MYTHS ABOUT THE MIDDLE AGES

[RedXIII]

MYTHS ABOUT THE MIDDLE AGES

Source Link: http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/medmyths.html

There are so many myths about the Middle Ages, it has to be suspected that the general level of "knowledge" about things medieval is actually negative.
Here are some of the more famous ones.

In the Middle Ages it was believed the earth was flat.
There's a whole book devoted to refuting this one: J.B. Russell's Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians (New York, 1991) (review; also `The myth of the flat earth'.)
The facts are that the Greeks knew the earth was spherical from about 500 BC, and all but a tiny number of educated persons have known it in all times since. Thomas Aquinas gives the roundness of the earth as a standard example of a scientific truth, in Summa theologiae bk. I q. 1 art. 1.


The scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages debated how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
This has not been found in any scholastic, nor has the allegation been found earlier than in a Protestant writer of 1638. See `Heads of pins'; further; discussion.
Aquinas does discuss "whether several angels can be in the same place at the same time" (Summa theologiae bk. I q. 52 art. 3), but that does not quite have the farcical ring of the original.





Some medieval Pope (unnamed, of course) instituted fasting from meat on Fridays to help the fishing industry of the Papal States.
Mediev-l archives `Fish on Fridays' thread.


The alleged fragments of the True Cross would have added up to a whole forest.
In a truly obsessive piece of scholarship, Charles Rohault de Fleury's Memoire sur les instruments de la passion de N.-S. J.-C. (Paris, 1870) counted all the alleged fragments and showed they only added up to considerably less than one cross ... more


Vikings wore helmets with horns
How would you know Hagar the Horrible was a Viking if he didn't have horns? ... the facts



An early medieval church council declared (or almost declared) that women have no souls.
History of the error.


The medieval burning of witches.
Medieval canon law officially did not believe in witches. There were very occasional individual witch trials in the Middle Ages, but the persecution of witches only became a mass phenomenon from around 1500. The height of persecution was in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries ... article; resources.


The feudal system.
Depending on how strictly it is defined, the feudal system, in the sense of a hierarchical system of property-based legal obligations between lords and vassals, is a later invention. This is argued in S. Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals (reviews). However, it is true that there was a manorial system or generalised protection racket, something like the "feudal system" of popular imagination.

[Spider Jerusalem]

1. Another myth:

Feudal lords exercised "jus primae noctis", the "right of the first night" (sometimes referred to as "droit de cuissage" or "le droit du seigneur") which gave them the right to deflower any of their female peasants/serfs on her marriage night. (Not true, but persists in popular imagination anyway; see for instance that horrible Mel Gibson film "Braveheart", in which the evil English lord deflowers William Wallace's sister--which never actually happened).

[RedXIII]

2. ,,,

we're going to have to give a little lesson on medieval history and why it's so hard to do. We think we can summarize the problems in a few brief points:

1.It's really damn old. Stuff got destroyed or lost. Literacy was not common in the thirteenth century either, so accounts are rare.

2. People were gullible. Recall that these folks were still four hundred years from Isaac Newton and three quarters of a millenium from antibiotics.

3. Paucity of material can be mighty tempting to speculate about and, well, it's easy to make stuff up to embellish a scarce account.

4. The accounts were copied frequently. This means it was easy to "modify" them.

Textbooks disseminate misinformation all the time. School texts still tell us that you taste different things on different parts of your tongue, a myth based on a mistranslation of a 17th century german scientic study.

Just because it is in a textbook doesn't make it factual.

[Spider Jerusalem]

3. Not to mention...

that even what primary sources ARE available can't be counted on as being strictly factual; a degree of myth and legend found its way into the accounts of Gregory of Tours, Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, et cetera; and then too a good deal of what does survive was written by royal chroniclers whose viewpoints were somewhat prejudiced by their alleigances, or by cloistered monks whose practical knowledge was often somewhat limited. And then there are a lot of inferences about the nature of mediaeval life (and in particular the notions of knighthood and chivalry) that are drawn from idealised accounts, like the Chanson de Roland and Malory's Morte d'Arthur, which may bear only the slightest of relations with reality (L'Histoire de Guillaume de Marechal is probably the best primary source I'm aware of on the institution of mediaeval knighthood and the attendant ideas of chivalry and feudal obligation).

[patrick t. cakes]

4. id like to know if those battles were really

that gory and violent.
seems youd get tired real fast.

[Porcupine]

8. Yes they were that violent and yes they got real tired.

Remember lots of the battle was spent marching into position. Once the actual fighting started the most fit and well fed side had a huge advantage. Getting 0ff the battlefield alive by nightfall was also required as proffesional scavengers would not hesitate to kill a wounded man for his teeth, clothes and gear.

[sarge43]

18. And many of those 'battles' were seige warfare

Whoever survived starvation and disease won.

[Lethe]

19. na they didnt last long

from what i've read it was mostly a battle of morale and discipline. There were a relatively low number of casualties during the actual fighting, and the majority of deaths occurred when one side turned and fled.

[ruiner4u]

5. Thats an interesting myth about fish on Friday that I never heard.

"Some medieval Pope (unnamed, of course) instituted fasting from meat on Fridays to help the fishing industry of the Papal States.
Mediev-l archives `Fish on Fridays' thread"


The idea of an organized 'industry' during that time period that could lobby the Pope just seems ridiculous to me. There would be no way to ship the cargo in a timely way to areas that didn't have coastal areas...

I came to believe that the 'fish on friday' idea evolved from a health standpoint because of no refrigeration for meat and it was a way to cut down on disease

[deadparrot]

7. My dad's reasoning behind the "fish on Fridays" rule:

"What WERE the apostles, anyway? Oh, yeah...fishermen."

:)

[tjwmason]

11. Fasting on Fridays dates back to the second century, at least.

It's mentioned in the Didache. At the time Jews fasted on Monday and Thursday (I think), to differentiate Christians fasted on Wednesday and Friday (the later explanations added were that these were the days of Christ's betrayal and death respectively).

A part of fasting was not eating meat, at the time fish weren't thought to be meat but fruit (odd I know, but even now in French the term for sea-food is fruits de mer).

Over time the original strictures were relaxed until by the Middle Ages the main point was no meat on Fridays and during Lent.

[leftofthedial]

6. what about this one?

you could tell when a man was a king, because he wasn't covered in shit.

[seaglass]

9. My favorite poem that mentions the middle ages...

by my favorite poet - Billy Collins


Nostalgia


Remember the 1340's? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called "Find the Cow."
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent a badly broken code.

The 1790's will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.

As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.

[jobycom]

10. Some of that is not as settled as all that.

For instance, claims that there were enough fragments of the True Cross to make a forest or fill a ship were made during and shortly after the Middle Ages. Attempts to count up the relics in 1870 focused on the fragments surviving then. But those were "official" relics, so to speak. They were relics whose chain of possession could be reasonably traced to the original "True Cross" from Constantinople (whether it was really the cross of Jesus is debatable, but it was officially recognized as such). It seems from contemporary writings, though, that there were a lot of fragments that weren't so official. Many small churches and monasteries and abbies claimed relics with no real proof of authenticity, and the "True Cross" was one of the most commonly claimed. These fragments, being in smaller churches, would not have survived until 1870, not having the recognition of a large Catholic church.

Witches-- While medieval canon did say that there were no "witches," canon law also claimed that some women believed they were witches and consorted with the devil. Pagan and newly-converted Christians around the 9th and 10th centuries (Carolingian era) executed women they accused of witch-like powers. The Church tried to put a stop to this, claiming that these women could not have such power, because no such powers existed. But at the same time, canon law recognized that some women claimed to have these powers, and that they were leading others astray, and it condemned these women, not for witchcraft, but for claiming to be witches. They weren't executed then by the by the Church, but "witches" were executed during the early Middle Ages by local superstitious peasants. The Church began to crack down on women who made such claims, and these women were caught up in the whole war on "heresy," which for the Church amounted to any belief not authorized by Bush... I mean the Church.

The feudal system--Susan Reynold's book "Fiefs and Vassals" is at the same time much needed and misleading. While it takes great care in demonstrating that the schematic of feudalism often taught--the one clearly spelled out in Marc Bloch's "Feudalism--" is too strict and was almost never really practiced in reality, the book doesn't really prove that there is no such thing as feualism. It, in fact, shows all of the elements of Bloch's version of feudalism existed, just not in the perfect structure we usually envision. Her book was based on an earlier argument by Elizabeth Brown, in the article "Tyranny of a Construct," and the title reveals the real problem many have with "feudalism." It forces a conformity on Middle Age government and land ownership that wasn't exactly the way medieval folk would have seen it. If we do away with the word Feudalism, we would have to invent another word to name what all it describes. It's a fairly complex debate, not easily summed up by a simple question of whether feudalism existed.

[tjwmason]

12. The point about the Cross relicks is that they're tiny pieces.

About the only major piece which is now extant is the Titulus (the part on which the charge was written) which is in the Roman church of Santa Croce in Gerusaleme. The rest of these relics are litterally a couple of splinters (I've seen them), it would take thousands and thousands of these to make a piece of wood of any size at all...never mind a whole cross.

This doesn't alter the obvious fact that whatever it was that St. Helena found in the Holy Land, after the sack of Constantinople and the follow flood of relicks into the West an incredible number of fakes came along with the genuine ones.

[Spider Jerusalem]

13. The "Titulus Crucis" in the basilica of Santa Croce...

was recently subjected to radiocarbon dating, which returned a two sigma (95% probability) date of AD 980-1146, so it probably dates to before the sack of Constantinople, but not to the time of Saint Helena; it was only discovered in 1492, after more than a millennium had passed. There are accounts of such a relic being venerated in Jerusalem in the 4th century (circa 385, after the time of Helena and Constantine), after which it disappeared from history.

[Robb]

14. Also, wenches actually *less* bawdy than today

Hard to believe, but true. :D

[Bucky]

15. However, if overall bawdiness is divided by the number of teeth each has

...then their wenches had a higher "per dentis" bawdidity factor.

[wildhorses]

20. bawdidity...Bawahahahahaa

:rofl:


my new word for the day:toast:

[cobalt1999]

16. One interesting hypothesis on what spurred the renaissance...

During most of the middle ages the primary drink was mead/ale/wine as the water was too dangerous. Even children drank alcoholic drinks as the alcohol killed anything dangerous.

This of course led to a very drunk and passive population without much motivation for change. This all started to change after some of the crusades when coffee was introduced to Europe. Suddenly, coffee became a HUGE drink. People were now pepped up and active. It's may not be a coincidence that most of the original insurance/banking/trading businesses started up in coffeehouses. Also, people were not so willing to put up with abuses by nobles when wired on coffee.

Just a theory, but it is interesting. The ancient Starbucks may have been the catalyst to our own civilization.

[Spider Jerusalem]

17. But...

coffee wasn't introduced into Europe until the 17th century (some hundreds of years after the supposed beginning of the "Renaissance" in Italy).

[NashVegas]

21. I Believe It Was Due to the Reduced Power of the RC Church

Between Gutenburg and Henry VIII, Rome lost a great deal of political power.

[tjwmason]

22. It started in Italy

which is where the Church was strongest (the whole Papal States thing), and started long before Henry VIII.

But the whole concept of a renaissance is based on the concept of the Dark Ages, which is increasingly untenable as an historical view, for example it denigrates the position of the Carolingians.