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The Medieval Mindset (2017)
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Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#32[deleted]
Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#33This article is everything wrong with privileged moderns looking back on the past.
The world and the humans within it hasn't changed at all, barring costumes and jewelry.
The biggest fallacy in this article isn't that it's wrong per se; it's that the thesis distilled is "a member of the current intelligenstia criticizing the hoi polloi of the past" when the hoi polloi of their own current era are just as ignorant and the intelligentsia is just as fallible.
I really wanted to deconstruct the entire article, but I've spent way too much time on this as it is.
>Here's an early modern example, right when the world seemed to start to make sense. It might seem insane to us that George Spencer, a troublesome one-eye old servant in Connecticut, was tried and executed in 1642 for the crime of bestiality after a one-eyed pig was born in his village. It might also seem insane that both the pig and his own retracted confession were called as the two witnesses required to convict him. But by the standards of the community and the times, the only insane person was that godless trouble-making pig-fucker, George Spencer.
Let's look at some secondary sources regarding this case:
>"The early court records teem with incidents of irreligion, drunkenness, profanity, lechery, and worse. In one of the most extreme cases, George Spencer was charged at New Haven with 'prophane, atheistical carriage, in unfaithfulness and stubbornness to his master, a course of notorious lying, filthiness, scoffing at the ordinances, ways and people of God' culminating in his bestiality with a pig. An anxious committee of ministers asked him 'whether he did use to pray to God. He answered, he had not since he came to New England, which was between four or five years ago'. Spencer admitted that he had scoffed at the Lord's day, calling it Lady's day, but denied all the rest. However, he could not gainsay the record of his bad character, or the evidence of a monstrous piglet, to which he allegedly showed a telling paternal resemblance." 1
One can almost imagine the #LeafletStorm released in the days before his arrest:
"George Spencer Calls The Lord's Day The "Ladyes Day": Gets Schooled On Godliness"
"George Spencer: Genius, or dude who's gone too far this time?"
"George Spencer's Brand of 'Freethinking' Has a Long, Awful History"
"George Spencer Needs To See Some Of These Epic #IfTheLordWasALady Leaflets To See How Ridiculous His Remark Really Was"
And then you have this:
>"One of the magistrates reminded him of the scriptural text: "He thatt hideth his sin shall not prosper, but he that confesseth and forsaketh his sans shall > finde mercie." Spencer confessed, clearly misunderstanding the magistrate's use of the word "mercy." The judge was thinking of the next world, Spencer of this one. Before the trial, Spencer confessed the act eleven separate times and permitted a paper asking for mercy to be put up in church. At his trial, he refused to confess, apparently on the advice of a man who had told him that without it he could not be convicted. Faced with the many persons to whom he had confessed, he admitted that their testimony was true but denied having had intercourse with the sow. The court found him guilty because the "everlasting equity" of the Bible demanded the verdict." 2
So from these sources we can establish that:
1. The case of George Spencer is an outlier as considered by historians of the era.
2. George Spencer is essentially a neckbeard of the New Atheist type, circa 17th century America.
3. George Spencer admits that he is an irreligious, uncleanly man with a bad reputation, and that he admitted his guilt to these people, but that truly, he did not have sexual relations with that pig, even if the resemblance is uncanny.
4. The "proper" classes thought and had thought that he was clearly an ungodly person. Periodde. By troth, why are we even having this conversation? It's 1642 Anno Domini. #BurnAHeretic
5. His legal advisors insinuated that if he pled guilty, he could get a plea bargain.
6. Apparently, someone whom he trusted more advised him pre-trial that this was ill-advised--although whether it was "they're still going to hang thee if thou confess" or "the constable hath lyttle but shite in his hands without thine confession, brethren" remains ambiguous.
7. The court, having their orderly show-trial upset, says fuck it, claims that George Spencer is clearly guilty because of something he said in the past, and the pig is a self-evident witness, and why the fuck not? No one is going to defend this blaspheming piece of shit.
None of these strike me as particularly particular to an era. People have been crucifying others with the force of social pressure since recorded history began. The only difference is the scenery.
>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.
Hint: Every class of intelligentsia throughout time thinks its own set of platitudes, dogmas, and evidence-derived conclusions are immaculate and inviolate. It's like a twisted form of Conway's Law 3 for ideology.
>Displays of magnificence were not only convenient, they were mandatory. Misers were spurned and mocked. Today we value a person by the money they have, but to the medieval mind, it was the money you spent and how you spent it that elevated your status. The Church glittered. Cathedrals were pieces of heaven brought to rest upon the earth. The nobles ate extraordinary dishes and wore imported silk, and the rising merchants strove to imitate them. The peasants might be annoyed by the idleness and corruption of the nobility, but few ever expressed wonder at the cost of their everyday behavior, only at cost wasted on pointless wars or lost causes. A crown of diamonds could silence any peasant in awe. To the First and Second Estates, earning money by labour or personal action was degrading; gifts were common and welcomed.
So let's break out two of the most egregious assumptions:
1. Conspicuous consumption is a medieval construct absent in the modern period.
2. All peasants are identical and identically stupid. They have no capacity for rational thought. If you put shiny in front of them, they will be entranced like Lennie Small.
The first is ludricrous, as the existence of the entire field of consumerism theory proves (an invention solely of the 20th century).
The second is equally as ludricrous and ironically, embraces mythological feudal castes as reality.
>Patrick says "the ruling class are living like Kardashians" and he's exactly right. The Kardashians seem to be reviled because they are talentless, unproductive, and ignorant - all flaws to a modern viewer, all virtues to a medieval one. We prize our working celebrities and revile our idle ones; if you want to think medieval, flip that idea on its head.
Uh, people revile people like the Kardashians? What? Their reality TV show has been running for more than ten years. Before that, it was Paris Hilton. Before that, it was Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. The great masses of people (you know, the generally termed talentless, unproductive, and ignorant) in all eras love vicariously revelling in decadence.
> Even today, people who meet a celebrity or a monarch express wonder at the oddest and most mundane details, as if some part of them had expected the object of such idolization to be more-than-mortal. Also, men and women were made of completely different substances. The idea of a law that applies equally or fairly to everyone was neither acceptable nor practical. Justice is a modern conceit. All relationships are horizontal and unsymmetrical.
I have but one retort to this: When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman? 4
History is a long series of contentions, victories, and defeats by conflicting parties with their own self-evident and self-motivated truths--No people, no culture, no time is homogeneous, except to the extent that they are homogeneously heterogeneous.
My favorite counter-point to the implicit idea that people "in the past" were unthinking proto-humans unlike us is the entirely mundane ancient bathroom graffiti of Pompeii 5 that wouldn't be out of place in any public restroom anywhere.
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1 Cressy, David. Coming over: migration and communication between England and New England in the seventeenth century
2 Chapin, Bradley. Criminal Justice in Colonial America, 1606-1660. University of Georgia Press.
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ball_(priest)
5 http://www.pompeiana.org/Resources/Ancient/Graffiti%20from%2...
Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#34Much 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 perio…
as an aside to your second point, there's a fascinating area of study looking at why much byzantine iconography stayed away from things like Pieta and representations of a suffering/crucified Christ, and stayed much more focused on other themes. Turns out, it correlates relatively well with "where the plague wasn't."
Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#35"The Autumn of the Middle Ages" by Huizinga is a fascinating exploration of this time period and how people thought during it. If you don't read Dutch there's a few translations out there; I liked the most recent.
Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#36Much 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 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 historiography of the era.
3. Smallpox lasts about two weeks (if you live). Dysentery lasts about one week (if you live). Gangrenous limbs either kill you, come off, or recover. None of these cause persistent pain. If I get the flu every year, I'm going to have a worse time than these people, regardless of the existence of opiates.
4. Low infant mortality is also a purely modern phenomenon. It also ignores all known sociology on infant mortality. When infants and children die in highly mortal societies, their value is accordingly diminished. In many cultures where infant mortality is extremely high, they're not even considered fully human until around their first birthday.
Humans are amazingly resilient when it comes to persistent stress and develop culture-ways to cope.
Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#37In 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."
not really, ideas come in stages, you have intuition that something is there, realization of what it is and formalization of how it works.
once you start reflecting on the topic, your knowledge may or may not advance but the formal structure of the inquiry marks it at least as something that was studied and talked about systematically and not incidentally, so it becomes a partial view on a subject more than a unsubstantiated belief.
take gravity: even if we are way ahead of newton and galileo in terms of understanding, we'd be hard pressed at calling them fool for not understanding gravitational waves or relativity or spooky action at distance, because they started the research systematically instead of postulating that each body has a "natural place" it tends toward.
Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#38Earlier 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…
1. This is an on-going debate to a certain degree (I mainly have encountered it via Phillipe Ariès's Centuries of Childhood). But I have never bought the argument that childhood is a modern invention. If you actually read primary sources from the period it is abundantly clear that parents sought to protect their children, that they treated children as different from adults, and that children were expected to behave in a manner different from adults. To me, that's a childhood, albeit one that looks very different from modern norms due to the existence of widespread child labor, etc.
2. It's too strong of a claim to say that medieval or early modern warriors suffered from CTE (mostly because retroactive diagnosis has a terrible track record) but I think it's very reasonable to say that warriors of this period suffered from severe psychological and physical distress that derived directly from their training. Likewise, you're leaving out the fact that nobles hunted and rode on horseback (with no helmet!) on a daily basis and that these are exceptionally dangerous occupations by modern standards.
3. Smallpox might last a matter of weeks as an active illness. But it is permanently disfiguring. Elizabeth I is just the most well-documented of what we can imagine were literally millions of people who suffered trauma from smallpox scars. Similarly, many illnesses of the period (like malaria, polio, scrofula, etc) were chronic. As for gangrenous limbs, Henry VIII suffered from a wound (from recreational jousting no less) that ultimately killed him via a leg ulcer, but it took years of agonizing pain to do so. Maybe not gangrene, but the point remains that a world of sharp objects + no antibiotics is no fun for anyone.
4. It's very difficult for me to imagine that the pain of losing a child ever really goes away, even if you live in a world where it's commonplace. Likewise, the evidence about children not being considered "fully human" until age 1 relies on naming practices. But it ignores things like murder prosecutions for infanticide which were widespread in the period - if babies weren't considered fully human, why did courts care if they were killed? And finally, most childhood mortality occurred after age 1, regardless.
Edit: I mostly agree with your critique of the OP, by the way. But I think the fact that we agree on humans from the past being more or less like us conflicts with your points about parents in the past being relatively un-concerned about the loss of a child, etc.
Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#39Slightly 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.
Re: The Medieval Mindset (2017)
#40Earlier 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…
1. Define modern and social class you have in mind? Definitely by the end of 19 century in Germany, upper class children time was heavily controlled. Yes, poor kids run around alone from very early age through - you had 4 years old alone whole day.
As for peasants, you did not lived alone after marriage that was soon. You lived with parents who still exercised control over you.
Contemporary child soldiers are exactly that - they are kids recruited or forced into army. They still act like teenagers and kids, except they are more dangerous. Go read up on them and on how they do once they are out of army. There are projects trying to deal with that and by what they wrote, these kids do have various social, mental etc problems. Including nightmares and higher rates of violent behavior.