WTF???

[Kyle Abraham]

Middle ages? What the funt? Lets talk some WW2 or US Civil War!

[Big Brother]

Eh, I wanted a general history forum, but my sis has a degree in Medieval Studies, and since the HP series has a sort fo Medieval feel (dungeons, magic, the robes, the castle, the sheer torture of trying to read through the first and fifth books in the series...), that's what we got. I'm sure she wouldn't object if we discussed other historical topics here...or, if she did, that she'd just move it to the Vale of Oddisy.

[Lolua]

*sigh*... if you guys are actually gonna talk about Harry Turtledove and whatnot, I can fairly easily turn the "Age of Faith" section into one devoted to historical fiction, which I enjoy. Especially since I'm quite certain nobody but me really cares about the Middle Ages, anyway.

[Lorpius Prime]

Lolua said:

Especially since I'm quite certain nobody but me really cares about the Middle Ages, anyway.

Which begs the question, why do you care about the Middle Ages?

[Lolua]

Lorpius said:

Which begs the question, why do you care about the Middle Ages?

Why do I care about the Middle Ages? Because calling it the "Middle Ages" is inherently unfair, and I've always been a sucker for historical underdogs (which I suppose is why I'm a lifelong fan of the Chicago Cubs). To title that period the "Middle Ages" is like saying that the late 1950s and early 1960s in America, a time of dynamic change in culture and politics, were the "Middle Years" simply because they happened to fall between the wars (or as my friend Jon would correctly call them, "police actions") in Korea and Vietnam.

Everybody thinks the Middle Ages were "Dark" and "dreary" and "barbaric". Yes, there was some of that. Between plagues, raids, infant mortality, and a diet of hopless beer and coarse bread, death was a part of everyday life. Dental hygiene was definitely worse then than now. People lived close to their animals for warmth in the winter, and things for the common people were pretty mucky, especially during the spring rains.

You're thinking now that things were a lot cleaner and better under the Romans, right? Wrong. All those movies of Romans sitting around in their baths would have you believe that they were very clean, but here's the truth: They actually removed the dirt with oil. They poured olive oil on themselves and then scraped it off with a dull knife called a stirgil. Doesn't sound very clean to us, now, does it? It especially wouldn't be very comfortable in the muggy Mediterranean weather. Soap was around, yeah, but who invented it? Pliny the Elder credits those Gallic "barbarians" with its invention, in the form of a shampoo. So next time you wash your hair, thank the Gallic Celts, not the Romans.

The Romans went to the baths to socialize more than to get clean, anyway. (People who don't believe me should visit their local Turkish bath and take a look around.) Collective and social bathing wasn't as big a part of northern culture, as the water was freakin' cold. If you had to heat the water yourself, would you bathe very often? In the Middle Ages, women were encouraged to bathe once a month, the men twice a year and on the morning of their wedding. On the farm where my mother grew up, before they had hot and cold running water, she bathed once a week. Many she knew bathed much less often. Should we ignore the 1940s and 1950s because not everyone had hot running water?

I've just gone into one aspect of why I like the Middle Ages, and I know I'm not very eloquent. Here's an excerpt from a much better essay by Penn Szittya, a Georgetown professor of English and former chair of my alma mater's Medieval Studies Department:

Why do we study the Middle Ages? Students, and often their parents, ask me that question. It is not a career path: you cannot become a medieval lawyer; you cannot buy or trade medieval stocks; you would be arrested for practicing medieval medicine; medieval theology is out of date, even at -- or especially at -- a Jesuit institution.

Our students answer such questions with their feet. Enrollemnts in courses on on medieval subjects exceed 600 a year. Why? Because the Middle Ages is one of the most fascinating and exciting chapters in human history, East or West. It is a period of vast transformations in which the roots of our own time are firmly planted. The university itself is a medieval invention.... Law as we know it, scientific thought and the experimental method all begin in the Middle Ages. So do banks, gunpowder, optics, encyclopedias, royal courts, parliaments, Northern European cities, ships, fairs, outlaws, courtly love, castles. Some of the most extraordinary adventures in human history occurred in the Middle Ages: the Crusades; the Viking discovery of North America; the rediscovery of Aristotle by Arabic philosophers. Islamic and Asiatic cultures in the period are phenomenally rich in science, law, art, and philosophy. Even today, the cities of Europe and the East are full of medieval monuments to human endeavor: Haigia Sophia, Chartres, the Alhambra, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Kremlin, the Haram of Mecca, San Marco.

The essay in its entirety can be found at www.georgetown.edu/organizations/medieval/longview.html.

I'm not saying you shouldn't study the classical period -- I love the Romans, oil-bathing and all. Nor do I hold (much of) a grudge against the Renaissance scholars who, quite full of themselves and their glorification of the classical past, first coined the horrible term "Middle Ages". Never mind that the Classical works of Aristotle would have been lost forever without medieval Arab scholars, or that Renaissance Michelangelo's earliest sketches are of works by the medieval painter Giotto di Bondone.

I hope this satisfies your curiosity, Lorpius.

[Lorpius Prime]

Eh, so do (did?) you study the "Middle Ages" as it applies to just Europe, or the entire world?

I, and most of the people I know, tend to associate the term Middle Ages solely with Europe, and (while I don't pretend to be an expert by any means) it's always seemed that those were times of extraordinary economic destitution in Europe, and that as a result, not a whole lot of stuff really ever happened. Or is that just a misconception?

[Mlle Bienvenu]

I don't really know too much about the Middle Ages, but, from what I remember from High School and Middle School, they are a fascinating subject.

Also, If' I'm not mistaken, I believe Tokein was a Midieval Studies professor.... Not sure though

I think all of history is important to look at, Lorpius, because it shapes all of our lives. It may not be entirely apparent now, but the Middle Ages had a great impact on our lives. For instance, in the Late Middle Ages the printing press was invented, this had a profound impact on the dissemination of knowledge that has been unsurpassed until perhaps the last 200 year, with the invention of telegraphy and of course, the digital information age we are in now. and that's just one of the innovations of that era.

OT: While searching for info on the Mid Ages, to check my facts (I'm still shakey on them, like I said, haven't studied the mid ages in a while), I just found a king named Knut... (Canute) cool :-P

Anyway, I agree with Lolua, that the Middle Ages get a bad rap...

[Lorpius Prime]

Oh, I completely agree that it is important to understand and be familiar with History. I just think I can sympathize with the people who don't place too much importance on the "Middle Ages" (what would be a better name, btw?).

[Big Brother]

Mlle said:

Also, If' I'm not mistaken, I believe Tokein was a Midieval Studies professor.... Not sure though

Languages. I can't recall which ones off the top of my head at the moment, but it was definitely languages. Which, when done well, often overlaps a bit with History, but isn't really history.

Tolkein supposedly made up the languages of Middle Earth (Quenya, Black Speech, Westron, etc.) long before he made up the stories themselves. The books were pretty much an excuse to use the languages.

Mlle said:

I think all of history is important to look at, Lorpius, because it shapes all of our lives. It may not be entirely apparent now, but the Middle Ages had a great impact on our lives.

Indeed. One al-Qaeda recruiting flyer seen in Somalia depicted an American and an Israeli soldier both riding on the same horse. A horse with two knights on it was the emblem of the Knights Templar, an order of Knights who fought in the Crusades. The full actual official name of al-Qaeda in Arabic translates as "The World Coalition against Crusaders and Jews".

Bin Laden and his ilk think they're still fighting the Crusades. They view Israel as just another batch of Europeans who invaded the Mideast and carved out a coastal kingdom on what disturbingly resembles the exact holdings of the medieval Kingdom of Jerusalem.

Mlle said:

OT: While searching for info on the Mid Ages, to check my facts (I'm still shakey on them, like I said, haven't studied the mid ages in a while), I just found a king named Knut... (Canute) cool :-P

Also indeed. First time I saw the Knut coins in HP, I immediately assumed they were named after King Knut the Great, who IIRC was the Danish king who conquered England in what, 1017 or so?

[Lolua]

Lorpius said:

Eh, so do (did?) you study the "Middle Ages" as it applies to just Europe, or the entire world?

I, and most of the people I know, tend to associate the term Middle Ages solely with Europe, and (while I don't pretend to be an expert by any means) it's always seemed that those were times of extraordinary economic destitution in Europe, and that as a result, not a whole lot of stuff really ever happened. Or is that just a misconception?

A good medievalist looks at the broader picture, because there was interaction/trade/what-have-you among various peoples from England to Vietnam and from Norway to Mozambique. Odoric of Pordenone (in Italy) made it to coastal southeast asia (where he described fish that threw themselves onto the shore and turtles the size of a building for the folks back home). The Franciscans sent a delegation to convert the Mongols, and, of course, everyone knows the tale of the trader Marco Polo. Arab sailors ventured down the east African coastline and waves of Muslim conquerors inhabited Spain for seven hundred years. The Norsemen even made it to Canada during the Middle Ages. The Medieval Studies department at my alma mater considered both Asian Civilization I and Middle Eastern History I to be courses in Medieval Studies, alongside such staples as courses in Arthurian Literature, Dante's Divine Comedy, and The Crusades.

Now, I'm probably not as well-rounded as I could be. Here's a list of classes I took that count as "Medieval Studies":

• Intro. to Medieval Studies: The Age of Dante
  
• Medieval History I: Fall of Rome to The Millennium
  
• Medieval History II: The Millennium to the Black Death
  
• The Latin Works of Matteo Ricci (an early Jesuit in China)
  
• Latin Poetry (mostly Ovid's Metamorphoses)
  
• Barbarians And Others: Late Latin Literature (works about the sacking of Rome by the Goths in 410 AD)
  
• Literatures of Medieval Women (everything from Celtic epics to courtly poetry and Arthurian romance to plays by Hrotsvit of Gandersheim)
  
• Boccaccio's The Decameron
  
• Arthurian Legends: 500-1500
  
• A Knight's Life (we read the whole freakin' Nibelungenlied in German)
  
• Islamic Religious Thought and Practice (incl. a comprehensive history of the rise of Islam that took more than half the semester)
  
• Intro. to Roman Archaeology
  
• Gothic Art & Architecture
  
• Giotto & Italian Art
  
• Italian Renaissance Art (I was an Art History minor, what can I say?)

It's true that you can study the Middle Ages as solely European, and I won't deny that most programs in medieval studies (including mine) are very Eurocentric -- they look at the rest of the world, but mainly for its relation to Europe. That may change as more people study languages like Arabic and Sanskrit and Chinese, which are dead useful when looking at the world outside of Latinate Europe.

In terms of economic destitution... interest-charging banks as we know them were a medieval invention, to help pay for the building of medieval cities, to get the money out of the hands of the wealthiest individuals and into the hands of the most creative entrepeneurs. We're talking rise of the capitalist system here. I'm not going to get into the whole thing at the moment, but read Medieval Cities by Henri Pirenne (don't diss him just because he's Belgian) and then we'll talk.

"Not a whole lot of stuff ever really happened"? The only reason people see the Middle Ages as a zero-sum game is that they think "Renaissance" means getting a fresh chance at the classical age so they don't make the "big mistake" of the Middle Ages. As far as I'm concerned, Baroque and Rococo were far bigger mistakes.

Lorpius said:

Oh, I completely agree that it is important to understand and be familiar with History. I just think I can sympathize with the people who don't place too much importance on the "Middle Ages" (what would be a better name, btw?).

Some prefer the title used for this section on the main board: "The Age of Faith." Because it was, mostly. Even the dissenters like Peter Waldo and Jan Hus were believers, they just believed in something slightly different from everyone else. The vast majority of Europe was united under one church, with small populations of Jews and Arabs in various places. Most of the rest of the world was at least ruled by Muslims, because the Mongols had converted to it and the newly-converted Arabs had taken a large chunk of territory themselves before their religion was more than a hundred years old.

At least I am comforted in one thing... no one else can spell Tolkien's name, either.

[Kyle Abraham]

Sorry but Matchlock rifles just don't do it for me. Now a Springfield, Thompson of Minie- those are perfect weapons for carnage :evil smiley:

[Ash]

Now, I'm probably not as well-rounded as I could be. Here's a list of classes I took that count as "Medieval Studies":

• Intro. to Medieval Studies: The Age of Dante
  
• Medieval History I: Fall of Rome to The Millennium
  
• Medieval History II: The Millennium to the Black Death
  
• The Latin Works of Matteo Ricci (an early Jesuit in China)
  
• Latin Poetry (mostly Ovid's Metamorphoses)
  
• Barbarians And Others: Late Latin Literature (works about the sacking of Rome by the Goths in 410 AD)
  
• Literatures of Medieval Women (everything from Celtic epics to courtly poetry and Arthurian romance to plays by Hrotsvit of Gandersheim)
  
• Boccaccio's The Decameron
  
• Arthurian Legends: 500-1500
  
• A Knight's Life (we read the whole freakin' Nibelungenlied in German)
  
• Islamic Religious Thought and Practice (incl. a comprehensive history of the rise of Islam that took more than half the semester)
  
• Intro. to Roman Archaeology
  
• Gothic Art & Architecture
  
• Giotto & Italian Art
  
• Italian Renaissance Art (I was an Art History minor, what can I say?)

Gosh... and I was upset cause I had to fill the whole second quarter of 9th Grade SS with the European Middle Ages, thanks to our new curriculum. Ah, as I constantly tell my students in this "general review" class, there is always more history. You can start with the Middle Ages, then you can go to Medieval France, then 14th Century France, then the Local Economies of 14th Century France. If you go for the doctorate, you're stuck with doing some paper on Poultry Husbandry on 14th Century France.

No, I'm not kidding about the chicken raising - some guy in the SCA managed to become a peer thanks to raising period chickens. He is known throughout that group as the "chicken laurel."

[Big Brother]

Ash said:

You can start with the Middle Ages, then you can go to Medieval France, then 14th Century France, then the Local Economies of 14th Century France. If you go for the doctorate, you're stuck with doing some paper on Poultry Husbandry on 14th Century France.

No, I'm not kidding about the chicken raising - some guy in the SCA managed to become a peer thanks to raising period chickens. He is known throughout that group as the "chicken laurel."

Great. Now Rachel's gonna want to go back for her doctorate and do her thesis on poultry raising in 12th-century Bavaria.

[Mlle Bienvenu]

LOL!

[Kiv]

I guess you would not like my world history class then. I blaze from the paleolithic to the early renaissance in a four week review I refer to as "Bones and Dirt." Give me a good revolution over the inquisition any day. If the average fellow isnt able to throw the finger at the man, then I am not interested!