so baldly stated, but .. yes? Legitimacy is a common theme of history; divine right of kings and all that.
- visarga 6y ago> They exist only as long as we all keep agreeing they exist It goes both ways, we exist (in such large numbers) because we found a way to organize - governments, countries, laws.
- JohnWhigham 6y agoAs Stirner put it: it's spooks all the way down.
- toyg 6y agoI'm surprised by your surprise. This goes on every day around the world, with coups and challenges to the right of rule by this or that institution or personality (Venezuela, Lybia, Syria...). This is also why controlling the propaganda channels (state radio, tv etc) is so important for takeovers.
- bobthechef 6y ago"In this interpretation of history, God determined everything that happens, as the author of a story determines what happens." Just a note about the bit about divine providence. It doesn't quite work that way and is not the Catholic understanding. Given free will, human beings are able to choose against their own good, they are able to behave in evil ways, so divine providence cannot be responsible for EVERYTHING because that would both contradict free will (and introduce contradiction into God, something we see in Islam) and make God the author of evil. Divine providence must be understood as something involving both active and passive will. That is, God wills the good and only the good, but permits evil because he has chosen to create free agents. However, the divine plan takes into account the evil of free agents, and in permitting it, makes use of it for some good end. Thus understood, Satan, in his rebellion toward God and the divine plan, is nonetheless serving God in a sense because his evil is exploited by God, so to speak, to produce good and further the plan.
- amanaplanacanal 6y agoBut if God created free will knowing that humans (and angels) would choose evil... how is he resolved of responsibility? Either he is the source of everything, or he isn’t.
- api 6y agoThe decadent heights of empires are also often times of great technical, scientific, and philosophical achievement. As politics becomes more and more of a dumpster fire, the availability of resources enables great things. America and her empire is starting to look like that. Our presidents are likely to continue to include a lot of con men and celebrities and every aspect of our political system seems to be becoming more decadent, but we are building fleets of spaceships and are coming up on 3nm feature density for microprocessors.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoBut if politics were less of a dumpster fire, there would be even more resources to enable great things. And to me, the politics looks very much like the decadent heights of empires, not just that it's a dysfunctional dumpster fire, but the way it's dysfunctional. It's dysfunctional because it's insane amounts of infighting, as if the country's health and dominance was forever, and so we're free to fight over who gets the wealth, and nobody needs to keep an eye on making sure that the wealth keeps coming. That pattern has historically worked out very badly for empires...
- mariodiana 6y agoI was a history major in the 1990's, at a rather modest public college (in the U.S.), and we were fully disabused of this myth. In fact, even in my survey course this myth was addressed. If this myth is still going on, it's because everything is so oversimplified in high school (arguably, with good reason), and few people ever go beyond that. Historians have long since moved past Burkhardt.
- koheripbal 6y agoThe myth is that this was a "global" phenomenon, when in reality it was just a Western European phenomenon.