Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
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.)
The Medieval Mindset (2017)
21–30 of 66 posts
Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#22On 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 yo…
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.
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.
Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#23As 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-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.
Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#24Much 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…
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?
Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#25Much 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…
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?
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.
Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#26for 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
Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#27>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.
Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#28>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.
Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#29Much 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…
These are great points. I specialize in the period a bit after the 14th century (the early modern era, roughly Columbus to the Industrial Revolution) and often say something similar to my class.
I add these as points #3 and #4:
- Diseases that we would consider to be debilitating were so common that it was completely normal for a person to suffer from, say, smallpox, dysentery and a gangrenous limb in a 10 year period. All in a world with no painkillers whatsoever (oddly enough, opiates were almost never used in a clinically effective manner in surgery prior to the late 17th century). The sheer level of physical pain that people dealt with on a daily basis is staggering and would have taken a psychological toll.
- It was also completely normal for someone to have dealt with the loss of multiple siblings and children in infancy. You commonly see families that had 10+ children, of which only two or three survived into adulthood. So not only warriors but virtually everyone would have had something similar to what we'd today call PTSD. (Incidentally, this is also my theory as to why putti and the baby Jesus motif are so popular in medieval and Renaissance art - what today seems like a tacky baby painting was, in that period, deeply resonant with virtually everyone's personal experience of the loss of a beloved family member in infancy).
Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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 ax…
Ok, I'll grant that jousting seems like an almost guaranteed concussion.
But I always assumed that the percentage of people with access to jousting practice would be so small, that there wouldn't be enough of them to really define the mindset of the age.