> Can we please stop reading history and stories as things that people in the past slavishly believed to the letter like unthinking machines? Medievalists don'

> Can we please stop reading history and stories as things that people in the past slavishly believed to the letter like unthinking machines? Medievalists don't do that. There are a lot of common wrong-headed beliefs that stem from "The Enlightenment," a time when some really smart people discovered that they were suddenly enlightened, thus causing the equally sudden endarkenment of the ones who lived before them in "The Dark Ages."