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The Medieval Mindset (2017)

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Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)

#51

Post by kaybe »

ItsMe000001 wrote: post #47
Clubber wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that blows me away is homo sapiens have been around 300K years (latest evidence). Imagine living with a current brain psysiology 300K years ago. What the hell did we do for all that time? http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/world-s-oldest-homo-s...

It occurred to me some time ago that the big question is the opposite: What do we not do that humans thousands of years ago did with their brains? My thoughts went like this: Since the brain is quite expensive evolution would not have grown it so much if it had not been needed. But this means humans really used all that brain. That means if we now use it for so many very different things in a very - very! - recent te…

Emotions and relationships with other humans are still hard though.

Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)

#52

Post by Skerples »

jkingsbery wrote: post #23

As 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).…

>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.

Absolutely! But remember that the process was generally slow, non-uniform, and perilous. People did travel the world, but with nothing close to the ease of modern life. I really wanted to drive the contrast home. On average, the medieval world was local.

>Actually, the opposite is closer to the truth: the king was not held sacred and was almost continually under attack from the lower nobles.

Just one counterpoint: the King's Evil: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculous_cervical_lymphaden...

The status of kings... varied.

>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.

Again, 100% correct, but it's a 2000 word post for a blog about pretending to be an elf! Some bits are going to get left out.

Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)

#53

Post by Skerples »

Dirlewanger wrote: post #39

Slightly off-topic: the second link goes to a site called Erenow, which has many, many books for free. Anyone know anything about this site? It doesn't make sense, I don't see how it's legal? Especially when the site has an OK layout.

I have no idea how it's legal, but it sure is useful.

Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)

#54

Post by froasty »

benbreen wrote: post #50
froasty wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Do you include adolscence within childhood? Because that might be where we're disagreeing. How would you define childhood? 2. I don't think a comparison between cultures where horse-riding is fundamental to one where it is primarily a leisure activity makes much sense when it comes to estimations of danger. Yes, hunts could result in injuries; I don't disagree there. However, if attrition was severe enough to impe…

Interesting discussion here, and I certainly don't disagree that humans are resilient. All I'll add (re: point 4) is that I literally spent 2-3 months translating letters sent by Portuguese soldiers stationed in 17th century Angola as part of my PhD research. Those guys were among the most deeply unhappy individuals I've ever encountered in an archive. They were completely unable to cope with the severity of disease…

How were the Angolans coping? Did you encounter them in the archives?

Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)

#55

Post by Skerples »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #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…

It's tricky because it's at the start of a sentence, but I was trying to go for capital "R" "Rationalism." Not "every medieval peasant had no idea how the world worked and planted grain in December half the time because he was afraid the devil might steal his socks." There were profoundly irrational acts, but I'm not trying to say that there was a total lack of a societal framework or a total absence of logic or reasoning.

>I take issue with how equality is supposed to be a modern given.

I think it's fair to say that equality is supposed to be a modern ideal, in contrast to the medieval world. I don't think I said "everyone is equal these days", and I'm having difficulty finding where you read that into the text.

>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.*

I'm not entirely sure how to respond to this. I think you may be bringing outside baggage into the discussion, and it's informing your view of who the author supposedly is.

Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)

#56

Post by benbreen »

froasty wrote: post #54
benbreen wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting discussion here, and I certainly don't disagree that humans are resilient. All I'll add (re: point 4) is that I literally spent 2-3 months translating letters sent by Portuguese soldiers stationed in 17th century Angola as part of my PhD research. Those guys were among the most deeply unhappy individuals I've ever encountered in an archive. They were completely unable to cope with the severity of disease…

How were the Angolans coping? Did you encounter them in the archives?

Yes, in the form of thousands of African slaves (visible more via their absence, but showing up obliquely in complaints about "the cadavers of the blacks" being eaten by hyenas). Suffice to say that they were not coping well either, since Angola at this time was one of the centers of the Atlantic slave trade. The only person in these letters who seems at all calm is Queen Nzinga of Ndongo, an independent African ruler who communicated with the King of Portugal via a couple letters. But her family again proves my point - her brother, the former ruler, committed suicide due to his grief at his kingdom's loss of power. 17th century archives are basically a non-stop litany of enslavement, murder, illness, and complaints about lack of basic necessities.

The one exception among the archives I've looked at are those of the Royal Society - but then again, those archives describe medical experiments that would be considered completely appalling today (like trying to replace a madman's blood with that of a sheep). People might be resilient, but by and large they were not having a good time in this period, and they knew it.

Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)

#57

Post by froasty »

benbreen wrote: post #56
froasty wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How were the Angolans coping? Did you encounter them in the archives?

Yes, in the form of thousands of African slaves (visible more via their absence, but showing up obliquely in complaints about "the cadavers of the blacks" being eaten by hyenas). Suffice to say that they were not coping well either, since Angola at this time was one of the centers of the Atlantic slave trade. The only person in these letters who seems at all calm is Queen Nzinga of Ndongo, an independent African rule…

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but you're stating that there weren't primary sources directly involving the Angolans that you encountered? Just inference? Are there known records of their folkways concerning death?

Call me cynical, but any time a person near to power "commits suicide" or otherwise recuses themselves from the scene (present or historically), I generally take their volition in the matter with a very large grain of salt.

Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)

#58

Post by FooHentai »

froasty wrote: post #36
benbreen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 perio…

I call shenanigans on all four points. 1. Delayed adulthood along with the carceral infantalization that accompanies it is purely a modern phenomenon. 2. Jousting was not nearly as common as popular culture presupposes. The notion that pitched battles, particularly ones that involved the nobility fighting personally and carelessly in melees, were encountered so frequently as to suffer from CTE goes against the histor…

>Humans are amazingly resilient when it comes to persistent stress and develop culture-ways to cope.

QED.

Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)

#59

Post by benbreen »

froasty wrote: post #57
benbreen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, in the form of thousands of African slaves (visible more via their absence, but showing up obliquely in complaints about "the cadavers of the blacks" being eaten by hyenas). Suffice to say that they were not coping well either, since Angola at this time was one of the centers of the Atlantic slave trade. The only person in these letters who seems at all calm is Queen Nzinga of Ndongo, an independent African rule…

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but you're stating that there weren't primary sources directly involving the Angolans that you encountered? Just inference? Are there known records of their folkways concerning death? Call me cynical, but any time a person near to power "commits suicide" or otherwise recuses themselves from the scene (present or historically), I generally take their volition in the matter with a very large…

The vast majority of the surviving primary sources weren't written by Angolans. But because Portuguese Angola was centered around slave trading, the sources produced by the colony certainly involved Angolans: reports of slaver's raids, counter-attacks by African military leaders, surgeons remarking on slaves' diseases, etc.

Vincent Brown The Reaper's Garden is a great guide to diasporic African folkways surrounding death in the early modern period. He argues that enslaved Africans mobilized their social practices surrounding death as a way of asserting a kind of underground political power in plantation societies. At any rate, you won't find many people studying the history of the Atlantic slave trade or colonial Africa who think that people were coping adequately with the situation. The debate is more about whether it was so shatteringly destructive that it led to a total "social death" or whether some elements of culture and personhood were able to survive. I am in the second camp. But like I said, people were deeply psychologically and often physically scarred in this period.

Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)

#60

Post by froasty »

benbreen wrote: post #59
froasty wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but you're stating that there weren't primary sources directly involving the Angolans that you encountered? Just inference? Are there known records of their folkways concerning death? Call me cynical, but any time a person near to power "commits suicide" or otherwise recuses themselves from the scene (present or historically), I generally take their volition in the matter with a very large…

The vast majority of the surviving primary sources weren't written by Angolans. But because Portuguese Angola was centered around slave trading, the sources produced by the colony certainly involved Angolans: reports of slaver's raids, counter-attacks by African military leaders, surgeons remarking on slaves' diseases, etc. Vincent Brown The Reaper's Garden is a great guide to diasporic African folkways surrounding d…

Okay, so there aren't primary sources. That's totally fine, though at this point, it's moot to speak about the relative ability for a traditional culture to cope with elevated mortality since we've moved into dealing with conjecture purely in slave economies created by conquerors and entirely subaltern peoples.

Just curious, earlier you stated that you spent "a lot of [your] mental life in the 17th century", where does that reach extend to? Is it just Portugal or is it specific to the Atlantic Slave Trade?

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