First, there is the break between the low and high Middle Ages. It seems like we know relatively little about the former (i.e., before around 1000 C.E.). Moreover, except for some notable high points, that period seems to have been a dismal time for western Europe. The high Middle Ages are another story altogether. While there were periods of famine and plague, and a peasant might find himself in the path of someone’s army, the social and technical advances of the period were impressive.
Second, and I think most books on medieval history touch on this, the Middle Ages started getting a bad reputation during the Renaissance, mainly because, to put it simply, people (or at least the movers and shakers) during the Renaissance needed someone to look down on. I think we’ve inherited this. Too close a look at the period might begin to put the lie to this notion, so better to just gloss over it.
In my readings, BTW, the Middle Ages don’t seem particulary alien. Admittedly a lot of things are far outside my own experience, but, for example, I think a lot of settlers in the early American west and midwest wouldn’t find the life of a peasant in medieval Europe to be all that unusual.
You’re saying ‘tohmahto’ while I’m saying ‘tomato’. It’s true that I don’t know much about South American revolutionaries, but it’s also true that I don’t go shooting my mouth off in threads about them saying things like, “Well, in this movie I dimly remember seeing five years ago, Frida Kahlo parachuted through the skylight, interrupting Castro and Che’s gay love affair, thusly causing the Bay of Pigs incident,” etc etc. If there’s a thread about the Zulu dynasty, I’ll read with interest, I might ask a question or two, but I don’t repeat the plot of Shaka Zulu word-for-word.
And I do know a fair amount about feudal Japan and the Yuan Dynasty, FYI.
I don’t think we know a hell of a lot about any history and never did. Even the Dark (Low Middle) Ages are not as Dark as they once appeared. Yes they were full of warlords and Vikings but ‘viking’ was as much verb as noun and they went on to found the first republics in Northern Europe and Russia, and via secondary incubation in Normandy to run England and large enclaves of the Mediterranean.
We do have two opposing extreme images of the Middle Ages, either filthy, superstitious and ignorant or romantic, chivalrous and mystical. But we have equally unbalanced views of the Roman Empire too: it was a brutal morally corrupt dictatorship that tortured all dissidents to death; it was a civilising force that taught western Europeans to wash and read. It was both - and do you mean the Empire of Augustus or of Septimus Severus some 200 years later or of Theodosius 200 years after that?
Part of our attitude to the Middle Ages comes from Renaissance romanticisation of it as a Golden Age. Knights did need to be winched onto horses, but those were knights in formal jousts long after the cavalry charge had become obsolete - and big men like Henry VIII! It is like applying modern fencing equipment to Romeo & Juliet. The later Middle Ages created their own fantasies of an earlier more ‘purely’ feudal period that probably never existed. Feudal non-aggression treaties make perfect sense when land is being transferred between neighbours. Of course you require your new neighbour will not attack you. That does not make it the only factor in land transfer!
My [Norman] home has records going back to the 13th century and one of the ‘interesting’ factors is that they show none of the ‘cascading’ land tenure associated with Feudalism but they do show feudal rights and taxes, some of which still apply.
Other than a few dates and name places, our school taught us squat about Medieval European Culture. Everything I know about it, I had to learn on the STREET!
(Actually, at the library down the street. Had to do a term paper on “Life in the Middle Ages” in senior year, and I got so into it, that term paper not only got illustrations thrown in, but was almost twice as long as required. One of those funny events that stick with you for life - I was, and still am, besotted by that time period and have read extensively about it just for, well, fun.)
To the OP, I’d just say welcome to being an expert - or at least semi-expert - on the SDMB. I could start a similar thread about peoples’ responses to my area of expertise, micro- and molecular biology. There’s a wide gap between what people know and what they think they know.
Since they ended up being almost ten percent of the population of Japan, I’d say that is a statistical certainty.
I don’t imagine they were any more likely to be gay than anyone else, since most samurai were born into that status. Japanese customs at the time were somewhat tolerant of homosexual activity, which Europeans (who visited Japan for the first time in the 16th century, a time of extreme Christian zealotry) would have found shocking, so that’s likely the source of that notion.
Blame the Renaissance. Those smug bastards, thinking they were all modern and stuff.
Seriously, the idea of the Middle Ages as a single, unified “dark” era of history began as soon as they could be said to have ended, so we have 500 years of this perspective to counteract. And it is so nice to believe that we are making such steady progress forward. If humanity can lift itself out of a dung heap in 500 years, imagine what we can do in 100 more!
The one thing that annoys me about people’s knowledge of the Middle Ages is the idea that society was somehow like the 19th century for all eternity. I don’t know a thing about how knights mounted their horses, or the kinds or armour they wore, but my interest was always in social and gender history and it’s very interesting to see how many of the mores we take for granted are so very new. Marriages, for example, only really started taking place in the church in the 11th century. I like to tell that to people who rattle on about “traditional” marriage, as if Jesus performed marriages for women in long white dresses using the Book of Common Prayer.
Here’s one for you. I’ve just been looking through a collection of medieval history lesson plans for ~6th grade. One lesson says, “Feudalism was introduced by William the Conqueror to keep order…” :smack: I suppose they meant that it was introduced into England– I’m pretty sure ol’ William B. didn’t invent feudalism. Given that it’s a world history course, the narrower meaning is not at all obvious. Argh.
The length probably doesn’t help either. If you compare “The Middle Ages” to “The American Civil War” or even “The Industrial Revolution,” they just go on forever. I think that makes learning about the Middle Ages a bit scattershot. Some of the more popular misconceptions may even be somewhat true about a very specific time and place within the Middle Ages but the big problem happens when they are used to generalize about a really quite lengthy period of time over a large and diverse geographic area.
You know, you get winched on to your horse one time …
Actually… I think the guy who mentioned Monty Python as a chief source for the unwashed masses probably hit the nail on the head.
Bingo!
Have you looked at your average redneck/trailer trash/white trash? It might be because some of their current relatives are unusually dirty, stunted, ignorant, and uncultured - I know I have cousins and in-laws like that.
Just yesterday I had a moment that made me think of this thread … I was standing in the queue at my city’s museum to get in to see an exhibition about Pompeii. Behind me in the long line for tickets was a father and son (son about 16ish), from what they were talking about I worked out they were getting tickets to IMAX … not the Pompeii exhibition.
Lots of posters around about Pompeii and the son asks his dad what he thinks the exhibition is about … the father starts pondering, perhaps lava, volcanoes … a bit of a pause … he then says he’s worked it out … “medieval stuff”
It’s my opinion that there is general ignorance about things that people generally don’t give a crap about, and general understanding of things that they do like.
