
The Medieval Mindset (2017) - marchenko
https://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.com/2017/09/thinking-medieval-seeking-endarkenment.html
======
hprotagonist
Much 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.

~~~
benbreen
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).

~~~
froasty
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.

~~~
benbreen
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.

~~~
froasty
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 impede the
function of the martial culture, it wouldn't be actively propagated.

3\. Yes, disfigurements and scarring would be common in the aftermath of
epidemics, but in those situations, it's so common that to form cultural
persecuting complexes around it is difficult to justify. Lepers, on the other
hand...

4\. That's really my entire point: the reason it's so hard for you to imagine
is because, if you live in the United States, the entire existence of death
has become divorced from culture and daily existence. It's an aberration and a
taboo. In a culture where death during childhood is common, there are cultural
forms that account for it. That doesn't mean that it is or isn't a loss, but
that it accomodates and integrates that event within a broader chain of being.
As far as judicial injunctions against infanticide go, early mortality is
incidental to life, not fundamental. Actively destroying a potential person,
particularly within a truly local culture, when it _isn 't_ already part of
the folkways, is _of course_ going to result in reprisal. However the very
existence of cultures that practiced exposure shows that it isn't fundamental
to the human condition to viscerally value the lives of infants
unconditionally. As far as PTSD goes, it's largely about _being unable_ to
cope with a traumatic event. In a functional society, it seems unlikely to me
that PTSD strictly as a pathology surrounding child loss would be a thing--and
the sociology surrounding it as I've read it supports that assertion.

I really think our disagreement resides in our perceptions of how
durable/fragile humans can be under duress. I think humans are especially
resilient, particularly if given adequate cultural coping mechanisms within a
culture.

~~~
benbreen
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 and death all around them. I think
they're more of the norm than many recognize, because most of us don't spend
time reading through primary source letters in archives. I think that spending
a lot of my mental life in the 17th century makes me fairly well placed to
imagine what it's like to lose a child in that world, and I really don't see
what you'r arguing here reflected in the archives.

If anyone reading this is interested, btw, the depiction of a fictional Thomas
Cromwell's loss of a child in Hilary Mantel's _Wolf Hall_ struck me as
incredibly well-observed and accurate. I really loved that part of the book.

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

~~~
benbreen
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.

~~~
froasty
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.

~~~
benbreen
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.

~~~
froasty
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?

~~~
benbreen
All history is conjecture. The primary sources relating to 17th century Angola
exist, they're just sparse. I just told you that Queen Nzinga sent letters to
the King of Portugal, for instance. If you're genuinely interested in this,
John Thornton and Linda Heywood both give good surveys of what sources are
available and what they can tell us.

I work on early modern Britain, Portugal, and their colonies.

------
twoquestions
My 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."

------
andrepd
>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.

~~~
Clubber
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...](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/world-s-oldest-homo-sapiens-
fossils-found-morocco)

~~~
ItsMe000001
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 technological world, with an equally recent extreme increase in
population density worldwide (both movement top cities as well as the
unprecedented total population size increase), what exactly did they do?

I think that this indeed is a very interesting question, I'm not sure we can
answer it. Medieval brains are one thing, but what about 20,000 years ago? The
brain must already have been pretty much the same.

~~~
kaybe
Emotions and relationships with other humans are still hard though.

~~~
ItsMe000001
But relationships have become a lot more complex with the huge increase in
population density, plus a _lot_ more flexibility and movement. We now have to
deal with a lot more people than any of our ancient ancestors, and a lot of
change. Our networks of work and cooperation are unprecedented by anything in
history too.

------
jkingsbery
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). 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...](https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/story-of-medieval-england-from-
king-arthur-to-the-tudor-conquest.html)). 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.

~~~
Skerples
> _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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculous_cervical_lymphadenitis#History)

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.

~~~
jkingsbery
I could have kept going - these are meant to be examples, not exhaustive. My
point is that rather than rebutting simple stereotypes with other simple
stereotypes, everyone is better served by acknowledging that history and
people are complicated.

------
simonh
On 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.

~~~
tabtab
_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.

~~~
simonh
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.

------
drzaiusapelord
>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.

~~~
Skerples
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.

------
lainga
In 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."

~~~
LoSboccacc
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.

------
sunseb
I think it may be biased to think that medieval life was a nightmare. It's
kind of a modern propaganda (that started in the Renaissance - a more bloody
period with a lot more wars by the way) to dismiss this old world and impose a
new one.

~~~
avocad
Indeed. People tend to forget that the Middle Ages lasted for a thousand
years. When all the conflicts are put together it seems there were only
murderous barbarians out there trying to murder and/or rape you. But most
areas were war-free most of that time. The reason that Barbara Tuchman wrote
about France in the 14th century is that there happened so much.

Monty Python and The Holy Grail was not a documentary but satirised (among
other things) the way the Middle Ages were depicted in movies and books.

One of the reasons we have such a bad image of that period is that the
brutalities of the French Revolution needed to be justified.

~~~
mkirklions
>But most areas were war-free most of that time.

Can anyone verify that?

I imagine that the last 2,000 years have been filled with territorial disputes
that were solved with the blood of males.

The survivors of the battle getting to keep the land and the women.

I dont think these were petty disputes either, I think these were rational
decision making from leadership.

But I really dont know. Ive thought about this question, to propagate your
genes, is it better to be Royal or peasant stock?

~~~
mantas
Depends on what you consider "filled". Most people or their living relatives
saw some sort of action. But in many cases it was once-in-lifetime happening.
On top of that, a big chunk of medieval wars were meet-you-in-a-field-out-of-
town kind of affairs.

As for royal vs. peasant.. big chunk of "blue blood" royalty had genetic
diseases thanks to intermarriage to keep pure blood.. Meanwhile peasants knew
it's not good to marry exclusively inside of a village and tried to spice
things up by mixing with neighbouring villages.

------
LoSboccacc
This 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

------
Karolus
for 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](https://pastebin.com/8ZgDV5mt)

------
tabtab
I don't see that "insanely flaky deluded narcissists" went out of style. We
just have slightly more checks and balances on them now.

------
gumby
This is quite good, though I disagree on one point:

> "FORGET...Progress"

I mean I completely agree, it's just for the modern reader infected with the
victorian idea of "progress" (which has also polluted most people's
understanding of how evolution works) this difference is even more profound.

There was a common belief in a largely static social order; why try for
profound change? You can try to usurp the king, but that just shows that the
old king was illegitimate, and anyway only certain people could get away with
it.

But the other significant and related force was one of declinism: the romans
had had a more advanced society (look at all their artifacts still around!
Their literature!) and that, perhaps due to original sin, the then-current
world was a less advanced society.

~~~
Jesus_Jones
i don't get what you are talking about. please explain what the problem is
with the victorian idea of progress (with or without scare quotes. And what do
you mean by that, including evolution. besides christianity taking over
religious thought in roman society, what does original sin have to do with
that, just the philosophical impact?

------
CalRobert
"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.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autumn_of_the_Middle_Ages](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autumn_of_the_Middle_Ages)

------
Dirlewanger
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.

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

------
1123581321
I would recommend reading A Distant Mirror, the book referenced at the start.

~~~
wrp
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."

~~~
mcguire
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.)

~~~
wrp
[http://gen.lib.rus.ec/](http://gen.lib.rus.ec/)

------
froasty
This 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.

-

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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law)

4
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ball_(priest)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ball_\(priest\))

5
[http://www.pompeiana.org/Resources/Ancient/Graffiti%20from%2...](http://www.pompeiana.org/Resources/Ancient/Graffiti%20from%20Pompeii.htm)

~~~
Skerples
Hi, trying to figure out how this site works. Hope you can see this!

It's good to see that someone else likes the Spencer case. It really is a
fascinating case study.

Spencer was trapped in the legal quagmire of Puritan law. He didn't know what
to do - he feared the law, and tried to obey his advisers, and generally made
a legal mess of things. Looking at it from a great distance it's easy to see
what he did wrong, but it's also important to remember that he was the victim
of a hysterical hunt and an irrational prosecution.

I've written another high-level (and therefore, very general) overview of
medieval laws and trials here:
[https://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/08/thinking-
medieva...](https://coinsandscrolls.blogspot.ca/2017/08/thinking-medieval-law-
trials-and.html)

and I come to the same conclusion you do. "No one is going to defend this
blaspheming piece of shit," is a core component of medieval justice.

I think you're also convinced that I'm claiming these things as _uniquely_
medieval which isn't true. I'm trying to provide perspective for someone
approaching this topic from a non-academic background of Disney movies and D&D
games.

> _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._

Well... yeah? You didn't think I was going on some sort of unironic Randian
super-rant here?

> _Conspicuous consumption is a medieval construct absent in the modern
> period._

I was mostly trying to contrast this with the modern idea of "net worth" and
"worth so many billion dollars." Wealth as assets, not as an abstract.

> _Uh, people revile people like the Kardashians?_

Absolutely. Chat with the viewerbase. It's mostly "oh my god, did you see what
they did now?" It's shock and drama and voyeurism. It's not a positive
experience, despite being a popular one. Not sure if you're familiar with
modern game streamers, but it's the same attitude.

> _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._

Again, I think you are reading way too far into the intent.

Remember, I write a gaming blog. The goal is to try and allow a modern human
to quickly adopt a point of view. Most people play medieval people exactly
like modern people. Sure, my post deals in high-level generalities - it's
designed to grind 1000 years of history and an entire continent and turn it
into an easily digestible paste. And it's only 2,000 words long! Of course
some detail is going to be lost! Of course important elements are going to be
left out! Your response to a few elements is nearly as long as the post
itself.

> _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._

And yet, for every similarity, differences:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevole...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevolent_Knowledge)

------
cat199
or, how to regurgitate the inherent biases used to justify the establishment
of of your own philosphy about another one without actually understanding it
to be biased...

> Nobody is Equal The world is hierarchical.

Unlike now?

> People of different estates and statuses are widely seen to be "of a
> different substance." > Peasants, seen by the nobility, are closer to hounds
> than the noble's peers.

1st world 2nd world, developing countries, etc.

> The person of the monarch was literally sacred - divine matter.

Not actually true. Rule by divine right was not universally accepted, and
didn't imply immunity since this was a 'right' or 'title' under a christian
society - the monarch was _intended_ (yes I know) to embody the best virtues
of the best families, and if this was not the case, he (or more rarely she)
was deposed.

Indeed, having such a strong power structure meant abuses were rampant, and
people took advantage. but even the philosophical basis of the time did not
believe this.

> Also, men and women were made of completely different substances.

Clearly much crazier than the present day, where men and women are made of the
exact same substance even though they actually aren't but somehow embody
distinct 'gender identities' which are devoid of biology and can be applied
equally and arbitrarily in differing configurations.

> The idea of a law that applies equally or fairly to everyone was neither
> acceptable nor practical.

Pretty sure murder was punished with death, as one example. Whether one could
get away with it is another thing.. Certainly our courts now are always fair
and never manipulated..

> Justice is a modern conceit.

justice under rule of law is an enlightement concept. justice under law of
'what is right' is more traditional.

I posit that false convictions or incorrect enforcement are both feasible
under either model.

> Neither speech nor assembly nor the commonest transactions of life are free.

mass surveillance, etc.

> There are laws for everything, and if there are no laws there are customs,
> and if there are no customs people will be reactionary and suspicious
> anyway.

see also voting response to this post, I am sure.

> The medieval world could be shaken by a speech, forever changed by a book,
> split by theological controversies over a line of text or the intonation of
> a hymn or the date of a holiday.

And what are the Kardashians up to this week? I hear so-and-so is planning to
invade somewhere-or-the-other.. It's 9/11.

> Displays of magnificence were not only convenient, they were mandatory.
> Misers were spurned and mocked.

Indeed. This is why monasteries utterly failed in that time period, and
dressing simply and repairing ones garments, items, etc. is a common practice
in modern consumer society.

> The Church glittered. Cathedrals were pieces of heaven brought to rest upon
> the earth

John Calvin called, he want's his reformation back. But I guess you were away
and on holiday in Vegas, so you missed the memo.

> Patrick says "the ruling class are living like Kardashians" and he's exactly
> right.

welll well, looks like we agree on something.

~~~
mamon
>> Pretty sure murder was punished with death, as one example.

Depends on social classes of the murderer and the victim.

If peasant killed a noble it was punishable by death. And sometimes they would
also torture said peasant before killing him, because the death alone wasn't
enough punishment.

If a noble killed peasant they would typically only need to pay a small fine
(unless the peasant was not his own subject, in which case instead of fine
they would pay retribution to peasant's lord for the "lost income")

------
js8
This is a great article. I almost cannot watch any historical movie, the life
was so hopeless back then.

