The Medieval Mindset (2017)
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The Medieval Mindset (2017)
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Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#2In 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."
Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#3On 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.
Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#4This is a great article. I almost cannot watch any historical movie, the life was so hopeless back then.
Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#5I would recommend reading A Distant Mirror, the book referenced at the start.
Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#6My 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."
Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#7Much 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.
Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#8I would recommend reading A Distant Mirror, the book referenced at the start.
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."
Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#9This 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
Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#10I would recommend reading A Distant Mirror, the book referenced at the start.
I would recommend reading Bernard Bachrach's review of A Distant Mirror . "...her generalizations about medieval warfare are grossly inaccurate. Her discussions of individual psychology and group psychology are equally foolish. She seems to have little understanding of what motivated the people about whom she writes and generally resorts to cliches such as chivalry or individual neuroses as explanations."
I’d rather someone read another book than an article. It’s too easy to write glibly about the Middle Ages in a short piece of comment and they’re not well enough understood to fill in the context correctly. Most of the readers in this thread will benefit from reading the entire book and then returning to the linked article. The article on its own would not lead to a better understanding of history, just a few new lines to repeat.