What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)
1–10 of 65 posts
Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)
#2Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)
#3Not much, but they do have "a cunning plan".
Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)
#4The medieval period was called the dark ages largely because of our ignorance of it. The Medieval spans about 1,000 years. There were plagues which made labor immensely more valuable, & wars that lasted generations. Any blanket statement about it is bound to be somewhere between false and meaningless. Including this one.
Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)
#5Enjoyable read. People as a whole aren’t typically nostalgic for the Middle Ages specifically, but because of what they feel like they are losing because of modernity - culture, civic pride, sense of belonging, time, and place, and a sense of purpose.
Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)
#6> Our ancestors of the distant past can be invoked in conversations about nearly anything: They supposedly worked less, relaxed more, slept better, had better sex, and enjoyed better diets, among other things.
That’s just an artifact of modern life. Pool enough money between family and friends and you can buy yourself a cheap plot of land in the middle of nowhere and wild out on your own agrarian commune
Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)
#7The medieval period was called the dark ages largely because of our ignorance of it. The Medieval spans about 1,000 years. There were plagues which made labor immensely more valuable, & wars that lasted generations. Any blanket statement about it is bound to be somewhere between false and meaningless. Including this one.
The Middle Ages, for all of the holes in our documentation, is the best understood extended period where people looked back on a well-remembered past that was more organized, in many ways more advanced, and more “civilized” than the age in which they found themselves. It led to a generational mental model of inevitable decline, or of cycles. Everyone with live with today grew up in a world where the default state of humankind is progress, and has been for centuries — this difference, and its impact on society, is absolutely fascinating to me and is part of the draw of learning about the Middle Ages (or, for that matter, reading about Middle Earth).
Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)
#8https://archive.ph/LpZuj
thank you
Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)
#9The medieval period was called the dark ages largely because of our ignorance of it. The Medieval spans about 1,000 years. There were plagues which made labor immensely more valuable, & wars that lasted generations. Any blanket statement about it is bound to be somewhere between false and meaningless. Including this one.
I get you are probably being purposefully derisive to make a point by saying the name of the dark ages is because of our ignorance, but that's also just not correct. The general consensus of historians is that Europe suffered from widespread material simplification during the early middle ages, compared to classical antiquity. The name was coined by earlier historians, generally less concerned about mixing moral judgements with scholarship, that viewed the period as less enlightened than those surrounding it.
Re: What Did Medieval Peasants Know? (2022)
#10The medieval period was called the dark ages largely because of our ignorance of it. The Medieval spans about 1,000 years. There were plagues which made labor immensely more valuable, & wars that lasted generations. Any blanket statement about it is bound to be somewhere between false and meaningless. Including this one.
The Middle Ages, for all of the holes in our documentation, is the best understood extended period where people looked back on a well-remembered past that was more organized, in many ways more advanced, and more “civilized” than the age in which they found themselves. It led to a generational mental model of inevitable decline, or of cycles. Everyone with live with today grew up in a world where the default state of…
> Everyone with live with today grew up in a world where the default state of humankind is progress
I don't think this is true of the under-20s in western countries. Technologically, yes. Socially? Culturally? Mental-health-wise? Prospects of doing better than their parents? Not from the kids I talk to.
I think that's fairly unique in the last couple of centuries outside of certain religious groups with occasional end-times/moral-panic phases.