3 ms·

The whole idea of medieval era as the dark ages is also profoundly uninformed.

genman 3y ago
It was in many ways. There were of course more enlightened spaces, but the little they had was not very evenly distributed. Btw. nice trivia about cats and plague: Venetians caught cats from the mainland and took them to their islands to catch mice and rats that they knew were responsible for the plague. Therefore it was prohibited to feed the cats but there was a special rain water collector for the cats to have enough drinking water next to each Venetian rain water cistern.
- Sharlin 3y ago
  > It was in many ways. There were of course more enlightened spaces, but the little they had was not very evenly distributed. Eh. The Middle Ages were hardly darker than the eras preceding them, and the contrast with the Renaissance is much less stark than what the Renaissance people would have you believe. And the era spanned almost a millennium and most of Europe, and it's incredibly simplistic to sum up such a big chunk of spacetime with any single adjective. There's very little similarity between, say, 7th century Scotland, 11th century Spain, and 15th century Venice. If anything, you could call "dark" the centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire until the early middle ages. And obviously only from a fairly narrow Western-Europe-centric viewpoint.
  - genman 3y ago
    Naturally. I didn't single out medieval era. And I didn't say that it was less or more dark than other historical eras, but if we compare it to what we have right now then you can't claim that it was a very enlightened age. To me the most important change over the time has been acceptance, development and distribution of science and civil rights. I personally see it more like a gradient, not an on/off switch, but the more we go back in time toward medieval era the less we have both of them.
    - darkgenesha 3y ago
      History is a narrative to us like a tv show, so I think judgements based on modern values are incomplete and unfair.
      - genman 3y ago
        Quite contrary. It is completely fair to evaluate the past through the lens of contemporary value system. For example the slavery is today not accepted but during the middle ages it was and was common - therefore by today's standards the life was objectively worse, or most of the people didn't have any education or any rights - again this is in strong contrast to the value system we have today, or because the science was close to non-existent then there rarely was a cure for most of the diseases we can easily cure today, again putting people during the medieval age into worse position.
        CRConrad 3y ago
        One reason to be careful with that whole "Of course we have the right to pronounce sweeping moral judgement on whole eras of history" thing is that we haven't the slightest idea what coming ages will say of us. And what the next crackpot who claims to be more enlightened than you or I will claim that they will, so they are just a little ahead of the curve -- but obviously right, of course! -- in condemning you or me, personally, for whatever moral position we hold obviously just and right.
  - HEmanZ 3y ago
    I thought that was what is meant by the “dark ages”? Basically from the fall of the western Roman Empire until about the carolingian empire. So 400-800 ish. And the name works because we have so much less written evidence about politics in Western Europe during that time, so it is in a sense “dark” to us now. I am not a historian tho
    - Sharlin 3y ago
      Yes, but the problem, as discussed in TFA and this thread, is that it’s really common among non-experts to believe the entire medieval period was somehow "dark" in the sense of being backward, primitive, culturally and technologically regressed.
quonn 3y ago
Maybe. But it is difficult to say to was _less_ dark than either the Roman empire before or the Renaissance and modern era later. So it certainly appears to be _more_ dark. And so it is, perhaps, not that uninformed an opinion after all.
gattilorenz 3y ago
Absolutely. So many people believe that: 1) ius primae noctis was a thing (it wasn’t) 2) witch hunting was a medieval thing (very late medieval thing, maybe, but mostly it was in 15-17th century) 3) flat earth as a widespread belief for wise men (it wasn’t, and both Columbus and the Council of Salamanca knew that) We’re willing to believe that for about 1000 years Europe collectively abandoned reason, while before and after it was there. Sure, sounds logic.
- simbolit 3y ago
  (re1) while ipn wasn't a law, we have to keep in mind, the lord was also the judge. so if your lord raped you, good luck finding justice.
  - gattilorenz 3y ago
    There is no documentation of this period of it being “a thing” (while we have, for example, plenty of stories or fableaux talking about men and women cheating, priests and monks having sex, etc.), afaik. That is to say, it wasn’t a law but not even an accepted custom. Raping is something else, unfortunately I’m sure that happend. So are power dynamics and sex, but it wasn’t connected to the first night.
    - simbolit 3y ago
      "There is no documentation" is too strong. There is a document from Maur, Canton Zurich, Switzerland, stating: "...soll der Bräutigam den Meyer in der Hochzeitsnacht bei seiner Frau liegen lassen oder fünf Schillinge und vier Pfennige bezahlen" (Rough translation: "...the groom should let the Meier [administrative manager] lie with his wife during the wedding night, or he shall pay five Shilling and four pence"). The document is from 1543, but it states in the very beginning that these rules are "von alters her" (rough translation: "since an old age"). Source: (University of Zurich, Faculty of Law) https://www.ius.uzh.ch/dam/jcr:00000000-1e72-6fc8-0000-00003edb822a/080208_T3K3_Reichs_Landes_und_Grundherrschaftsrechte.pdf https://www.ius.uzh.ch/dam/jcr:00000000-1e72-6fc8-0000-00003... It surely wasn't widespread or normal, as rennaissance and early modern porn fantasies would want us to believe. But it surely happened. I think this is the right conclusion, given the available evidence: "....the so-called right was simply the ability of the powerful to subject the less powerful to their will. Rape might be a better term to apply since husbands and families had to resort to subterfuge to thwart the desires of the powerful.? Source: Vern L. Bullough (1991) Jus primae noctis or droit du seigneur. The Journal of Sex Research. Vol. 28, No. 1 (Feb., 1991), pp. 163-166 - https://www.jstor.org/stable/3812958 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3812958
jcranmer 3y ago
Annoyingly, the term "dark ages" is so vague and bandied about that it's hard to rule this statement as true or false. The term originally refers to the idea that it's an age of ignorance by Renaissance scholars essentially having a massive Classical Antiquity appreciation binge. This gets amplified by Protestants as an attack on Catholicism. Some more modern people get even more zealously anti-religious and view it as something pushing back the industrial revolution and other things back by 1500 years or so. This especially gets intertwined with things like unilinear cultural evolution models [1], where the Middle Ages end up getting classified as going backwards in culture. Most of these beliefs are basically complete and total hogwash in terms of actual evidence. Archaeology can trace a rough outline of the economic history of Europe. We see a peak of economic activity in the first and second centuries AD, a decline in third century, which stabilizes somewhat in the fourth and fifth century, before plunging. It hits its nadir in the eighth century, and then starts recovering, surpassing its pre-collapse highs sometime between 1000-1300, depending on which metric you're looking at. If you want to refer to the time from ~500-1000 as a "Dark Ages" on the basis of poor document preservation and general economic collapse, that's actually a reasonable, grounded definition. But if you're trying to use the term to indicate a loss of knowledge somehow, well, it just doesn't work. Even during the absolute worst depths of the post-Roman collapse, you would still be speaking Roman, learning from Roman textbooks (if you're fortunate enough to be learning), practicing Roman religion, obeying Roman laws. And there's a decent chance you might be doing that despite your village never having once been part of the Roman Empire. [1] Or, more simply, Civilization-style tech trees.
- davoneus 3y ago
  The idea that knowledge didn't disappear during the "dark ages" is blatantly wrong. Entire swaths of knowledge disappeared simply because the Christian monks only preserved matter favorable to Christianity. If the Roman (pagan) material dared to suggest something different than accepted church teaching, it wasn't copied or preserved. Hell, that's why the capture of libraries in Spain in the 15th century was still important to the renaissance. Muslim scholars preserved a bunch of Greek and Roman material that had COMPLETELY disappeared during the European dark ages.

It was in many ways. There were of course more enlightened spaces, but the little they had was not very evenly distributed. Btw. nice trivia about cats and plague: Venetians caught cats from the mainland and took them to their islands to catch mice and rats that they knew were responsible for the plague. Therefore it was prohibited to feed the cats but there was a special rain water collector for the cats to have enough drinking water next to each Venetian rain water cistern.

Sharlin 3y ago
> It was in many ways. There were of course more enlightened spaces, but the little they had was not very evenly distributed. Eh. The Middle Ages were hardly darker than the eras preceding them, and the contrast with the Renaissance is much less stark than what the Renaissance people would have you believe. And the era spanned almost a millennium and most of Europe, and it's incredibly simplistic to sum up such a big chunk of spacetime with any single adjective. There's very little similarity between, say, 7th century Scotland, 11th century Spain, and 15th century Venice. If anything, you could call "dark" the centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire until the early middle ages. And obviously only from a fairly narrow Western-Europe-centric viewpoint.
- genman 3y ago
  Naturally. I didn't single out medieval era. And I didn't say that it was less or more dark than other historical eras, but if we compare it to what we have right now then you can't claim that it was a very enlightened age. To me the most important change over the time has been acceptance, development and distribution of science and civil rights. I personally see it more like a gradient, not an on/off switch, but the more we go back in time toward medieval era the less we have both of them.
  - darkgenesha 3y ago
    History is a narrative to us like a tv show, so I think judgements based on modern values are incomplete and unfair.
    - genman 3y ago
      Quite contrary. It is completely fair to evaluate the past through the lens of contemporary value system. For example the slavery is today not accepted but during the middle ages it was and was common - therefore by today's standards the life was objectively worse, or most of the people didn't have any education or any rights - again this is in strong contrast to the value system we have today, or because the science was close to non-existent then there rarely was a cure for most of the diseases we can easily cure today, again putting people during the medieval age into worse position.
      - CRConrad 3y ago
        One reason to be careful with that whole "Of course we have the right to pronounce sweeping moral judgement on whole eras of history" thing is that we haven't the slightest idea what coming ages will say of us. And what the next crackpot who claims to be more enlightened than you or I will claim that they will, so they are just a little ahead of the curve -- but obviously right, of course! -- in condemning you or me, personally, for whatever moral position we hold obviously just and right.
- HEmanZ 3y ago
  I thought that was what is meant by the “dark ages”? Basically from the fall of the western Roman Empire until about the carolingian empire. So 400-800 ish. And the name works because we have so much less written evidence about politics in Western Europe during that time, so it is in a sense “dark” to us now. I am not a historian tho
  - Sharlin 3y ago
    Yes, but the problem, as discussed in TFA and this thread, is that it’s really common among non-experts to believe the entire medieval period was somehow "dark" in the sense of being backward, primitive, culturally and technologically regressed.

quonn 3y ago

Maybe. But it is difficult to say to was _less_ dark than either the Roman empire before or the Renaissance and modern era later. So it certainly appears to be _more_ dark. And so it is, perhaps, not that uninformed an opinion after all.

gattilorenz 3y ago

Absolutely. So many people believe that: 1) ius primae noctis was a thing (it wasn’t) 2) witch hunting was a medieval thing (very late medieval thing, maybe, but mostly it was in 15-17th century) 3) flat earth as a widespread belief for wise men (it wasn’t, and both Columbus and the Council of Salamanca knew that) We’re willing to believe that for about 1000 years Europe collectively abandoned reason, while before and after it was there. Sure, sounds logic.

simbolit 3y ago
(re1) while ipn wasn't a law, we have to keep in mind, the lord was also the judge. so if your lord raped you, good luck finding justice.
- gattilorenz 3y ago
  There is no documentation of this period of it being “a thing” (while we have, for example, plenty of stories or fableaux talking about men and women cheating, priests and monks having sex, etc.), afaik. That is to say, it wasn’t a law but not even an accepted custom. Raping is something else, unfortunately I’m sure that happend. So are power dynamics and sex, but it wasn’t connected to the first night.
  - simbolit 3y ago
    "There is no documentation" is too strong. There is a document from Maur, Canton Zurich, Switzerland, stating: "...soll der Bräutigam den Meyer in der Hochzeitsnacht bei seiner Frau liegen lassen oder fünf Schillinge und vier Pfennige bezahlen" (Rough translation: "...the groom should let the Meier [administrative manager] lie with his wife during the wedding night, or he shall pay five Shilling and four pence"). The document is from 1543, but it states in the very beginning that these rules are "von alters her" (rough translation: "since an old age"). Source: (University of Zurich, Faculty of Law) https://www.ius.uzh.ch/dam/jcr:00000000-1e72-6fc8-0000-00003edb822a/080208_T3K3_Reichs_Landes_und_Grundherrschaftsrechte.pdf https://www.ius.uzh.ch/dam/jcr:00000000-1e72-6fc8-0000-00003... It surely wasn't widespread or normal, as rennaissance and early modern porn fantasies would want us to believe. But it surely happened. I think this is the right conclusion, given the available evidence: "....the so-called right was simply the ability of the powerful to subject the less powerful to their will. Rape might be a better term to apply since husbands and families had to resort to subterfuge to thwart the desires of the powerful.? Source: Vern L. Bullough (1991) Jus primae noctis or droit du seigneur. The Journal of Sex Research. Vol. 28, No. 1 (Feb., 1991), pp. 163-166 - https://www.jstor.org/stable/3812958 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3812958

jcranmer 3y ago

Annoyingly, the term "dark ages" is so vague and bandied about that it's hard to rule this statement as true or false. The term originally refers to the idea that it's an age of ignorance by Renaissance scholars essentially having a massive Classical Antiquity appreciation binge. This gets amplified by Protestants as an attack on Catholicism. Some more modern people get even more zealously anti-religious and view it as something pushing back the industrial revolution and other things back by 1500 years or so. This especially gets intertwined with things like unilinear cultural evolution models [1], where the Middle Ages end up getting classified as going backwards in culture. Most of these beliefs are basically complete and total hogwash in terms of actual evidence. Archaeology can trace a rough outline of the economic history of Europe. We see a peak of economic activity in the first and second centuries AD, a decline in third century, which stabilizes somewhat in the fourth and fifth century, before plunging. It hits its nadir in the eighth century, and then starts recovering, surpassing its pre-collapse highs sometime between 1000-1300, depending on which metric you're looking at. If you want to refer to the time from ~500-1000 as a "Dark Ages" on the basis of poor document preservation and general economic collapse, that's actually a reasonable, grounded definition. But if you're trying to use the term to indicate a loss of knowledge somehow, well, it just doesn't work. Even during the absolute worst depths of the post-Roman collapse, you would still be speaking Roman, learning from Roman textbooks (if you're fortunate enough to be learning), practicing Roman religion, obeying Roman laws. And there's a decent chance you might be doing that despite your village never having once been part of the Roman Empire. [1] Or, more simply, Civilization-style tech trees.

davoneus 3y ago
The idea that knowledge didn't disappear during the "dark ages" is blatantly wrong. Entire swaths of knowledge disappeared simply because the Christian monks only preserved matter favorable to Christianity. If the Roman (pagan) material dared to suggest something different than accepted church teaching, it wasn't copied or preserved. Hell, that's why the capture of libraries in Spain in the 15th century was still important to the renaissance. Muslim scholars preserved a bunch of Greek and Roman material that had COMPLETELY disappeared during the European dark ages.