As an amateur medievalist, I’ve gotten to the point where I almost bristle anytime I see a new thread asking a question about medieval history. Although there will be several knowledgeable Dopers posting with well-researched information from reputable sources, there will inevitably be a couple dozen posts repeating the same old misinformation: knights had to be winched onto their horses, medieval people never took baths, medieval people were filthy and ate only gruel, medieval knights were lumbering clods and were malnourished and stunted, etc. Sometimes it seems to me that your average Doper gets his knowledge about medieval European culture from 50+ year-old works of historical fiction. I’ve heard similar statements expressed IRL as well. Do most people simply not get much accurate information about medieval history or culture? And why are people so determined to believe that these medieval Europeans, in some cases their ancestors, were unusually dirty, stunted, ignorant uncultured barbarians? Medieval people had very richly developed cultures and worldviews, albeit very alien to our own. I study it from an anthropological standpoint, just as I would any culture. YMMV on whether you find it interesting enough to study in-depth, but my god, it doesn’t take many brain cells to figure out that knights, being some of the most powerful and successful warriors of their time, did not get as far as they did by acting like helpless turtles rolling around on the ground if they were unhorsed in battle, nor were they stupid enough to carry 50 lb swords into battle to hack at their enemies for hours.
Most of us take Medieval History 101 by watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail. What do expect? Sadly, that’s a semi-serious answer.
Well, why the general ignorance about the Ming dynasty? Or literature of the Sturm und Drang movement? Or literature of the Elizabethan period? Or recent developments in cognitive science? Or theories of constitutional interpretation? There are a million areas about which you can have general knowledge, and it is impossible to have general knowledge about even a small fraction of them all. So people know about the areas that strike their interest, and they engage in further study about. For everything else, they rely on vaguely-remembered facts gleaned from long-ago PBS shows or (as you say) inaccurate semi-fictional treatments; or they just don’t know anything at all.
I acknowledge that I am ignorant on most topics, because there just isn’t time to learn. But that’s what’s so great about the Dope–there’s almost always someone out there who *isn’t *ignorant about whatever topic I’m interested in.
I learned more about life in the Middle Ages from reading The Poem of Mio Cid in Spanish class and from enjoying old legends than I did from History class. We got the Middle Ages twice and both times it was more of “the kings of Castille were all so great, hurrah hurrah, and there was a Moor called Abderraman III and the Califate and the Taifas” (excuse me, what about our own kings in Navarra?) with a footnote of “they were kings of Leon before being kings of Castille” and a sprinkling of battle dates than anything about what life was like, trade, what did people do in between… well, ok, in Spain you can’t really say “in between wars” when you’re talking about the Goth Kings (very little) followed by the Reconquista, but let’s say in between battles.
Heck, they didn’t even mention such things as “oh, by the way, sometimes the Christian Kingdoms would beat each other up too, Navarra had one Muslim king, the family trees of the different reigning families look more like we should talk about them in the singular (yes, that includes the Muslims).” No mention of succesion wars; the only king of Navarra that got mentioned in my History books was Sancho VII and only because he was at Las Navas. The only king of Aragon that got mentioned, Jaime I.
They can’t even be bothered to teach you the military and “kingly” facts while at the same time not trying to teach you any of the rest… but then, the same books and teachers were only too happy to conveniently forget several XIX century civil wars.
Why the general ignorance about everything? Most of us don’t know all that much about most things, nor do we need to.
OK, this may be true, but the Medieval eras are definitely portrayed more often in popular culture than any of those other examples. The ratio of movies about the Middle Ages versus actual understanding of the Middle Ages is very unbalanced.
When I was taught history at school, I was taught about dates, events, consequences of events and so on; not about how knights did or didn’t get on or off horses. A shame, really; it would have made it more interesting, and brought it alive. But to know accurately about that sort of stuff requires time and effort, and real interest in the subject. There’s just too much information out there for me to be able to ingest it all, sadly. I’m sure that there are many subjects that the OP has insufficient or incorrect knowledge of.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this is in fact a chief source of lack of understanding of the Middle Ages.
People often know enough about their own ignorance not to weigh in on these topics. But some folks just cannot pass up the chance to hold forth on this subject, as it gives them the opportunity to ridicule a (possibly fictional) set of people who do know something about it or at least have a passing interest in a fictionalized version of the middle ages.
We are now in the Dark Ages of knowledge about the Dark Ages. Our Medieval scholarship is, well, positively Medieval.
I think it’s usually safe in any search for the source of cultural ignorance to take a shot at television. Jared Diamond specifically cites our development of television as one of the two reasons he’s confident modern “civilized” humans are NOT more intelligent than hunter-gatherers. The other reason is more complex, but just “access to television” alone accounts for a lot of ignorance and stupidity.
Some of these misunderstandings have a basis in reality but are distorted. An unhorsed knight indeed had trouble rising – if he’d been unhorsed by two thousand pounds of charging Percheron and hurled ten feet backward and six feet straight down onto a horse paddock packed iron-hard by decades of hooves, but it wasn’t because his armor weighed too much. People reading about such blows probably misunderstood the reason.
Well, the fact is most people aren’t going to know as much as you do about something you have a particular interest in. How much do you know about the Bolivarian revolutions? The rise and fall of the Zulu empire? The Yuan Dynasty? Feudal Japan?
I think OP’s point wasn’t so much a complaint that people have no knowledge of the Middle Ages, but rather that they have seemed to absorbed so much misinformation about the Middle Ages.
Most people probably don’t know a lot about the topics you mentioned, but neither are they laboring under the false impression that they do.
What did Will Rogers say? “It’s not the things you don’t know that’s a problem, it’s the things you know that aren’t true.”
To use feudal Japan as an example, I doubt 99% of people who babble about samurai know very much about them at all. The current image of samurai is that they were ninja-like super-assassins who used amazing swords capable of slicing Sherman tanks in half. Hell, you can be even more current and keep it within national history; most Americans, including some on this message board, still think the Vietnam War was more or less entirely fought against skilled, evasive guerrilla forces and that that’s why the war was lost. And that’s not dusty history, that’s within people’s living memory.
Let’s be honest, on most historical topics, people absorb a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation. I really don’t think the Middle Ages are unique in this regard.
Others have posted what I’d post about the study of the period. I wish more knew about the inventions and technology that progressed over the period. Jean Gimpel (The Medieval Machine, The Cathedral Builders) – far from the dark ages.
A little outside living memory, but a similar example is the Civil War. Most people think that it was fought pretty much over whether or not slavery should be legal, and that from day 1 of American history slaves were only bought/sold/owned in the South.
The misinformation about the European middle ages, a direct antecedent of mainstream Western culture, allows us to feel superior about our own society. We may see a stark decline in the standard of living from our parents’ generation, the sad state of education today, a crumbling infrastructure, etc., but at least we are better than our smelly illiterate peasant ancestors (or so we keep telling ourselves).
Have you tried educating someone who is vested in their own ignorance? It’s an uphill battle, to say the least.
Try Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel by Frances and Joseph Gies. A good book about medieval technology.
Ooh, that looks interesting. I’m going to put that on my “to get” list. Cheers.
And weren’t a lot of Samurai actually gay?