Not much witch killing in the middle ages…that was more a rennaisance preocupation. And besides, people like midwives and herbalists weren’t likely to be accused of witchcraft. They were a lot more likely to accuse other people of witchcraft.
How do you figure?
[Moderating]
Irspariah, please note that political jabs of this kind are not allowed in General Questions. I would recommend you read the sticky on General Questions Rules at the top of this forum.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
The above would be true of Ludwig II from about the age of 25 onward. He wasn’t always that way, though. Ludwig II maintained throughout his life that he’d have been happier as a medieval king. He often said he was born too late, and was disappointed that he’d missed the era of chivalry and “real” kings. His ideas about the Middle Ages were definitely romanticized and whether he actually would have been happier with more power and more responsibilities is questionable, but that’s what he himself believed.
Ludwig’s governess and later his tutor had helped to instill him with what were, even by 19th century standards, very old-fashioned ideas about the role of a monarch. He didn’t have much of a relationship with his father, and inherited the throne at age 18 with a lot of unrealistic expectations. Ludwig wound up having to learn while on the job that his duties as king were mostly ceremonial.
It was when Ludwig failed in his efforts to keep Bavaria out of the Seven Weeks War that he first started to withdraw from public life. Even after that he was still making some effort to live up to his obligations as king, but the Franco-Prussian War and the unification of Germany under a Prussian emperor were too much for him. This was when Ludwig washed his hands of politics and immersed himself as best he could in a fantasy world.
Let’s not forget Herrenchiemseeand Linderhof. He didn’t build a castle; he built a series of castles, and work was underway on the fourth, Falkenstein, at the time of his death.
Not just a geek, but a magnificent loon. 
Occupations held by Medieval-nerds:
[ul]
[li]herald – keeping track of all those coats of arms, mostly to make sure no two knights have duplicates.[/li][li]alchemist – Isaac Newton got into alchemy and he was one of the biggest nerds of all time. Yes, I know he lived at a later time, but there were alchemists before him.[/li][li]astrologer – Kepler ditto, although he did complain about the astrology taking time away from astronomy.[/li][/ul]
Some things we really need to consider:
Most people in the “dark ages” were poor, poor, poor. They got their lifestyles directly out of the land. There was no class mixing back then. There was no equivalent to the lonely little dork stuck in a small Midwestern town, growing up and packing his bags and making it big in Silicon Valley or whatever. The town “nerd” in a dark ages village couldn’t just go “hey, I’m going to be an alchemist/herald/scribe/scholar/etc.” All those professions were reserved for people in the nobility. Either the younger sons of noblemen who chose those professions over knighthood, or noblemen who had formerly been knights and picked up alchemy or whatever on the side because they had the time and the means to pursue such a hobby. Someone in a shithole village couldn’t just become an intellectual.
People back then had to work, work, work. Nowadays there are children who are weak because they choose not to participate in sports, and grow up to become geeks. Back then, you are forced to work. You work from the time you are able-bodied enough to do chores, and you work a lot. This forces your body to become strong. There were lots of farm kids at my high school. Some of them played sports, and some of them didn’t, some of them were shy and introverted, and some of them were small. But they were all lean and scrappy. If you’re a peasant boy, you have no choice but to build your body and get strong because this will happen simply as a byproduct of your family’s lifestyle.
BUT - there were likely many children who were weakened by disease. Those children who were stricken with illnesses at a young age might grow up unable to do farm work, and if they were in a dickwater village, that would mean that they’d be relatively useless to the family. I am not a dark-ages history ace, but it would be my guess that these children - if they lived to grow older - would probably do household chores and help the women, rather than do farm work. Maybe they got made fun of for this, I don’t know.
In North Korea, the answer is obvious.
But if you can’t be the dictator, you can be one of his doubles in case anyone tried to off him.
It was inaccurate, also- Spanish Inquisition, product of the late Middle Ages/Renaissance.
Or an artisan, but yeah, social mobility wasn’t something in most people’s minds.
Still, the first “fellowship” granted by the Kingdom of Navarra is from the time of Averroes; the major of one of the largest towns went to Parliament bringing with himself a boy who was not yet old enough to be considered a man by normal standards, yet had been apprenticed first to the boticary, then to the surgeon, as well as with the priest, and surpassed all three of his teachers in less time than most boys would take for a single apprenticeship. The town wanted to send the boy to Cordoba to study with the great Averroes, as he had inclination and talent for Medicine and talent but no inclination to the priesthood; they had obtained enough money to pay for the trip but wanted the kingdom to provide some sort of safeguard pass and contacts for the boy to get an interview with the great doctor. The Kingdom provided what the town was asking for as well as housing and livelihood expenses for the boy for as long as his apprenticeship with Averroes (if he was accepted) lasted.
An exceptional case, but it caused a precedent which still imbues current Navarrese fellowships with a lack of strings attached that seems to be quite unusual.
Or not, in Spain at least the choice for any males of noble blood between the XVth and XVIIIth centuries were still limited to the military or the church. It became easier to become a tradesman if your parents hadn’t been; the notion of someone being “a military man” is also pretty much from the Renaissance, again in Spain. Until then, soldiers also had duties as guardsmen and servants, plus the majority of “men at arms” in any given battle were militia, peasant being led by their local lord (who didn’t want to dawdle in the field of battle for too long, as the fields of wheat needed to be cut and brought in).
St Francis Xavier had no real vocation for the priesthood, but he had to choose between the sword and the pen, there were no other possibilities - he liked the pen better, so he became a priest. It was several years after his ordination that he actually grew a vocation for it.
I believe there were plans for a Chinese style palace as well. Like many modern geeks, Ludwig was also fascinated by East Asian culture!
Right, and even today, a computer geek would never think to, to coin a phrase, (and I have to coin it because it’s never been done before,) “hack” into other peoples websites or databases. Possibly, just for the thrill of seeing secret information, say, back in the 70’s-80’s when nobody ever thought to attempt entering FBI and other government computer systems. Or today, when nobody would think to steal credit card info for personal gain or to unleash malicious code (that I’ll call “viruses”.) (I might be giving people ideas here and should probably stop.)
Yes, they may have a very finely defined sense of right and wrong. But, it isn’t always the same sense as everybody else. Possibly, in part, due to a lack of social skills, or not feeling like a part of society, always being an outcast?
and yes, this still happens today, too.
If movies are to be believed, any elite criminal organization worth its salt will naturally have a small, geeky guy with glasses who is a computer ace and whose job it is to “bypass the security systems” and “hack into the mainframe” (both of which will be bleeping and blooping relentlessly with every action performed on them, and also feature extremely flashy graphical interfaces that bear no resemblance to any real-life system.) They will also have a hot chick in a tight outfit whose specialty is sneaking into places, and a huge black guy who’s the “demolitions expert.”
And of course all Hollywood movies are models of accuracy.
Dude it was a joke…don’t be so serious.
If you were lucky enough to afford a lifestyle where you didn’t have to work grueling hours to produce enough food for sustenance or to satisfy the evil overlord ruling over you, then you might have the opportunities to pursue the geeky lifestyle and delve into learning and knowledge. Then again, not all peasants and members of that period’s lower class were the stereotypical ignorant or superstitious. Some did look up at the sky at night, see the stars and wonder.
Also, the entire world was not experiencing the dark ages. Outside Europe, if you were to enter the muslim realm you would have seen a culture at the time which promoted learning and performed great advances in mathematics, the sciences and arts. Same with china. As a geek you would definitely had more opportunities there to satisfy those brain cells, assuming you had the luck to be born there or the resources to get out there, assuming you knew what was happening on the other side of the world.
Dude, I was joking too.