Mentality in Fantasy
Filimonker
would be called 'history of mentality' in English.
An example. Consider a medieval farmer woman in the real world. Now from an
external p.o.v. one could look back at her with something akin to empathy.
She was born in the wrong time for her to have any of the liberties that we
take for granted. She worked from the day she could walk, and until the day
she died prematurely. She bore many children, and she was considered
property to be sold in marriage for advantages. The concept of the nuclear
family (a later invention) was miniscule, and her purpose in life was to
better the status of her kin. If that meant that she was a piece of property
to sell to another kin for certain advantages, then that was how things
would be. Externally, she was to be pitied, that farmer woman. With
hindsight.
But the interesting part, to me, is to try to look inside her head - and
when you do you find it very different to our minds. Large differences to
you and me is that she would be very devoutly religious, bordering on what
you or I would call fanatical. She would be no stranger to death and to
suffering. Her world would extend a mile or so beyond her home. She lived in
a dark age, and by that I mean a physically dark age. And the lack of
liberties we pity her for would be alien concepts for her, as she would
never have been exposed to the idea of individuality for individuality's
sake and female emancipation. Her home would be very dimly light in the
daytime since there would be few windows, and when night came she would be
enmeshed in a darkness we can't imagine in this illuminated age.
Her mentality would make her quite alien to us in large ways and small ways.
That is a very fascinating thought. But I've only seen this reflected in a
few works of fantasy. Most of the time it seems the people populating a
medieval fantasy world are modern people dressed in medieval clothes, with a
few swords flung in.
Do you agree with this? If yes or no, how come?
David Friedman
"Filimonker" <an...@nowhere.net> wrote:
> But the interesting part, to me, is to try to look inside her head - and
> when you do you find it very different to our minds. Large differences to
> you and me is that she would be very devoutly religious, bordering on what
> you or I would call fanatical.
I think that part of your description is probably mistaken. While no
doubt such people existed, I know of no evidence that the average
medieval peasant was devoutly religious, bordering on fanatical.
> She would be no stranger to death and to
> suffering. Her world would extend a mile or so beyond her home.
Farther than that.
> She lived in
> a dark age, and by that I mean a physically dark age. And the lack of
> liberties we pity her for would be alien concepts for her, as she would
> never have been exposed to the idea of individuality for individuality's
> sake and female emancipation. Her home would be very dimly light in the
> daytime since there would be few windows, and when night came she would be
> enmeshed in a darkness we can't imagine in this illuminated age.
>
> Her mentality would make her quite alien to us in large ways and small ways.
> That is a very fascinating thought. But I've only seen this reflected in a
> few works of fantasy. Most of the time it seems the people populating a
> medieval fantasy world are modern people dressed in medieval clothes, with a
> few swords flung in.
I think getting believably different people is difficult. One of the
things that struck me about the contrast between Patrick O'Brien's
Aubrey/Maturin books and C.S. Forester's earlier Hornblower books, was
that Hornblower felt rather like a modern person in the early 19th
century, Aubrey and Maturin like late 18th/early 19th century types.
A later period, but the same issue.
--
Remove NOPSAM to email
www.daviddfriedman.com
Bill Swears
>
> But the interesting part, to me, is to try to look inside her head - and
> when you do you find it very different to our minds. Large differences to
> you and me is that she would be very devoutly religious, bordering on what
> you or I would call fanatical. She would be no stranger to death and to
> suffering.
I read an author some years ago. I think it was Michener's "The
Source." He asserted that religious leaders of various faiths were
roaming the world practicing forced conversions, the result of which was
that the local peasants had a pretty jaundiced view of religion. They
took up whatever god, goddess, or pantheon wouldn't get them killed by
the local authorities.
Although that particular book was set in one place, I think he
generalized that comment.
Bill
--
Bill Swears
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Ben Franklin, 1755 "Historical Review of Pennsylvania"
To think that was once a right wing comment. In the land of Homeland
Security it seems.. Suspiciously left-wing.
Filimonker
"David Friedman" <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote in message
news:ddfr-31095A.0...@news.isp.giganews.com...
> In article <7AtFe.1428$jA4.2@amstwist00>,
> "Filimonker" <an...@nowhere.net> wrote:
>
>> But the interesting part, to me, is to try to look inside her head - and
>> when you do you find it very different to our minds. Large differences to
>> you and me is that she would be very devoutly religious, bordering on
>> what
>> you or I would call fanatical.
>
> I think that part of your description is probably mistaken. While no
> doubt such people existed, I know of no evidence that the average
> medieval peasant was devoutly religious, bordering on fanatical.
>
>> She would be no stranger to death and to
>> suffering. Her world would extend a mile or so beyond her home.
>
> Farther than that.
Possibly. And possibly not. A man would have a larger world, but a woman's
movements would be a lot more controlled, I think. She would possibly go to
the fields, or to the market in some nearby town, but would it be more than
that?
> I think getting believably different people is difficult. One of the
> things that struck me about the contrast between Patrick O'Brien's
> Aubrey/Maturin books and C.S. Forester's earlier Hornblower books, was
> that Hornblower felt rather like a modern person in the early 19th
> century, Aubrey and Maturin like late 18th/early 19th century types.
>
> A later period, but the same issue.
I guess my rumination is a way to try to find a boundary between
believability and reasonability. Or somesuch. A person we would consider
good just wouldn't do a lot of the things that a person considered good in
the eleventh century would do.
There are many interesting aspects of the witch trials of the sixteenth and
seventeenth century. These was mostly a protestant problem to start with,
and similar things in catholic countries was often stopped by the fact that
the inquisition required evidence of witchcraft to proceed, and the
inquisition were - contrary to most myths - hesitant about using torture.
However, torture was a good act in those days, particularly in religious
matters. It was not so much an effort to get people to confess to crimes so
that they could be punished - it was more an effort to get people to confess
crimes against god so that their immortal souls could be saved from eternal
damnation. Getting confessions was a means to give absolution for crimes, so
that they would not go to hell. And that was a good act. A very good act.
But a torturer would not make a very pleasant main character, particularly
not one that infliced torture out of a sense of the good of it.
That's just one thing to illustrate how different the mentality of those
days are from ours.
And I think there probably needs to be more thought given to the mentality
of characters based on their society. But there's also a limit, of course,
as shown by the torturer analogy.
Filimonker
"Bill Swears" <wsw...@gci.net> wrote in message
news:11ecr1v...@corp.supernews.com...
> Filimonker wrote:
>>
>> But the interesting part, to me, is to try to look inside her head - and
>> when you do you find it very different to our minds. Large differences to
>> you and me is that she would be very devoutly religious, bordering on
>> what you or I would call fanatical. She would be no stranger to death and
>> to suffering.
>
> I read an author some years ago. I think it was Michener's "The Source."
> He asserted that religious leaders of various faiths were roaming the
> world practicing forced conversions, the result of which was that the
> local peasants had a pretty jaundiced view of religion. They took up
> whatever god, goddess, or pantheon wouldn't get them killed by the local
> authorities.
>
> Although that particular book was set in one place, I think he generalized
> that comment.
I think one needs to consider that in mainlaind europe farmers had been
christians for nearly a thousand years on the middle ages. Religion was a
pervasive part of life. Much more so than today. But anyway, religion was
just an example about the difference in mentality.
Bill Swears
>
> I think one needs to consider that in mainlaind europe farmers had been
> christians for nearly a thousand years on the middle ages. Religion was a
> pervasive part of life. Much more so than today. But anyway, religion was
> just an example about the difference in mentality.
>
>
Oh, you're looking for a particular, protected zone in central europe
with a particular set of values. That's different. In central europe
the religious wars were primarily about whether God was one or three, or
both, and of course between the various political sects of christianity.
The odds still lean toward the person you're looking for having very
conflicted perceptions about theology. She probably had family 'saints'
who were at best thinly disguised representatives of her family's
variously gleaned superstitions.
Another issue that could well have watered down the pervasive effect of
religion you seek is that the church had many of the social
responsibilities now held by government (disaster relief, welfare,
behavior modification.) or independent social organizations, (news
dissemination, charitable redistribution) and therefore was more central
to community life without necessarily being being any more effective at
proselytizing. In other words, if, as you posit, religion was central
to your character's life, it was primarily through secular
considerations. Maybe I should say temporal considerations.
At any rate, spending a lot of time in a book establishing the dark
situation of the masses still leaves you with the need to have a plot
and characters who mean something to your audience.
Bill
Patricia C. Wrede
news:c5uFe.1436$jA4.299@amstwist00...
> Possibly. And possibly not. A man would have a larger world, but a woman's
> movements would be a lot more controlled, I think. She would possibly go
> to the fields, or to the market in some nearby town, but would it be more
> than that?
Even if that's all she did, towns were a lot further than a mile apart, and
awareness of a wider world was in all likelihood a lot more common than
you're supposing except in the most isolated places. Your peasant woman
would, in all likelihood, have thought nothing of a one-mile walk to the
family field. It was not uncommon for women to marry outside their home
villages, as is shown by the records of the fines they paid for doing so.
Peasant women worked as hired laborers, including as transient ones moving
from holding to holding, and fairly often as servants in other households,
both within their home village and elsewhere. Furthermore, there was a
considerable amount of population transfer from rural to urban areas all
through the medieval period and after; it's quite likely that your peasant
woman had friends or family in London (or whatever major metropolitan center
was closest). There are rather a lot of other objections I could make to
your portrait, but they're beside the point. Which is:
If you want to write about people who have a really different historical
mindset, the very first thing you have to do is shed your modern
preconceptions, not just about how *we* look at the world, but about how
most people *think people of the past* looked at the world.
The best way I know to do this is to do a lot of research, preferrably in
primary sources where you can get a feel for how people thought and what
their concerns were, straight from them. You will, in all likelihood, find
a lot of surprises. Many of the things you "knew" about, oh, 12th-century
peasants will turn out not to be the case, and there will be quite a lot of
things you hadn't thought of that will make a huge difference.
How you portray this on the page is the same as how you portray any
character on the page: you show them doing and saying and thinking whatever
that person would do and say and think, and you show the people around them
reacting to what the character does and says in whatever way would be
appropriate. If you don't do the research, however, you will very likely
end up making the wrong assumptions about what to show and what not, what to
emphasize and what not, and your characters will come across as unconvincing
cardboard stereotypes of historical people, instead of as genuine characters
of that period of history.
Patricia C. Wrede
Vlatko Juric-Kokic
<pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>Even if that's all she did, towns were a lot further than a mile apart,
Take for instance my hometown. Villages 20 kilometres away were
gravitating towards it. People from the villages came to the town for
fairs. People from another smaller town, 50 kilometres away, were
coming to the fairs.
>awareness of a wider world was in all likelihood a lot more common than
>you're supposing except in the most isolated places.
How about the Crusades? :-)
>Your peasant woman
>would, in all likelihood, have thought nothing of a one-mile walk to the
>family field.
I think their fields were a bit closer.
OTOH, my mother told me about a time when she was a kid in the late
Forties. They went from one place to another, 18 kilometres away, on
foot. And that was nothing terribly peculiar.
_I_ used to walk with my uncle from my hometown to the village my
father's family was from when I was a kid. That was only five
kilometres away.
My greatgrandfather and his contemporaries (beginning of the Twentieth
century) used to _row_ to the fishing grounds. Ten nautical miles each
way.
vlatko
Ben Crowell
>>I read an author some years ago. I think it was Michener's "The Source."
>>He asserted that religious leaders of various faiths were roaming the
>>world practicing forced conversions, the result of which was that the
>>local peasants had a pretty jaundiced view of religion. They took up
>>whatever god, goddess, or pantheon wouldn't get them killed by the local
>>authorities.
> "Bill Swears" <wsw...@gci.net> wrote
> christians for nearly a thousand years on the middle ages. Religion was a
> pervasive part of life. Much more so than today. But anyway, religion was
> just an example about the difference in mentality.
As a concrete example, I've been doing research for an SF piece set in
Spain in 1354. In this period, there was what was known as the
"convivencia," a period when Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived
together in relative peace. Of course it was nothing like 21st-
century USian religious tolerance, but, e.g., it was common for
educated Jews to act as tax colectors, doctors, and translators.
People of each religion were supposed to live in their own areas,
but in fact they often lived side by side, even under the same roof.
This was all before the Inquisition in Spain really hit the big time
as a vehicle for attacks on Jews.
In this particular time and place, the average person definitely was
*not* a religious fanatic. Education was so poor that most "Christians"
barely had any idea of the fundamentals of their faith. There are
quite a few quotes from ordinary people that have been preserved
that actually sound surprisingly like modern attitudes of tolerance,
e.g., people volunteering that Christians, Jews, and Muslims could
all find salvation in their own way, or that God provided food for
all of them.
There is a lot of debate about what family really meant in the Middle
Ages. For instance, some historians claim that our whole concept of
childhood is a modern invention, but others disagree. With respect
to marriage, certainly the customs were different, but I'm not
convinced that 100% of medieval marriages were like livestock sales,
or that 100% of modern marriages are made purely based on romantic
love. Some info that will challenge some of your preconceptions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boswell
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/13653.ctl
Filimonker
"Ben Crowell" <"crowell05 at lightSPAMandISmatterEVIL.com"> wrote in message
news:Mqidnfr_Geg...@adelphia.com...
> Filimonker wrote:
>> There are many interesting aspects of the witch trials of the sixteenth
>> and seventeenth century. These was mostly a protestant problem to start
>> with, and similar things in catholic countries was often stopped by the
>> fact that the inquisition required evidence of witchcraft to proceed, and
>> the inquisition were - contrary to most myths - hesitant about using
>> torture.
> Well, let's not paint too sweet a picture of the Church's activities,
> though. The Inquisition went hand in hand with pogroms in Spain. And
> the Church massacred the Cathars so thoroughly that most people today
> have never heard of them.
Well, of course not. :)
I'm wary, though, of marching ahead and compare different times with each
other. The last cathar was burned at the stake in 1320, if I recall
correctly. The witch burnings were not a medieval problem, but a problem of
the 17th century. A vastly different time than the middle ages. One could
say that the mentality differences were almost as great, but not quite,
between the 17th century and the twelveth. Still, it's interesting to think
about it.
Ben Crowell
> There are many interesting aspects of the witch trials of the sixteenth and
> seventeenth century. These was mostly a protestant problem to start with,
> and similar things in catholic countries was often stopped by the fact that
> the inquisition required evidence of witchcraft to proceed, and the
> inquisition were - contrary to most myths - hesitant about using torture.
Brian M. Scott
at lightSPAMandISmatterEVIL.com> wrote in
<news:Mqidnfr_Geg...@adelphia.com> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
[...]
> And the Church massacred the Cathars so thoroughly that
> most people today have never heard of them.
Though the political situation is probably as much to blame
as the Church. For that matter, things might have been very
different had someone other than Innocent III been pope.
By the way, Glen Cook's recent _The Tyranny of the Night_ is
a very Glen Cook-ish and fantastic take on the Albigensian
Crusade; some of the major characters are quite
recognizable.
Brian
lclough
> If you want to write about people who have a really different historical
> mindset, the very first thing you have to do is shed your modern
> preconceptions, not just about how *we* look at the world, but about how
> most people *think people of the past* looked at the world.
>
>
A great book to read would be AN INSTANCE OF THE FINGERPOST. A
novel, but one of the most perfect journeys into the historical
mindset you ever saw. And not one, either, but four!
Brenda
--
---------
Brenda W. Clough
http://www.sff.net/people/Brenda/
Recent short fiction: PARADOX, Autumn 2003
http://home.nyc.rr.com/paradoxmag//index.html
Upcoming short fiction in FIRST HEROES (TOR, May '04)
http://members.aol.com/wenamun/firstheroes.html
James A. Donald
> > > She would be no stranger to death and to
> > > suffering. Her world would extend a mile or so
> > > beyond her home.
"David Friedman"
> > Farther than that.
Filimonker:
> Possibly. And possibly not. A man would have a larger
> world, but a woman's movements would be a lot more
> controlled, I think. She would possibly go to the
> fields, or to the market in some nearby town, but
> would it be more than that?
In medieval times, people, women as almost much as men,
went shopping to the fair, rather than the market, the
fair being a market held at well known rather infrequent
intervals. Fairs were separated by a great deal more
than a mile, so she would have traveled far further than
a mile or so.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
RA+psErz+W/r3iRAkgY54vKxl0NcmXxwz0Tb3dg/
4SzZIcL57s4xtTNxNNr4lSvDLJR364NmWefuGbCGe
James A. Donald
Bill Swears:
> I read an author some years ago. I think it was
> Michener's "The Source." He asserted that religious
> leaders of various faiths were roaming the world
> practicing forced conversions, the result of which was
> that the local peasants had a pretty jaundiced view of
> religion. They took up whatever god, goddess, or
> pantheon wouldn't get them killed by the local
> authorities.
To the best of my knowledge, this is an accurate account
of religion from about three hundred AD to sixteen
hundred AD. Religion was violent, popular support for
religion was slight, and acceptance of religion
superficial. However, when the world was emerging from
the dark ages (and fantasy novels are usually set in
times resembling the end of the dark ages) the church
had a near monopoly of literacy, and they tended to
record the world as if everyone accepted the immense
moral superiority of the church and the central
importance of salvation, much as communists describe the
world as if the masses were crying out for liberation
from the chains of capitalism.
"The age of faith" is a pious lie, created by a despotic
apparatus of historical revisionism.
The end of the dark ages had a fair resemblance to the
American west, in that the individual warrior hero
counted for a great deal, and the authority of the
government varied from weak, to distant, to nonexistent.
That is an environment that makes for good stories.
To understand that environment, people should read the
old penny dreadfuls, that were set in the west and
written by people who had lived it, and read non
clerical accounts of the early middle ages, for example
the history of William the Marshal,
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
2uoO2x4+hYxxbX8k+yyp5B4HoD7BQ0WzJgz1Vj37
4RZSYV6daC/HTNnoL5/1REGQU5I4wpG3vGPwN9xy/
David Langford
>Patricia C. Wrede wrote:
>> If you want to write about people who have a really different historical
>> mindset, the very first thing you have to do is shed your modern
>> preconceptions, not just about how *we* look at the world, but about how
>> most people *think people of the past* looked at the world.
>
>A great book to read would be AN INSTANCE OF THE FINGERPOST. A
>novel, but one of the most perfect journeys into the historical
>mindset you ever saw. And not one, either, but four!
Excellent recommendation -- I was hugely impressed by that book.
Dave
--
David Langford | http://ansible.co.uk/
Latest nonfiction: =The SEX Column and other misprints= (Cosmos, 2005)
Latest fiction: =Different Kinds of Darkness= (Cosmos, 2004)
Charlie Allery
"James A. Donald" <jam...@echeque.com> wrote in message
news:er0ee1dlmr2v6818p...@4ax.com...
> --
>> > > She would be no stranger to death and to
>> > > suffering. Her world would extend a mile or so
>> > > beyond her home.
>
> "David Friedman"
>> > Farther than that.
>
> Filimonker:
>> Possibly. And possibly not. A man would have a larger
>> world, but a woman's movements would be a lot more
>> controlled, I think. She would possibly go to the
>> fields, or to the market in some nearby town, but
>> would it be more than that?
>
> In medieval times, people, women as almost much as men,
> went shopping to the fair, rather than the market, the
> fair being a market held at well known rather infrequent
> intervals. Fairs were separated by a great deal more
> than a mile, so she would have traveled far further than
> a mile or so.
>
Actually, most medieval English towns have charters granting the rights to
hold markets in their market squares - usually on a specific day of the
week. Most towns still hold these markets on this day. These usually date
from the 12th and 13th centuries. Seems kings back then were very fond of
granting charters. :-)
Fairs in the west country are usually animal sales, like Priddy fair up on
the mendips where horses are sold and the exmoor fairs. Because they were
often annual gatherings of excess wild animals - like the exmoor ponies -
they were held less frequently. But weekly shopping would be in a town or
village market.
Charlie
Kevin J. Cheek
> Oh, you're looking for a particular, protected zone in central europe
> with a particular set of values. That's different. In central europe
> the religious wars were primarily about whether God was one or three, or
> both, and of course between the various political sects of christianity.
That awaited the Reformation. By that time Christianity was already
established for over a millennia most of Europe. Even the Nordic regions
were by that time predominately Christian.
> The odds still lean toward the person you're looking for having very
> conflicted perceptions about theology. She probably had family 'saints'
> who were at best thinly disguised representatives of her family's
> variously gleaned superstitions.
Actually, the odds are very good that our farmer's wife had a better
grasp of the basics of Christian theology than you average 21st Century
person on the street. Since so many were illiterate, plays illustrating
parts of the Bible were common in churches as teaching tools. Even
concepts of Christian theology was addressed through play and ceremony.
Not only that, but people of the farmer's wife status utilized recited
prayer and Christian ritual on occasion. Midwives could preform infant
baptism should the child appear to be unlikely to survive. The closest
idea of "family saints" would be a saint associated with a trade.
Pagan rituals were often Christianized, as certain local ceremonies.
Superstitions were just that, with the Church either rolling it's eyes
and shaking it's head or engaged in active preaching against the
practice.
For an slice at Medieval sermons, see Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." He
includes two, one from the Medieval version of televangelists and the
other from a devout minister. Our farmer's wife would have heard such in
her day.
> Another issue that could well have watered down the pervasive effect of
> religion you seek is that the church had many of the social
> responsibilities now held by government (disaster relief, welfare,
> behavior modification.) or independent social organizations, (news
> dissemination, charitable redistribution) and therefore was more central
> to community life without necessarily being being any more effective at
> proselytizing. In other words, if, as you posit, religion was central
> to your character's life, it was primarily through secular
> considerations. Maybe I should say temporal considerations.
Yet the religious aspect permeated every aspect of society. As a people,
they were more religious than those of the 21st Century. How much this
was taken to heart is another question.
--
-Kevin J. Cheek
Remove corn to send e-mail.
Kevin J. Cheek
at lightSPAMandISmatterEVIL.com"> says...
> In this particular time and place, the average person definitely was
> *not* a religious fanatic. Education was so poor that most "Christians"
> barely had any idea of the fundamentals of their faith. There are
> quite a few quotes from ordinary people that have been preserved
> that actually sound surprisingly like modern attitudes of tolerance,
> e.g., people volunteering that Christians, Jews, and Muslims could
> all find salvation in their own way, or that God provided food for
> all of them.
See other rock. But if you'd consider U.S. church-going residences of the
Bible Belt religious fanatics, then you'd have to consider the average
person of the Middle Ages in the same way. But, as I observed on the
other rock, how much was taken to heart is another question.
> There is a lot of debate about what family really meant in the Middle
> Ages. For instance, some historians claim that our whole concept of
> childhood is a modern invention, but others disagree. With respect
> to marriage, certainly the customs were different, but I'm not
> convinced that 100% of medieval marriages were like livestock sales,
> or that 100% of modern marriages are made purely based on romantic
> love. Some info that will challenge some of your preconceptions:
I think part of the idea that childhood is a modern invention comes from
the lack of information on the lives of children in that period. We don't
know. But going back to the 1st Century, we find a comment by Jesus in
Matthew that briefly describes children playing with pipes and dancing
and pretending to be mourners (Matthew 11:16-17). We have a picture of
children playing at imitating adults. No doubt the same thing went on in
the Middle Ages.
To use a more modern example, those of us who grew up on farms remember
chores. We always seemed to manage to play.
Filimonker
> Filimonker wrote:
>>
>> I think one needs to consider that in mainlaind europe farmers had been
>> christians for nearly a thousand years on the middle ages. Religion was a
>> pervasive part of life. Much more so than today. But anyway, religion was
>> just an example about the difference in mentality.
>
> Oh, you're looking for a particular, protected zone in central europe with
> a particular set of values. That's different. In central europe the
> religious wars were primarily about whether God was one or three, or both,
> and of course between the various political sects of christianity.
What I'm considering doesn't have anything to do with religion. Really. I'm
just trying to find an acceptable boundary between mentality - where
religion is just one component - and readability. I've used the torturer
analogy already, but it's a good one. A torturer in the inquisition was
doing good when he tortured a person. If I should write a story about the
good side of torture, I think I'd have a difficult time. Most people today
do not see anything good about torture. It's a question of difference of
mentality between the inquisition's torturer (and his bosses) who believed
they were saving a persons eternal soul from damnation by breakting him/her
physically to extract a confession. It becomes a problem of suspension of
disbelief in one way. It becomes a question of modern morality (not
religious morality, mind you) in another way.
Most fantasy stories deal with a thinly disguised medieval world, with a bit
of a pantheon thrown in to disguise the continental european mediveality of
the whole thing. But most of the time, I get a feeling that the characters
in the stories are modern people. I rarely get a sense that they are
enmeshed in their culture, their times, their way of life. I've used the
witch-hunter simile too before, but it also is a good one. The witch
hysteria of the 17th century did not come from above down on an unsuspecting
serfdom. It was actually a case where neighbours and friends of the witch -
the peers - reported her to the authority as a witch. Often it had nothing
to do with famine, epidemics, or some sort of upheaval of the local area.
Most of the time these things erupted when someone accused a woman of being
a witch, and things spiralled out of control from that with hysterical child
witnesses. It was the mentality of the times that allowed for that to
happen. Not so much economic, political, or religious reasons.
The specific instance where these thoughts arose is a scene in my WiP where
my main character goes off on an unexpected binge of murder that sort of
destroys his credibility as a non-villain. In my modern eyes there's now
little to distinguish his methods from the villain's methods. But his
methods are based upon his mentality - the sum of all the (in the story)
contemporary knowledge and perceptions about things. So... He murders a
whole family, down to the smalles infant, because in his world familial
pride is paramount and should a single on of the murdered family live he'd
have to contend with them later on.
Dorothy J Heydt
Filimonker <an...@nowhere.net> wrote:
>
>The specific instance where these thoughts arose is a scene in my WiP where
>my main character goes off on an unexpected binge of murder that sort of
>destroys his credibility as a non-villain. In my modern eyes there's now
>little to distinguish his methods from the villain's methods. But his
>methods are based upon his mentality - the sum of all the (in the story)
>contemporary knowledge and perceptions about things. So... He murders a
>whole family, down to the smalles infant, because in his world familial
>pride is paramount and should a single on of the murdered family live he'd
>have to contend with them later on.
David can give you Old Norse/Icelandic analogues of that. I
remember one whose punchline is "You forgot that So-and-So had
*three* sons."
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
Bill Swears
> In article <11ecusc...@corp.supernews.com>, wsw...@gci.net says...
>
>
>>Oh, you're looking for a particular, protected zone in central europe
>>with a particular set of values. That's different. In central europe
>>the religious wars were primarily about whether God was one or three, or
>>both, and of course between the various political sects of christianity.
>
>
> That awaited the Reformation. By that time Christianity was already
> established for over a millennia most of Europe. Even the Nordic regions
> were by that time predominately Christian.
Given. I was sloppy in that comment, but the church managed to have
schisms and power struggles throughout its medieval history, which
struggles didn't make it down to the people for a long time, because all
players were in agreement concerning the manorial economy.
The church owned large tracts of land, and used religion to enforce the
roles of royalty and serfdom. Christianity wasn't spreading through
europe because it was a neat idea, it was spread by martial enforcement,
and it promulgated the feudal system as divine guidance.
>
>
>>The odds still lean toward the person you're looking for having very
>>conflicted perceptions about theology. She probably had family 'saints'
>>who were at best thinly disguised representatives of her family's
>>variously gleaned superstitions.
>
>
> Actually, the odds are very good that our farmer's wife had a better
> grasp of the basics of Christian theology than you average 21st Century
> person on the street. Since so many were illiterate, plays illustrating
> parts of the Bible were common in churches as teaching tools. Even
> concepts of Christian theology was addressed through play and ceremony.
> Not only that, but people of the farmer's wife status utilized recited
> prayer and Christian ritual on occasion. Midwives could preform infant
> baptism should the child appear to be unlikely to survive. The closest
> idea of "family saints" would be a saint associated with a trade.
This disagreement is very thin. I mean, we aren't in significant
disagreement.
There can be little doubt that the only authorized religion was trying
very hard to be universal, but it was overlaid on the culture by force,
then used as tool to enforce serfdom for the vast majority of
agricultural labor (and most trades). People hung on to undocumented
family icons for many generations, just as christians hung on in russia
during communism. I'm defining culture as the majority of people in an
agricultural economy, where virtually all agriculture is performed on
lands owned by the church direct, or by royalty ordained of God. Serfs.
My relatives and probably yours. Not slaves, exactly, but bound to the
land, (or their trade) and required to work not only their own land, but
land belonging to the church/peer proper. Largely in exchange or
protection against other feudal lords.
>
> Pagan rituals were often Christianized, as certain local ceremonies.
> Superstitions were just that, with the Church either rolling it's eyes
> and shaking it's head or engaged in active preaching against the
> practice.
>
I have no argument at all here.
> For an slice at Medieval sermons, see Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales." He
> includes two, one from the Medieval version of televangelists and the
> other from a devout minister. Our farmer's wife would have heard such in
> her day.
>
But, wasn't Chaucer himself something of a sport? A fellow who lived on
his wits and his writing in a time and place where most people were
effectively slaves, writing about a europe that existed mostly in the
minds of the literate, who stood on a pedestal of flesh?
Filimonker
> Kevin J. Cheek wrote:
> The church owned large tracts of land, and used religion to enforce the
> roles of royalty and serfdom. Christianity wasn't spreading through
> europe because it was a neat idea, it was spread by martial enforcement,
> and it promulgated the feudal system as divine guidance.
Serfdom wasn't universal... And there were degrees to it too where it
existed. In northern europe farmers weren't serfs. In the scandinavian
countries farmers were in fact a powerful political block. Society were
devided into estates; nobility, clergy, burghers and farmers. Farmers had
the least political power, but they didn't lack power. Most farmers were
free and farmed their own lands, or rented land from the nobility. But that
rent didn't include that they hand themselves over.
Germany of that time was a patchwork of differences. Farmers in one
principality was relatively free, while the farmers in the principality
three miles down were mere slaves to their lords. So, it's an exxageration
to say that all medieval european farmers were downtrodden masses. Things
were just not that simple.
As to the church. I can only speak for northern europe, really. But here the
order of things was that when a new area was settled the first things that
people wanted was a church. They built the church, and then petitioned the
dioces for a priest.
Dorothy J Heydt
Bill Swears <wsw...@gci.net> wrote:
>>
>But, wasn't Chaucer himself something of a sport? A fellow who lived on
Chaucer was a court poet. There were a number of them. Chaucer
succeeded rather well, in that he was court poet to John of Gaunt
and to Edward III; note that that was not the only source of his
income; at various times he was a soldier, a justice of the
peace, and a member of Parliament.
And he wasn't the only court poet by a long shot. Dunbar's
"Lament for the Makers" lists twenty-four of his own generation,
now dead, a twenty-fifth on his deathbed, and concludes "Sen he
has all my brether tane, / He will naught let me live alane; / Of
force I man his next prey be:-- Timor mortis conturbat me."
>in a time and place where most people were
>effectively slaves, writing about a europe that existed mostly in the
>minds of the literate, who stood on a pedestal of flesh?
Not quite that either. Even at the beginning of the Middle Ages,
when most peasants were serfs, that is, bound to the land, there
were some free peasants e.g. in England; and throughout the Middle
Ages there was a ongoing process of serfs saving up enough money
to buy their freedom, along with tenants both bound and free
re-negotiating their arrangements with their lords to pay them
in money, not service. By Chaucer's time the process was well
advanced.
If you really want a milieu with widespread serfdom, try Russia,
where the practice was finally abolished in 1861.
What Brian said: you need to read a lot of primary sources. In
translation if you must, but primary sources, not
re-interpretations by moderns.
Brian M. Scott
<wsw...@gci.net> wrote in
<news:11ef98i...@corp.supernews.com> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
[...]
> Christianity wasn't spreading through europe because it
> was a neat idea, it was spread by martial enforcement,
> and it promulgated the feudal system as divine guidance.
The spread of Christianity through Europe is a good bit more
complicated than that. For starters, there was a
significant Christian base in much of western Europe before
the start of the Middle Ages, thanks to the Roman empire.
There was also a good deal of peaceful missionary work, not
always without effect. Where you really get your martial
enforcement is with the conversion of rulers like the rather
odious St Olaf, but then it's part of a country's internal
politics.
I'm afraid that 'the feudal system' is meaningless as it
stands: there's just too much variation over medieval
Europe, and the term 'feudal' has been used to mean too many
different things by too many different people (including
historians). What precisely did you have in mind here?
[...]
> There can be little doubt that the only authorized
> religion was trying very hard to be universal, but it
> was overlaid on the culture by force, then used as tool
> to enforce serfdom for the vast majority of agricultural
> labor (and most trades).
That last claim ('then used ...') would be hard to support.
In fact, even the use of the unqualified 'serfdom' is
unsupportable: a simple free/unfree distinction doesn't
begin to capture the reality. In Cambridgeshire in 1279 the
following terms were all used to describe villagers
according to their status: liberi, liberi tenentes, liberi
homines, sokemanni, liberi sokemanni, bondi sokemanni,
custumarii, custumarii tenentes mollond, tenentes in
vellenagio, villani, bondi, servi, cotagii, cotarii, liberi
cotarii, croftarii, coterelli, liberi coterelli, croftmanni,
cotmanni. And a little to the north in the south
Lincolnshire fens we get yet others: consuetudinarii, pleni
villani, molemen, monedaymen, bordarii, bordi, werkmen,
operarii. Some of the variation, it's true, is the result
of imprecision and inconsistent usage, but much of it
reflects real differences in status, and there were many
13th century villagers whose real status could not well be
accommodated by the theory of villeinage that the lawyers
had been busily constructing.
Their relative number varied considerably from place to
place, but so did the relative numbers of those who could be
clearly classified as either villein or free. A large
sample of tenants in parts of Cambridgeshire,
Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and
Oxfordshire in 1279 shows a ratio of about three villeins to
two freemen, though with great variation between hundreds,
while in the northern Danelaw the proportion of freemen
exceeded 60% in some villages. In Kent the Lex Kantiae (as
codified in the late 13th century) established that 'All the
persons of Kentishmen should be free, as much as the other
free persons of England', with the right 'to give and sell
their lands and their tenements without asking leave of
their lords'. Just over the border in Sussex, however,
there were large numbers of nativi (unfree by birth).
Your picture also seems to leave no room for the explosive
growth of towns; in England, at least, this is readily
observable in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. The
large net movement from the countryside to the city implies
considerably more personal freedom than your picture
suggests.
[...]
>> For an slice at Medieval sermons, see Chaucer's
>> "Canterbury Tales." He includes two, one from the
>> Medieval version of televangelists and the other from a
>> devout minister. Our farmer's wife would have heard such
>> in her day.
> But, wasn't Chaucer himself something of a sport? A
> fellow who lived on his wits and his writing in a time
> and place where most people were effectively slaves,
> writing about a europe that existed mostly in the minds
> of the literate, who stood on a pedestal of flesh?
No. It is not the case that most people in late 14th
century England were effectively slaves.
Brian
James A. Donald
On Wed, 27 Jul 2005 07:00:10 -0400, Kevin J. Cheek
> Yet the religious aspect permeated every aspect of
> society. As a people, they were more religious than
> those of the 21st Century. How much this was taken to
> heart is another question.
Chaucer suggests it was not much taken to heart.
The religious aspect permeated every aspect of society
in part because of the church's grip on activities that
required literacy. You needed a baptism then in part
for the reasons you need a birth certificate today.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
KUzndOAlNYTMQdmc8Xa7JS+FjVVf1MKIgdCj8RG3
4A5kOaLzykwmx1xMXTTB1+wprde7v5q/MoQXOE7r5
Brian M. Scott
<jam...@echeque.com> wrote in
<news:0lufe1dlkpn82r0bo...@4ax.com> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> On Wed, 27 Jul 2005 07:00:10 -0400, Kevin J. Cheek
>> Yet the religious aspect permeated every aspect of
>> society. As a people, they were more religious than
>> those of the 21st Century. How much this was taken to
>> heart is another question.
> Chaucer suggests it was not much taken to heart.
> The religious aspect permeated every aspect of society
> in part because of the church's grip on activities that
> required literacy. You needed a baptism then in part
> for the reasons you need a birth certificate today.
In England baptismal registers weren't introduced until
1538.
James A. Donald
On Wed, 27 Jul 2005 07:15:32 -0800, Bill Swears
> The church [...] used religion to enforce the roles of
> royalty and serfdom.
No it did not. Rather, pope and church contended for
power with King, nobles and Holy Roman emperor, and the
vicar contended with the squire. You are projecting
the modern unitary state into an era when it did not
exist, as marxists do.
The standard fantasy social order, where government is
weak to nonexistent, and justice comes from heroes,
after the fashion of "the scouring of the shire", or
the wild west, is a fair approximation to the world
before 1648,
The local important person was and those close to him
were typically trained and equipped for violence, and
could handle the locals one on one easily enough. If a
bunch of peasants got together, the local lord of the
manor would have connections with other manors, while
the troublesome peasants would generally lack
connections with peasants in other villages. The lord
of the manor had authority more because he owned a lot
of land and had a sharp sword and a bunch of friends
with sharp swords, than because the king or the bishop
declared him to have authority.
> Christianity wasn't spreading through europe because
> it was a neat idea, it was spread by martial
> enforcement, and it promulgated the feudal system as
> divine guidance.
You have been reading too many Marxists. Marxist
influences in a fantasy novel look silly, unless they
are there as deliberate postmodern irony.
The spread of Christianity and the feudal system were
independent. Duke Rollo was only nominally christian,
and practiced human sacrifice.
For a long time the Christian church denied the reality
of the feudal system, pretending that authority was
excercised by itself and the holy roman emperor, then
later it set out to civilize it feudalism. The church
at best reluctantly tolerated feudalism, and never
wholly accepted it, for a long time pretending that the
Roman empire in the west was still functional.
> There can be little doubt that the only authorized
> religion was trying very hard to be universal, but it
> was overlaid on the culture by force,
Agreed.
> then used as tool to enforce serfdom for the vast
> majority of agricultural labor
Not true.
> I'm defining culture as the majority of people in an
> agricultural economy, where virtually all agriculture
> is performed on lands owned by the church direct, or
> by royalty ordained of God.
Land in the middle ages was subject to multiple
overlapping claims of ownership. The serf claimed it
was his, and if he could not leave his land, neither
could his land be taken away, and analogously at each
level, with several levels between king and serf each
claiming almost full ownership of the land. This issue
was in fact never resolved, and was the subject of
frequent violence, for about seven hundred years, and
the Church never took any consistent stand on these
disputes, other than that it wanted more land.
> But, wasn't Chaucer himself something of a sport? A
> fellow who lived on his wits and his writing in a time
> and place where most people were effectively slaves,
> writing about a europe that existed mostly in the
> minds of the literate, who stood on a pedestal of
> flesh?
Chaucer and his characters seem to have been typical of
his time and place, as best we can tell from
contemporary evidence. The idea of a sea of serfs ruled
by a handful of divine right kings is marxist
revisionism. You see the early medieval era, on which
our fantasy worlds are commonly based, much as so many
Europeans see America.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
Hvihykr5h+RVK7R0LTpqNHHYD3i5H64VIXEvL/2J
4sEKr9KIpnT2EQ3rTUlzldi0AMy/gZc+VVV8z8ofT
Bill Swears
> On Wed, 27 Jul 2005 07:15:32 -0800, Bill Swears <wsw...@gci.net>
> wrote in <news:11ef98i...@corp.supernews.com> in
> rec.arts.sf.composition:
>
> [...]
>
>
>> Christianity wasn't spreading through europe because it was a neat
>> idea, it was spread by martial enforcement, and it promulgated the
>> feudal system as divine guidance.
>
>
> The spread of Christianity through Europe is a good bit more
> complicated than that. For starters, there was a significant
> Christian base in much of western Europe before the start of the
> Middle Ages, thanks to the Roman empire.
Which only changes the date of enforced conversion, not the fact.
>
> I'm afraid that 'the feudal system' is meaningless as it stands:
> there's just too much variation over medieval Europe, and the term
> 'feudal' has been used to mean too many different things by too many
> different people (including historians). What precisely did you
> have in mind here?
manorial economic system.
http://www.historyguide.org/ancient/lecture23b.html
Heh, this entire thread is flawed by efforts to bring examples from one
part of europe in to justify comments about others. The Canterbury
Tales as an example of a medieval sermon to inform an argument about
conditions in central europe following the final collapse of the
carolingian empire until the mid 1200s is a fine example.
>
> [...]
>
>
>> There can be little doubt that the only authorized religion was
>> trying very hard to be universal, but it was overlaid on the
>> culture by force, then used as tool to enforce serfdom for the vast
>> majority of agricultural labor (and most trades).
That was intended to be discussing the situation in central europe into
the 1200s. Any similarity to england in the 1300s and later was purely
coincidental.
>
>
>
> Your picture also seems to leave no room for the explosive growth of
> towns; in England, at least, this is readily observable in the late
> 13th and early 14th centuries. The large net movement from the
> countryside to the city implies considerably more personal freedom
> than your picture suggests.
>
> No. It is not the case that most people in late 14th century England
> were effectively slaves.
I hate to seem rude, but we disagree on the severity of life in england
between the black death and the wars of the roses. Most people there
would rather have been traditional land bound serfs than have the
freedom to rot on their own. By most, I mean the majority of people
alive between 1349 and 1455, by which time the nobility had effectively
bound them back to the land again anyway.
Their situation was much darker than that described by rural serfdom.
The conditions were bad enough to cause two peasant revolts; Also, the
plague (Black Death) had created such a drop in population the fifteenth
century was ushered in with a state of near anarchy, and yet, regardless
of title, most of england was agrarian, and many or most people didn't
recieve money in pay for their harvest.
You can say they weren't slaves, but serfdom continued in england
into the 17th century, and leasehold wasn't much different. There was a
brief period right at the end of the 1300s where the loss of so many
people gave the farming populace greater power, but they were back in an
effective stranglehold to the nobility by the middle of the following
century, so it wasn't all that much different than slavery in the
average persons experience.
below is a select quote from
http://www.britainexpress.com/History/medieval/black-death.htm
> The Black Death reaches England. The summer of 1348 was abnormally
> wet. Grain lay rotting in the fields due to the nearly constant
> rains. With the harvest so adversely affected it seemed certain that
> there would be food shortages. But a far worse enemy was set to
> appear.
>
> It isn't clear exactly when or where the Black Death reached England.
> Some reports at the time pointed to Bristol, others to Dorset. The
> disease may have appeared as early as late June or as late as August
> 4. We do know that in mid-summer the Channel Islands were reeling
> under an outbreak of the plague. From this simple beginning the
> disease spread throughout England with dizzying speed and fatal
> consequences.
>
> The effect was at its worst in cities, where overcrowding and
> primitive sanitation aided its spread. On November 1 the plague
> reached London, and up to 30,000 of the city's population of 70,000
> inhabitants succumbed.
>
> Over the next 2 years the disease killed between 30-40% of the entire
> population. Given that the pre-plague population of England was in
> the range of 5-6 million people, fatalities may have reached as high
> as 2 million dead.
>
> One of the worst aspects of the disease to the medieval Christian
> mind is that people died without last rites and without having a
> chance to confess their sins. Pope Clement VI was forced to grant
> remission of sins to all who died of the plague because so many
> perished without benefit of clergy. People were allowed to confess
> their sins to one another, or "even to a woman".
>
> The death rate was exceptionally high in isolated populations like
> prisons and monasteries. It has been estimated that up to two-thirds
> of the clergy of England died within a single year.
>
> Peasants fled their fields. Livestock were left to fend for
> themselves, and crops left to rot. The monk Henry of Knighton
> declared, "Many villages and hamlets have now become quite desolate.
> No one is left in the houses, for the people are dead that once
> inhabited them."
>
> The Border Scots saw the pestilence in England as a punishment of God
> on their enemies. An army gathered near Stirling to strike while
> England lay defenseless. But before the Scots could march, the plague
> decimated their ranks. Pursued by English troops, the Scots fled
> north, spreading the plague deep into their homeland.
>
> In an effort to assuage the wrath of God, many people turned to
> public acts of penitence. Processions lasting as long as three days
> were authorized by the Pope to mollify God, but the only real effect
> of these public acts was to spread the disease further.
>
> By the end of 1350 the Black Death had subsided, but it never really
> died out in England for the next several hundred years. There were
> further outbreaks in 1361-62, 1369, 1379-83, 1389-93, and throughout
> the first half of the 15th century. It was not until the late 17th
> century that England became largely free of serious plague epidemics.
>
>
>
Revolts:
http://www.britainexpress.com/History/Richard_II_to_Henry_V.htm
> The Peasant Revolt. In Edward III's dotage John of Gaunt (Ghent, in
> modern Belgium) was virtual ruler of England. He continued as regent
> when Richard II, aged 10, came to the throne in 1377. Four years
> later a poll tax was declared to finance the continuing war with
> France. Every person over the age of 15 had to pay one shilling, a
> large sum in those days. There was tremendous uproar amongst the
> peasantry. This, combined with continuing efforts by land owners to
> re-introduce servility of the working classes on the land, led to the
> Peasant's Revolt. The leaders of the peasants were John Ball, an
> itinerant priest, Jack Straw, and Wat Tyler. The revolt is sometimes
> called Wat Tyler's Rebellion. They led a mob of up to 100,000 people
> to London, where the crowd went on a rampage of destruction, murdered
> the Archbishop of Canterbury, and burned John of Gaunt's Savoy
> Palace.
>
> The End of the Revolt. Eventually they forced a meeting with the
> young king in a field near Mile End. Things began amicably enough,
> but Wat Tyler grew abusive and the Lord Mayor of London drew his
> sword and killed him.
> At this point Richard, then only 14, showed great courage, shouting
> to the peasants to follow him. He led them off, calmed them down with
> promises of reforms, and convinced them to disperse to their homes.
> His promises were immediately revoked by his council of advisors, and
> the leaders of the revolt were hanged.
>
> In 1399 Henry Bolingbroke, exiled son of John of Gaunt, landed with
> an invasion force while Richard was in Ireland. He defeated Richard
> in battle, took him prisoner, and probably had him murdered. Henry's
> claim to the throne was poor. His right to rule was usurpation
> approved by Parliament and public opinion
http://www.zum.de/whkmla/region/britain/wattyler.html
> The LOLLARDRY was a movement aiming at church reform, originating at
> Oxford, emerged from the teaching of JOHN WYCLIF. Declared a heretic
> movement and persecuted, a group of Lollards lead by SIR JOHN
> OLDCASTLE in 1414 rebelled, the rebellion easily subdued.
1455 saw the beginning of the wars of the roses.
Sounds like a fun time to be an agricultural worker in an agrarian state
to me.
-
James A. Donald
"Filimonker":
> What I'm considering doesn't have anything to do with
> religion. Really. I'm just trying to find an
> acceptable boundary between mentality - where religion
> is just one component - and readability. I've used the
> torturer analogy already, but it's a good one. A
> torturer in the inquisition was doing good when he
> tortured a person.
Do you think that Chaucer and his characters would
believe the torturer's heartfelt claim to be doing good?
Not much more so than we moderns believe the equally
heartfelt claims of communist torturers to be doing
good.
When I read these people in writings of their own times,
they do not seem alien. Quite likely some of the people
in this newsgroup from the former Soviet empire are
themselves torturers, or their parents were, and they
are just as certain of their virtue as the inquisition's
torturer was.
When King Philip accused the Knights Templar of
fantastic and bizarre crimes, most of which appear
absurd to us moderns, you are apt to think what strange
and alien people, to take such silly charges seriously -
but then reflect on the similarly bizarre crimes charged
in Stalin's show trials. Less than a century has
passed, and now Stalin's accusations seem almost as
strange and ridiculous to us as the accusations made by
King Philip - because to sensible people, they always
were strange and ridiculous, then as now.
> Most fantasy stories deal with a thinly disguised
> medieval world, with a bit of a pantheon thrown in to
> disguise the continental european mediveality of the
> whole thing. But most of the time, I get a feeling
> that the characters in the stories are modern people.
That is often a problem - but you need to get a feel for
what real medieval people were like - they were not so
different from us as you seem to imagine - one of the
posters in this thread remarked on the similarity
between Chaucer's pardoner and a televangelist. King
Philip's show trials showed marked similarities to
Stalin's, only with alleged Jewish connections instead
of Trotskyite connections. William the Marshal
resembles a wild west gunslinger.
There were important differences - no kings in the wild
west, but the people, as people, were reminiscent of
people in our own time
> I rarely get a sense that they are enmeshed in their
> culture, their times, their way of life. I've used the
> witch-hunter simile too before, but it also is a good
> one. The witch hysteria of the 17th century did not
> come from above down on an unsuspecting serfdom. It
> was actually a case where neighbours and friends of
> the witch - the peers - reported her to the authority
> as a witch. Often it had nothing to do with famine,
> epidemics, or some sort of upheaval of the local area.
Again, check out the Satanic Child Abuse trials in Kern
County of a few years back - the more things change, the
more they remain the same.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
7f4ETEcpbVKPpIxq5Te52uWhl6vgxOlW9cldd8Fa
4XIYUUT89IqZ5OmJ7qsWrhYGcidcX/Ze+ZThhKjR0
Anna Mazzoldi
> There is a lot of debate about what family really meant in the Middle
> Ages. For instance, some historians claim that our whole concept of
> childhood is a modern invention, but others disagree. With respect
> to marriage, certainly the customs were different, but I'm not
> convinced that 100% of medieval marriages were like livestock sales,
I'm pretty sure they weren't, especially if we're talking about
peasants. When there wasn't much property, status or power to gain or
lose one way or the other, families would exercise much less control on
marriages. This doesn't necessarily mean that young people got to marry
based on romantic love -- but they did get to make their own choices
choose more than their richer or socially superior contemporaries. And
this would go for both men and women -- which would make poor women,
*in this one thing*, better off than the rich ones.
--
Anna Mazzoldi <http://aynathie.livejournal.com/>
La loi, dans sa majestueuse égalité, interdit aux
riches comme aux pauvres de dormir sous les ponts,
de mendier dans les rues, et de voler.
-- Anatole France, écrivain français (1844-1924)
David Friedman
Or Gislisaga.
"What is all that commotion over by Thorvald's booth?"
"I do not know for certain, but perhaps they are talking about whether
Vestan had daughters only, or sons as well."
(Vestan's elder, but minor, son has just killed his father's killer by
trickery--the second speaker is his brother. By memory--I'm posting this
from a car going over the Sierra Nevada towards Reno. I love modern
technology).
--
Remove NOSPAM to email
Also remove .invalid
www.daviddfriedman.com
David Friedman
Kevin J. Cheek <kev...@maize.planttel.net> wrote:
> In article <11ecusc...@corp.supernews.com>, wsw...@gci.net says...
>
> > Oh, you're looking for a particular, protected zone in central europe
> > with a particular set of values. That's different. In central europe
> > the religious wars were primarily about whether God was one or three, or
> > both, and of course between the various political sects of christianity.
>
> That awaited the Reformation. By that time Christianity was already
> established for over a millennia most of Europe. Even the Nordic regions
> were by that time predominately Christian.
I think "over a millenia (um)" overstates it a bit. The reformation was
a going concern in the 16th century. In the sixth century, how much of
Europe outside the old borders of the Roman Empire was Christian? I seem
to remember Charlemagne, c. 800, warring against pagans on his borders.
If your comment about the Nordic regions is referring to the time of the
reformation, it's a considerable understatement. If you mean "by a
thousand years before the reformation," it's a large overstatement,
since the shift to Christianity was mostly in the 10th century.
...
> Yet the religious aspect permeated every aspect of society. As a people,
> they were more religious than those of the 21st Century. How much this
> was taken to heart is another question.
I don't know if that is true or not--it might depend where. My
understanding is that the U.S. got considerably more religious between
about 1800 abnd 1830 and that the level of religious belief, insofar as
it can be objectively measured by things such as church attendance or
donations, hasn't changed much since then. The pattern in Europe, I
gather, has been quite different.
I was told by someone who should have known that the archaeological
evidence suggests that on an average Sunday in the Middle Ages, most
people didn't go to church--there wasn't enough space.
Also, moderns may be "religious" in different senses--environnmentalism,
nationalism, political ideologies and the like. Not religion strictly
speaking, but often a similar thought pattern. I think a lot of
recycling and similar behavior makes more sense as religious ritual than
as consequentialist act. Or consider the concern over flag burning.
David Friedman
> I'm defining culture as the majority of people in an
> agricultural economy, where virtually all agriculture is performed on
> lands owned by the church direct, or by royalty ordained of God. Serfs.
> My relatives and probably yours.
The divine right of kings is mostly a post-medieval doctrine. And most
land in the Middle Ages wasn't held from either the church or the King
but from the local lord.
David Friedman
djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J Heydt) wrote:
> If you really want a milieu with widespread serfdom, try Russia,
> where the practice was finally abolished in 1861.
I thought the serfdom abolished in 1861 had been an innovation of a few
centuries before. Earlier than that, if I remember correctly, there was
one day a year when a serf was free to change his lord.
> What Brian said: you need to read a lot of primary sources. In
> translation if you must, but primary sources, not
> re-interpretations by moderns.
Yes.
For the Norse we have the sagas. I know a few good medieval Islamic
primary sources. What would you recommend for early medieval England?
The one thing that comes immediately to mind is the Histoire of William
Marshall, but that's upper class although not clerical.
Bill Swears
> --
> On Wed, 27 Jul 2005 07:15:32 -0800, Bill Swears
> <wsw...@gci.net> wrote:
>
>>The church [...] used religion to enforce the roles of
>>royalty and serfdom.
>
>
> No it did not. Rather, pope and church contended for
> power with King, nobles and Holy Roman emperor, and the
> vicar contended with the squire. You are projecting
> the modern unitary state into an era when it did not
> exist, as marxists do.
Huh? the english kings sought and gained papal authority from the time
the romans reconquered the Saxons in 592, right up until Henry VIII
declared the church of england in, what 1535?. Nobility and commoner
alike were overthrown and killed for denying papal authority, in
england, a number of times up to that pivotal moment. Henry VIII
converted most of the local catholics to church of england, but that was
after he killed the hard core Catholics.
Holy Rome didn't exist during the centuries we've been arguing. I can't
keep up with that.
>
> The local important person was and those close to him
> were typically trained and equipped for violence, and
> could handle the locals one on one easily enough. If a
> bunch of peasants got together, the local lord of the
> manor would have connections with other manors, while
> the troublesome peasants would generally lack
> connections with peasants in other villages. The lord
> of the manor had authority more because he owned a lot
> of land and had a sharp sword and a bunch of friends
> with sharp swords, than because the king or the bishop
> declared him to have authority.
Yeah, but not if he denied religious authority. then his house of cards
fell down around him.
>
>
>>Christianity wasn't spreading through europe because
>>it was a neat idea, it was spread by martial
>>enforcement, and it promulgated the feudal system as
>>divine guidance.
>
>
> You have been reading too many Marxists. Marxist
> influences in a fantasy novel look silly, unless they
> are there as deliberate postmodern irony.
If we disagree I'm a marxist? The catholic church in large areas of
europe owned lands and farmed them with serfs throughout the middle ages
until sometime in the 1700s. England sought and gained papal authority
for its king until 1535. All other regal authority flowed downward from
his ordination in a catholic ceremony, later approved by the standing
pope. Any other version of history is revisionist.
Please don't call me a marxist. It doesn't ring true.
>
> The spread of Christianity and the feudal system were
> independent. Duke Rollo was only nominally christian,
> and practiced human sacrifice.
>
> For a long time the Christian church denied the reality
> of the feudal system, pretending that authority was
> excercised by itself and the holy roman emperor, then
> later it set out to civilize it feudalism. The church
> at best reluctantly tolerated feudalism, and never
> wholly accepted it, for a long time pretending that the
> Roman empire in the west was still functional.
>
Italy was rife with feudalist aristocracies up until about the time of
the Florentine Renaissance. There are people who argue that the Mafia
is an example of feudal mentality failing to let go.
The Medici who later became popes held a feudalistic interest in parts
of Tuscany for a couple generations.
>
>>then used as tool to enforce serfdom for the vast
>>majority of agricultural labor.
>
>
> Not true.
Backing up the time frames away from Holy Rome. The Pope Approved
kings. Kings established the legitimacy of the nobility. The church
actively ran serf based manoral estates. In approving the right of
kings to exist, it accepted their legal authority. That was all
implicit in the theoretically divine inspiration of all kingly
judgment,and was even the basis of most european judicial concepts for a
long time.
The fact that regency and nobility were really established by force of
arms is crucial, but the presumption was that God would actually defend
the strong right arm of the morally correct participant in any given
conflict.
It's critical to note that the church didn't control who the king of
england, or Duke of Rottenburg (I don't know if it was a duke.)were, but
if that king or duke denied the church, all his buddies turned against
him. The church, when not a martial body of its own, was a critical
element in the search for legitimacy of any monarchy in europe in the
middle ages.
Christian affiliation is still an essential element to legitimize most
western governments.
>
>
Bill Swears
> In article <11ef98i...@corp.supernews.com>,
> Bill Swears <wsw...@gci.net> wrote:
>
>
>> I'm defining culture as the majority of people in an
>>agricultural economy, where virtually all agriculture is performed on
>>lands owned by the church direct, or by royalty ordained of God. Serfs.
>>My relatives and probably yours.
>
>
> The divine right of kings is mostly a post-medieval doctrine. And most
> land in the Middle Ages wasn't held from either the church or the King
> but from the local lord.
>
An accurate statement, but local lord implies nobility, implies,
somewhere, regal proclamation. the act came before the approval, but
the system required a tacit understanding that everybody in authority
was approved by God in form of the pope.
I'm not saying the church ran any governments in the middle ages.
I think the idea of a central authority in that era kind of ridiculous.
However, in the countries that were christian prior to the outbreak of
protestantism, papal authority was either presumed, or actively sought,
and the catholics have a rather long list of approved royals from the
period.
Brian M. Scott
<wsw...@gci.net> wrote in
<news:11eg11c...@corp.supernews.com> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> Brian M. Scott wrote:
>> On Wed, 27 Jul 2005 07:15:32 -0800, Bill Swears <wsw...@gci.net>
>> wrote in <news:11ef98i...@corp.supernews.com> in
>> rec.arts.sf.composition:
>> [...]
>>> Christianity wasn't spreading through europe because it was a neat
>>> idea, it was spread by martial enforcement, and it promulgated the
>>> feudal system as divine guidance.
>> The spread of Christianity through Europe is a good bit more
>> complicated than that. For starters, there was a significant
>> Christian base in much of western Europe before the start of the
>> Middle Ages, thanks to the Roman empire.
> Which only changes the date of enforced conversion, not the fact.
What fact? It's clear that a great many people voluntarily
adopted Christianity under the Roman empire; indeed, the
growth from a minor cult to a very popular religion has with
considerable justification been described as explosive. No
one would deny the existence of forced conversions in a
number of times and places, but one has to ignore a great
deal of evidence to describe the spread of Christianity
throughout Europe as you've done here.
(I wonder how many casual readers stumbling on this thread
would realize that you're a Christian and I have less than
no use for religion at all!)
>> I'm afraid that 'the feudal system' is meaningless as it stands:
>> there's just too much variation over medieval Europe, and the term
>> 'feudal' has been used to mean too many different things by too many
>> different people (including historians). What precisely did you
>> have in mind here?
> manorial economic system.
That's a bit better, though it still leaves a great deal of
room for variation.
> http://www.historyguide.org/ancient/lecture23b.html
Ye gods. That's superficial to the point of uselessness.
Some of it is simply false (never mind that he can't spell
<demesne>): we have quite a few 11th and 12th century
records of peasants, for instance. Life on a medieval manor
was not particularly simple and uncomplicated, because
farming is not all that simple.
> Heh, this entire thread is flawed by efforts to bring
> examples from one part of europe in to justify comments
> about others.
I'm well aware of that problem; it's why I've tried to be
careful to specify when and where I was talking about.
Unfortunately, your original claims were very unspecific in
those respects.
[...]
>>> There can be little doubt that the only authorized religion was
>>> trying very hard to be universal, but it was overlaid on the
>>> culture by force, then used as tool to enforce serfdom for the vast
>>> majority of agricultural labor (and most trades).
> That was intended to be discussing the situation in central europe into
> the 1200s. Any similarity to england in the 1300s and later was purely
> coincidental.
The time isn't a problem, since much of what I wrote about
England pertained to the 1200s and earlier. The conditions
were indeed a bit different; an obvious illustration of this
is the fact that England never developed anything comparable
to the German ministeriales. Probably on average they were
a bit worse. But there was no real need to enforce what was
generally seen as the natural order of things; until after
the Black Death peasant unrest was directed at specific bad
overlords, not at the system.
Tradesmen are another story. By the 1200s artisans in the
increasingly large and numerous towns had been largely
relieved of the servile obligations of their predecessors
(Hans-Werrner Goetz, _Life in the Middle Ages from the
Seventh to the Thirteenth Century_, p.231).
>> Your picture also seems to leave no room for the explosive growth of
>> towns; in England, at least, this is readily observable in the late
>> 13th and early 14th centuries. The large net movement from the
>> countryside to the city implies considerably more personal freedom
>> than your picture suggests.
>> No. It is not the case that most people in late 14th century England
>> were effectively slaves.
These two comments of mine do not belong together. The
second was a response to this statement of yours, which you
deleted without any indication of having done so:
But, wasn't Chaucer himself something of a sport? A
fellow who lived on his wits and his writing in a time
and place where most people were effectively slaves,
writing about a europe that existed mostly in the minds
of the literate, who stood on a pedestal of flesh?
By snipping that statement, you've disguised the fact that
your response to me (immediately below) shifts the
goalposts.
> I hate to seem rude, but we disagree on the severity of
> life in england between the black death and the wars of
> the roses. Most people there would rather have been
> traditional land bound serfs than have the freedom to
> rot on their own.
The severity of life in late 14th century England was not at
issue; I was responding to your claim that in that time and
place 'most people were effectively slaves'.
> By most, I mean the majority of people alive between 1349
> and 1455, by which time the nobility had effectively
> bound them back to the land again anyway.
> Their situation was much darker than that described by
> rural serfdom. The conditions were bad enough to cause
> two peasant revolts; Also, the plague (Black Death) had
> created such a drop in population the fifteenth century
> was ushered in with a state of near anarchy, and yet,
> regardless of title, most of england was agrarian, and
> many or most people didn't recieve money in pay for
> their harvest.
Considering that already by 1400 a great deal of farm and
other labor was performed for wages, often by temporary
labor, and further that during the 15th century land
holdings were increasingly concentrated with the work
increasingly done by hired help, this seems somewhat
unlikely.
> You can say they weren't slaves, but serfdom continued in
> england into the 17th century,
On a very small scale in a few places. By and large it had
in practice disappeared by the 15th century.
> and leasehold wasn't much different. There was a brief
> period right at the end of the 1300s where the loss of so
> many people gave the farming populace greater power, but
> they were back in an effective stranglehold to the
> nobility by the middle of the following century, so it
> wasn't all that much different than slavery in the
> average persons experience.
I'm reminded of my mother's opinion that all wine tastes
like vinegar and all beer like dirt. But she's never tried
to suggest that her inability to discriminate is an accurate
reflection of the facts.
> below is a select quote from
> http://www.britainexpress.com/History/medieval/black-death.htm
All of which is irrelevant to the question of whether 'most
people were effectively slaves', but I want to comment on a
couple of points anyway.
[...]
>> Over the next 2 years the disease killed between 30-40%
>> of the entire population. Given that the pre-plague
>> population of England was in the range of 5-6 million
>> people, fatalities may have reached as high as 2 million
>> dead.
That's probably a little exaggerated. I quote from Philip
Ziegler's _The Black Death_, p.182:
The question [of the pre-plague population of England]
remains open. In so far as any consensus can be said to
have evolved it would probably be that the total
population could have been anywhere within a range of
which Russell's 3.7 million would be the lower point
and 4.6 million or so the higher.
He goes on to discuss estimates of the number of deaths.
His conclusion:
As a rough and ready rule-of-thumb, therefore, the
statement that a third of the population died of the
Black Death should not be too misleading. The figure
might quite easily be as high as 40% or as low as 30%;
it could conceivably be as high as 45% or as low as
23%. But these are surely the outside limits. On this
basis the approximate total for the dead in England
would be 1.4 million. No figures above one million
and below 1.8 million would be astonishing but the
nearer the actual figure approached the median, the
more it would seem to accord with the existing evidence.
[...]
>> The death rate was exceptionally high in isolated
>> populations like prisons and monasteries. It has been
>> estimated that up to two-thirds of the clergy of England
>> died within a single year.
More like 45%, according to Ziegler.
[...]
> Revolts:
> http://www.britainexpress.com/History/Richard_II_to_Henry_V.htm
>> The Peasant Revolt [...] The revolt is sometimes
>> called Wat Tyler's Rebellion. [...]
At least marginally relevant, since one of their demands was
the abolition of serfdom, but the proximate cause was, I
believe, government action against tax evasion and, more
generally, against poor government and administration.
> http://www.zum.de/whkmla/region/britain/wattyler.html
>> The LOLLARDRY was a movement aiming at church reform,
>> originating at Oxford, emerged from the teaching of JOHN
>> WYCLIF. Declared a heretic movement and persecuted, a
>> group of Lollards lead by SIR JOHN OLDCASTLE in 1414
>> rebelled, the rebellion easily subdued.
Hard to see much relevance in what wasn't really a peasant
movement at all. In addition to what can be inferred from
this very brief description, it's worth noting that the
Lollards emphasized reading scripture for oneself.
> 1455 saw the beginning of the wars of the roses.
> Sounds like a fun time to be an agricultural worker in an
> agrarian state to me.
So what? I don't believe that anyone was claiming that it
was a wonderful life.
Brian
Mary K. Kuhner
Brian M. Scott <b.s...@csuohio.edu> wrote:
>By the way, Glen Cook's recent _The Tyranny of the Night_ is
>a very Glen Cook-ish and fantastic take on the Albigensian
>Crusade; some of the major characters are quite
>recognizable.
This drove me crazy: I could not seem to find a reading
protocol that worked for it. It's *not* the Albigensian
Crusade, can't be in my eyes, because the magical and
religious underpinnings of the world are so different. But
if I treated it as "fantasy world which happens to have
some similarities to Earth of that period" the information
overload was backbreaking. The *only* way I could
keep the nations and factions straight was to translate them
back to their Earth equivalents; but I never did so without
an extreme feeling of wrongness.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Zeborah
> Chaucer was a court poet. There were a number of them. Chaucer
> succeeded rather well, in that he was court poet to John of Gaunt
> and to Edward III; note that that was not the only source of his
> income; at various times he was a soldier, a justice of the
> peace, and a member of Parliament.
My notes are a mess since I was trying to draw a family tree from Edward
III down to Mary and Good Queen Bess on a very small piece of paper
(possibly A6), but do I have it right that Chaucer was married to
Phillipa de Roet, a lady in waiting to Edward III's wife Phillipa of
Hainault?
Zeborah
--
Gravity is no joke.
http://www.geocities.com/zeborahnz/
Dorothy J Heydt
>like vinegar and all beer like dirt.
Hm. I would have said, like battery acid.
Brian M. Scott
<wsw...@gci.net> wrote in
<news:11egag9...@corp.supernews.com> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> James A. Donald wrote:
>> On Wed, 27 Jul 2005 07:15:32 -0800, Bill Swears
>> <wsw...@gci.net> wrote:
>>>The church [...] used religion to enforce the roles of
>>>royalty and serfdom.
>> No it did not. Rather, pope and church contended for
>> power with King, nobles and Holy Roman emperor, and the
>> vicar contended with the squire. You are projecting
>> the modern unitary state into an era when it did not
>> exist, as marxists do.
> Huh? the english kings sought and gained papal authority
> from the time the romans reconquered the Saxons in 592,
Come again? Gregory became pope in 592 and a year later
sent Augustine on his mission to convert the Anglo-Saxons,
but by then Romans as such weren't conquering anyone.
> right up until Henry VIII declared the church of england
> in, what 1535?.
John wasn't much distressed by Innocent's interdict in 1208.
And as you have yourself pointed out, England wasn't all of
Europe. The long-standing struggle between the papacy and
the temporal rulers is a fundamental fact of medieval
European history.
[...]
>> The lord of the manor had authority more because he owned
>> a lot of land and had a sharp sword and a bunch of
>> friends with sharp swords, than because the king or the
>> bishop declared him to have authority.
> Yeah, but not if he denied religious authority. then his
> house of cards fell down around him.
Depends on what you mean by denying religious authority.
Disputes between clergy, including clerical nobility, and
secular nobility were common as mud and were by no means
always resolved in the churchman's favor.
[...]
> England sought and gained papal authority for its king
> until 1535. All other regal authority flowed downward
> from his ordination in a catholic ceremony, later
> approved by the standing pope. Any other version of
> history is revisionist.
I'm afraid that the version of history that you present here
is oversimplified to the point of outright falsehood; even a
gradeschool history account ought to pay more attention to
the historical reality (as distinct from the notional
theory).
[...]
>> The spread of Christianity and the feudal system were
>> independent. Duke Rollo was only nominally christian,
>> and practiced human sacrifice.
We don't know enough about the man to make such claims. An
essay by an acknowledged expert:
<http://web.archive.org/web/20030624001416/http://hrolfr.com/>
[...]
> Italy was rife with feudalist aristocracies up until about
> the time of the Florentine Renaissance.
<sigh> Yet another example of why the term 'feudal' is
damn' near worthless. No term that hides the distinctive
nature of the Italian city-states can be considered useful
here.
[...]
> Backing up the time frames away from Holy Rome. The Pope
> Approved kings.
> Kings established the legitimacy of the nobility.
Except when the nobility did it themselves; consider the
dukes of Burgundy.
> The church actively ran serf based manoral estates.
With some reservations about 'serf-based' in certain times
and places, yes; in this the clerical nobility were no
different from the secular nobility.
> In approving the right of kings to exist, it accepted
> their legal authority.
The Church had no choice in the matter: the tradition of
kings considerably predates Church approval.
> That was all implicit in the theoretically divine
> inspiration of all kingly judgment,
Whose theory, and when? This sounds like you're thinking of
a much later period.
> and was even the basis of most european judicial concepts
> for a long time.
Having looked a bit at various medieval legal systems, I
seriously doubt that you can make this stand up. Quite
apart from anything else, they are largely concerned with
much more prosaic matters.
[...]
> It's critical to note that the church didn't control who
> the king of england, or Duke of Rottenburg (I don't know
> if it was a duke.)were, but if that king or duke denied
> the church, all his buddies turned against him.
Not always; see again John Lackland.
[...]
Brian
Patricia C. Wrede
news:11egbi2...@corp.supernews.com...
> David Friedman wrote:
>
>> In article <11ef98i...@corp.supernews.com>,
>> Bill Swears <wsw...@gci.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>>> I'm defining culture as the majority of people in an agricultural
>>> economy, where virtually all agriculture is performed on lands owned by
>>> the church direct, or by royalty ordained of God. Serfs. My relatives
>>> and probably yours.
>>
>>
>> The divine right of kings is mostly a post-medieval doctrine. And most
>> land in the Middle Ages wasn't held from either the church or the King
>> but from the local lord.
>>
> An accurate statement, but local lord implies nobility, implies,
> somewhere, regal proclamation. the act came before the approval, but the
> system required a tacit understanding that everybody in authority was
> approved by God in form of the pope.
That's how people think of it *now*. "Local lord" in the 800s-1200s did not
imply someone with a patent of nobility any more than "knight" implied plate
armor throughout that period. William the Conqueror certainly didn't have
any "divine right" to be king of England, and he didn't confer nobility on
his followers -- if you actually look at what happened, it's pretty clear
that the invaders basically split the loot up among themselves, and that as
the guy who'd organized and let them, William got the biggest share. And
the attitude toward the English king for rather a long time afterward -- at
least up to the Magna Carta -- was that he was "first among the barons," not
divinely appointed by anybody.
In the rest of Europe, what you are representing as a top-down hierarchy
starting with the Pope was a lot more like the power tugs-of-war among the
Senate, the House of Representatives, the White House, and other departments
and branches of government as seems appropriate. With a much greater
time-lag on communications. And a whole lot more reliance on the proverbial
nine-tenths of the law -- there are some fairly hairy stories about temporal
rulers holding bishops, cardinals, and yes even the Pope, hostage until
various decisions or demands they (the kings/princes/emperors) disliked were
reversed, which is not what your tidy summary would suggest.
> I'm not saying the church ran any governments in the middle ages. I
> think the idea of a central authority in that era kind of ridiculous.
> However, in the countries that were christian prior to the outbreak of
> protestantism, papal authority was either presumed, or actively sought,
> and the catholics have a rather long list of approved royals from the
> period.
Just what do you mean by "papal authority was either presumed or actively
sought"? "Authority" to me means a lot more than a symbolic pat on the
head; it means making decisions that *stick*. And it is pretty darned
clear, from looking at things like (to take just one of many possible
examples) various struggles between the English kings and the papacy over
stuff like who would be appointed Archbishop of Canterbury (I'm thinking of
the ruckus King John put up over Stephen Langton, not of Henry and Becket),
that the "papal authority" had a lot more to do with which way the political
winds were blowing than with any general recognition that the Pope had the
last word.
Patricia C. Wrede
Bill Swears
> On Wed, 27 Jul 2005 14:01:17 -0800, Bill Swears
>
>
>
>
> Ye gods. That's superficial to the point of uselessness.
> Some of it is simply false (never mind that he can't spell
> <demesne>): we have quite a few 11th and 12th century
> records of peasants, for instance. Life on a medieval manor
> was not particularly simple and uncomplicated, because
> farming is not all that simple.
So, basically if I disagree with you it's marxism, and if a source with
references disagrees with you it's superficial?
>
> I'm well aware of that problem; it's why I've tried to be
> careful to specify when and where I was talking about.
> Unfortunately, your original claims were very unspecific in
> those respects.
My claims were responsive to a request for opinion about a time frame in
the middle era, in a specific region. I presume you also read the
original request and the modifications filimonker and I came to, before
you started saying 'No' alot?
> (Hans-Werrner Goetz, _Life in the Middle Ages from the
> Seventh to the Thirteenth Century_, p.231).
An attribution! I'll look it up. I found more detailed attributions
for my comments, but neglected to include them. I didn't know we'd get
into a pissing contest on quality of reference.
>>>Your picture also seems to leave no room for the explosive growth of
>>> towns; in England, at least, this is readily observable in the late
>>> 13th and early 14th centuries. The large net movement from the
>>>countryside to the city implies considerably more personal freedom
>>>than your picture suggests.
If an english serf avoided recapture for a year and a day, he was free.
>>>No. It is not the case that most people in late 14th century England
>>> were effectively slaves.
This repeating of no, over and over without attribution is kind of
pointless. On the level of: is so. is not. is so. is not.
this concept you keep repeating that more people were wage earners by
the 1500s sometime does not equal most people were. Records were never
kept of individual serfs. Not ever. So, if the research is superficial,
it comes up with more people with jobs. It doesn't account at all for
people who don't merit an entry in a ledger.
>
>
> These two comments of mine do not belong together. The
> second was a response to this statement of yours, which you
> deleted without any indication of having done so:
>
> But, wasn't Chaucer himself something of a sport? A
> fellow who lived on his wits and his writing in a time
> and place where most people were effectively slaves,
> writing about a europe that existed mostly in the minds
> of the literate, who stood on a pedestal of flesh?
>
> By snipping that statement, you've disguised the fact that
> your response to me (immediately below) shifts the
> goalposts.
No, didn't intentionally shift the goalposts, I was trying to bring them
back to the original request for opinion. I just cut my own comment to
save space. Sorry if that offended you.
> I'm reminded of my mother's opinion that all wine tastes
> like vinegar and all beer like dirt. But she's never tried
> to suggest that her inability to discriminate is an accurate
> reflection of the facts.
I don't draw a moral difference between being a bond slave to a man, or
being property that passes with ownership of land. I don't think anyone
should. You've heard of a distinction without a difference?
Bill
Brooks Moses
> "David Friedman" <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote in message
> news:ddfr-31095A.0...@news.isp.giganews.com...
>>In article <7AtFe.1428$jA4.2@amstwist00>,
>>"Filimonker" <an...@nowhere.net> wrote:
>>>She would be no stranger to death and to
>>>suffering. Her world would extend a mile or so beyond her home.
>>
>>Farther than that.
>
> Possibly. And possibly not. A man would have a larger world, but a woman's
> movements would be a lot more controlled, I think. She would possibly go to
> the fields, or to the market in some nearby town, but would it be more than
> that?
Completely aside from all the quibbles about whether a woman would
likely ever travel a mile from home, I should be a bit startled (and
possibly offended, given context) to find someone claiming that my world
didn't contain Mexico or Europe or Australia, simply because I haven't
personally travelled there.
I should also note, speaking of those quibbles, that I have walked more
than a mile simply to go to lunch, and thought little of the distance.
- Brooks
--
The "bmoses-nospam" address is valid; no unmunging needed.
David Friedman
Bill Swears <wsw...@gci.net> wrote:
> I don't draw a moral difference between being a bond slave to a man, or
> being property that passes with ownership of land.
What about a distinction according to the rights someone else has with
regard to you? A slave owner, at least as commonly conceived, has almost
unlimited rights over the slave--although I don't think that was true of
all historical systems of slavery. A feudal lord had substantial but
limited rights with regard to his serfs--mainly an amount of labor
and/or other payments specified by local custom.
Zeborah
> Brian M. Scott wrote:
> > On Wed, 27 Jul 2005 14:01:17 -0800, Bill Swears
> >
> >>http://www.historyguide.org/ancient/lecture23b.html
> >
> > Ye gods. That's superficial to the point of uselessness.
> > Some of it is simply false (never mind that he can't spell
> > <demesne>): we have quite a few 11th and 12th century
> > records of peasants, for instance. Life on a medieval manor
> > was not particularly simple and uncomplicated, because
> > farming is not all that simple.
>
> So, basically if I disagree with you it's marxism, and if a source with
> references disagrees with you it's superficial?
Point of order: without reading every message again, I very much doubt
that Brian accused you of marxism; that's James A Donald's tactic, and
don't take it to heart, he counts the majority of the newsgroup's
population as marxist. Many simply killfile him.
As for the source: "historyguide.org" as a domain name rings the
too-generic-to-be-authoritative bell for me. This is mere prejudice, so
I'll check the site: hmm, it names the author -- this is good -- and
includes metadata, cool! (though why "those" is in there as a keyword
goodness only knows; I'll blame bad software) and ooh, a curriculum
vitae.
<skims C.V.> So he's a historian, yes, has a Ph.D. and teaches and all
-- but medieval Europe doesn't really look like his area of expertise.
He's primarily published about British Scientific Management in the
early 20th century; a secondary interest (judging from his long-winded
about-the-author) seems to be in how to make history exciting for high
school aged students. Making history exciting does not always mean it's
going to be riguorously authoritative.
The misspelling of <demesne> as "demense" (which doesn't occur in my
Oxford English Dictionary, nor on any but random fannish sites on
Google) _twice_ means it's not a typo; I mistrust authorities who
misspell important concepts in contexts where they should be taking
particular care.
He cites no sources, unless you count the sources for the header quotes;
I don't; and those aren't detailed citations in any case.
And for goodness' sake, the man is writing the history of Western
civilisation, from Mesopotamia to the Black Death, in 30 lectures -- of
*course* it's going to be superficial.
This is my judgement as a will-be-librarian, not as a historian. I know
nothing of history, but I do know how to judge information resources.
David Friedman
Bill Swears <wsw...@gci.net> wrote:
> It's critical to note that the church didn't control who the king of
> england, or Duke of Rottenburg (I don't know if it was a duke.)were, but
> if that king or duke denied the church, all his buddies turned against
> him.
Don't you think King John's conflict with the Papacy would have been a
lot shorter it all John's buddies had turned against him?
I don't know what would have happened to a king who announced that he
had converted to Judaism, or Islam, or Atheism. But announcing that he
was ignoring the orders of the Pope wasn't instant destruction, merely a
problem.
David Friedman
"Anna Mazzoldi" <AnnaU...@iol.ie> wrote:
> Ben Crowell wrote in rec.arts.sf.composition:
>
> > There is a lot of debate about what family really meant in the Middle
> > Ages. For instance, some historians claim that our whole concept of
> > childhood is a modern invention, but others disagree. With respect
> > to marriage, certainly the customs were different, but I'm not
> > convinced that 100% of medieval marriages were like livestock sales,
>
> I'm pretty sure they weren't, especially if we're talking about
> peasants. When there wasn't much property, status or power to gain or
> lose one way or the other, families would exercise much less control on
> marriages. This doesn't necessarily mean that young people got to marry
> based on romantic love -- but they did get to make their own choices
> choose more than their richer or socially superior contemporaries. And
> this would go for both men and women -- which would make poor women,
> *in this one thing*, better off than the rich ones.
I suspect that, at all levels, women had some control over who they
married, although not unlimited control. In saga period Iceland, as I
understand the situation, a woman's first marriage could be arranged
without her consent, but not subsequent marriages. And Njalsaga, at
least, leaves one with the impression that marrying your daughter to
someone she didn't want was distinctly risky.
I'm also reminded of a pre-Islamic arabic story, where a man has decided
to marry one of his daughters to a suitor. He asks the first daughter,
she says no, so he asks the second, who says no, so he asks the third,
who says she will do as her father thinks best. Not the same society we
were discussing, but I suspect a similar pattern.
Dorothy J Heydt
That's right. And Philippa's younger sister, Katherine Swynford,
was the mistress of John of Gaunt and eventually his third wife.
Dorothy J Heydt
Brooks Moses <bmoses...@cits1.stanford.edu> wrote:
>I should also note, speaking of those quibbles, that I have walked more
>than a mile simply to go to lunch, and thought little of the distance.
I used to walk two miles to work every morning, before the CFS
got acute. (I did walk about ten blocks this morning. We'll see
whether I can keep it up.)
Brian M. Scott
<wsw...@gci.net> wrote in
<news:11egiek...@corp.supernews.com> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> Brian M. Scott wrote:
>> On Wed, 27 Jul 2005 14:01:17 -0800, Bill Swears
>>>http://www.historyguide.org/ancient/lecture23b.html
>> Ye gods. That's superficial to the point of uselessness.
>> Some of it is simply false (never mind that he can't spell
>> <demesne>): we have quite a few 11th and 12th century
>> records of peasants, for instance. Life on a medieval manor
>> was not particularly simple and uncomplicated, because
>> farming is not all that simple.
> So, basically if I disagree with you it's marxism,
Eh? JAD is the one who sees Marxists under the bed; I
haven't used the term at all in this discussion.
> and if a source with references disagrees with you it's
> superficial?
No. The parts of that source that are basically sound are
just as superficial as the bad bits. If you want
trustworthy on-line sources for medieval history, the places
to start are Paul Halsall's Internet Medieval Sourcebook at
<http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook.html> and the On-line
Reference Book for Medieval Studies at
<http://www.the-orb.net/>. Another good site, but with a
very specific focus, is Paul Gans's Medieval Technology
Pages at
<http://scholar.chem.nyu.edu/tekpages/Technology.html>.
>> I'm well aware of that problem; it's why I've tried to be
>> careful to specify when and where I was talking about.
>> Unfortunately, your original claims were very unspecific in
>> those respects.
> My claims were responsive to a request for opinion about a
> time frame in the middle era, in a specific region. I
> presume you also read the original request and the
> modifications filimonker and I came to, before you
> started saying 'No' alot?
Of course. But I didn't get into it until you had already
brought in Chaucer and clearly moved the discussion beyond
13th century central Europe.
[...]
>>>> Your picture also seems to leave no room for the
>>>> explosive growth of towns; in England, at least, this
>>>> is readily observable in the late 13th and early 14th
>>>> centuries. The large net movement from the
>>>> countryside to the city implies considerably more
>>>> personal freedom than your picture suggests.
> If an english serf avoided recapture for a year and a day,
> he was free.
Are you seriously suggesting that this accounts for the bulk
of the growth?!
>>>> No. It is not the case that most people in late 14th
>>>> century England were effectively slaves.
> This repeating of no, over and over without attribution is
> kind of pointless.
I have not merely been repeating 'no': I have consistently
given reasons for my objections. I have for the most part
not bothered to give references simply because what I've
been telling you is pretty standard fare. This isn't hard
to confirm: just read some serious scholarship in medieval
history. Some of what I've said can be found in or readily
inferred from articles in Christopher Dyer's _Everyday Life
in Medieval England_ (and just about anything by Dyer is
good); much of the rest is from Edward Miller and John
Hatcher, _Medieval England: Rural Society and Economic
Change, 1086-1348_. (It's been several years since I
actively pursued the subject, and at almost 30 years old the
latter book is starting to get a bit long in the tooth, but
I understand that it's still quite well-respected.)
> On the level of: is so. is not. is so. is not.
> this concept you keep repeating that more people were wage
> earners by the 1500s
Far from repeating such a statement, I have said nothing
about any period later than the 15th century -- which is the
1400s.
> sometime does not equal most people were. Records were
> never kept of individual serfs. Not ever.
If you were to familiarize yourself with the evidence, you
might not make this kind of elementary blunder. There are
copious records of individual peasants of all degrees of
unfreedom, especially in England; two of the most important
categories are custumals and various types of court records.
I have editions of several on my shelves, in fact, including
custumals of the English lands of the Abbey of Bec from the
mid-13th century and a comprehensive 1189 survey of the
estates of Glastonbury Abbey.
But you could have inferred the existence of such
information from this, which I wrote in an earlier post:
In Cambridgeshire in 1279 the following terms were
all used to describe villagers according to their status:
liberi, liberi tenentes, liberi homines, sokemanni,
liberi sokemanni, bondi sokemanni, custumarii,
custumarii tenentes mollond, tenentes in vellenagio,
villani, bondi, servi, cotagii, cotarii, liberi cotarii,
croftarii, coterelli, liberi coterelli, croftmanni,
cotmanni. And a little to the north in the south
Lincolnshire fens we get yet others: consuetudinarii,
pleni villani, molemen, monedaymen, bordarii, bordi,
werkmen, operarii.
These are descriptions attached to the names of individuals.
Anyone described as <villanus>, <bondus>, or <servus> was
undoubtedly what you are calling a serf, and you would
probably apply the term to some of the other categories as
well. I also wrote:
A large sample of tenants in parts of Cambridgeshire,
Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire,
and Oxfordshire in 1279 shows a ratio of about three
villeins to two freemen, though with great variation
between hundreds, while in the northern Danelaw
the proportion of freemen exceeded 60% in some
villages.
Again, it is obvious that such a study could not have been
made if we had no records of individual villeins. (The
information is from Miller & Hatcher, 120; there were 10,000
peasants in the sample.)
From the date, 1279, it's obvious that all of this material
is based on the Rotuli Hundredorum, or Hundred Rolls. The
amount of detail in these varies from place to place, but
here's what Trevor John says of the Warwickshire Hundred
Rolls for Stoneleigh and Kineton Hundreds in the
introduction to his edition thereof:
Each tenant free or servile, cottager and villein, is
named, and the conditions and extent of each
individual tenure detailed. The Warwickshire
survey is indeed a 'rural census of tenants'. The
labour services of each category of tenant are
given, and there appears to be no holding too
small to be listed and the rent recorded.
In the later 14th century we have records of the enforcement
of the labor laws; these typically involve workers who were
accused of breaking a contract, refusing to accept
employment, or crossing hundred or wapentake boundaries
without authorization. Some of them could reasonably be
called tradesmen -- carpenters, thatchers, tilers, etc. --
but many were servants, reapers, mowers, plowmen, and
persons who did 'autumn work', i.e., helped bring in the
harvest. Indeed, most of the labor for such tasks as hay
making, grain harvesting, and threshing 'came from hired
hands who were taken on for a few days or weeks'.
Christopher Dyer and Simon A.C. Penn go into this and
related matters in some detail in 'Wages and Earnings in
Late Medieval England: Evidence from the Enforcement of the
Labour Laws' in the Dyer book mentioned above; it's based on
evidence from the period 1349-1415.
[...]
>> These two comments of mine do not belong together. The
>> second was a response to this statement of yours, which you
>> deleted without any indication of having done so:
>> But, wasn't Chaucer himself something of a sport? A
>> fellow who lived on his wits and his writing in a time
>> and place where most people were effectively slaves,
>> writing about a europe that existed mostly in the minds
>> of the literate, who stood on a pedestal of flesh?
>> By snipping that statement, you've disguised the fact that
>> your response to me (immediately below) shifts the
>> goalposts.
> No, didn't intentionally shift the goalposts, I was trying
> to bring them back to the original request for opinion.
I did not say that it was intentional; indeed, it was to
avoid making that accusation that I attributed the shift to
your response and not to you. My main point was that your
response was in fact a non sequitur dealing with a wholly
new issue; the secondary point was that it would be a good
idea to develop the habit of marking snipped material so as
to avoid this sort of accident.
[...]
>> I'm reminded of my mother's opinion that all wine tastes
>> like vinegar and all beer like dirt. But she's never tried
>> to suggest that her inability to discriminate is an accurate
>> reflection of the facts.
> I don't draw a moral difference between being a bond slave
> to a man, or being property that passes with ownership
> of land. I don't think anyone should. [...]
You've completely missed the point of the comment, I'm
afraid, and I expect that you'll continue to miss it until
you learn more about medieval English society.
Brian
Lucy Kemnitzer
Heydt) seems to have said:
>In article <42E8560C...@cits1.stanford.edu>,
>Brooks Moses <bmoses...@cits1.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
>>I should also note, speaking of those quibbles, that I have walked more
>>than a mile simply to go to lunch, and thought little of the distance.
>
>I used to walk two miles to work every morning, before the CFS
>got acute. (I did walk about ten blocks this morning. We'll see
>whether I can keep it up.)
Good for you. How do you feel afterwards?
Lucy Kemnitzer, still
http://www.baymoon.com/~ritaxis
http://www.livejournal.com/users/ritaxis
Bill Swears
>>So, basically if I disagree with you it's marxism,
>
>
> Eh? JAD is the one who sees Marxists under the bed; I
> haven't used the term at all in this discussion.
For that you get sincere apologies. I was feeling attacked because of
the whole marxist thing and and lost track of my own babble.
>
> No. The parts of that source that are basically sound are
> just as superficial as the bad bits. If you want
> trustworthy on-line sources for medieval history, the places
> to start are Paul Halsall's Internet Medieval Sourcebook at
> <http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook.html> and the On-line
> Reference Book for Medieval Studies at
> <http://www.the-orb.net/>. Another good site, but with a
> very specific focus, is Paul Gans's Medieval Technology
> Pages at
> <http://scholar.chem.nyu.edu/tekpages/Technology.html>.
>
thanks for the references. I'm going absolutely crazy though, in that I
read a claim from a catholic site just today that Augustine went to
England in 592 and restored papal authority to the crown. It even went
on about the shift away from papal authority when the saxon's took
control of the land. Now I can't find the citation at all, even though
I'm pretty convinced it was a document the Catholic Encyclopedia has up.
> Of course. But I didn't get into it until you had already
> brought in Chaucer and clearly moved the discussion beyond
> 13th century central Europe.
I didn't bring up Chaucer. I replied to a suggestion that I go to
Canterbury Tales for a good example of a medieval sermon. Since we had
been discussing europe 200 years before Chaucer, I made a mistake even
replying to the suggestion.
From here down in your post, I'm going to sit quiet and review. I
started the post by mistaking you for James, and now I don't know who I
was disagreeing with from quote to quote. I was feeling nettled, and
made a series of off the cuff dismissals of your points, probably
misdirected. I'll happily return to argue on another day, but for now I
call myself outgunned, embarrassed, and, well, misguided.
Bill
Brian M. Scott
<wsw...@gci.net> wrote in
<news:11eh04m...@corp.supernews.com> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> Brian M. Scott wrote:
[...]
> thanks for the references. I'm going absolutely crazy though, in that I
> read a claim from a catholic site just today that Augustine went to
> England in 592 and restored papal authority to the crown. It even went
> on about the shift away from papal authority when the saxon's took
> control of the land. Now I can't find the citation at all, even though
> I'm pretty convinced it was a document the Catholic Encyclopedia has up.
Quite possible; but don't forget that the version at
<www.newadvent.org/cathen/> dates from the early 20th
century and inevitably contains a good deal of very dated
historical scholarship, even ignoring possible bias.
>> Of course. But I didn't get into it until you had already
>> brought in Chaucer and clearly moved the discussion beyond
>> 13th century central Europe.
> I didn't bring up Chaucer.
Oops. I didn't check closely enough; the discussion had
shifted, but you're absolutely right that you weren't the
one who shifted it.
> From here down in your post, I'm going to sit quiet and
> review. I started the post by mistaking you for James,
> and now I don't know who I was disagreeing with from
> quote to quote.
If it helps any, I know that besides me, David F., JAD, and
Patricia have all raised objections to one or another
comment on medieval history or life. (Don't worry about the
confusion with JAD; that was improbable enough to tickle my
funny-bone.)
[...]
Brian
Filimonker
"Ben Crowell" <"crowell05 at lightSPAMandISmatterEVIL.com"> wrote in message
news:Ae-dnRtAULh...@adelphia.com...
>>>Filimonker wrote:
>>>I read an author some years ago. I think it was Michener's "The Source."
>>>He asserted that religious leaders of various faiths were roaming the
>>>world practicing forced conversions, the result of which was that the
>>>local peasants had a pretty jaundiced view of religion. They took up
>>>whatever god, goddess, or pantheon wouldn't get them killed by the local
>>>authorities.
> [...]
Point of order. I didn't write the above quote. Bill Swears did. :)
>> "Bill Swears" <wsw...@gci.net> wrote I think one needs to consider that
>> in mainlaind europe farmers had been christians for nearly a thousand
>> years on the middle ages. Religion was a pervasive part of life. Much
>> more so than today. But anyway, religion was just an example about the
>> difference in mentality.
>
> As a concrete example, I've been doing research for an SF piece set in
> Spain in 1354. In this period, there was what was known as the
> "convivencia," a period when Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived
> together in relative peace. Of course it was nothing like 21st-
> century USian religious tolerance, but, e.g., it was common for
> educated Jews to act as tax colectors, doctors, and translators.
> People of each religion were supposed to live in their own areas,
> but in fact they often lived side by side, even under the same roof.
> This was all before the Inquisition in Spain really hit the big time
> as a vehicle for attacks on Jews.
>
> In this particular time and place, the average person definitely was
> *not* a religious fanatic. Education was so poor that most "Christians"
> barely had any idea of the fundamentals of their faith. There are
> quite a few quotes from ordinary people that have been preserved
> that actually sound surprisingly like modern attitudes of tolerance,
> e.g., people volunteering that Christians, Jews, and Muslims could
> all find salvation in their own way, or that God provided food for
> all of them.
>
> There is a lot of debate about what family really meant in the Middle
> Ages. For instance, some historians claim that our whole concept of
> childhood is a modern invention, but others disagree. With respect
> to marriage, certainly the customs were different, but I'm not
> convinced that 100% of medieval marriages were like livestock sales,
> or that 100% of modern marriages are made purely based on romantic
> love. Some info that will challenge some of your preconceptions:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boswell
> http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/13653.ctl
>
Chris Dollin
> ......................... But a torturer would not make a very pleasant
> main character, particularly not one that infliced torture out of a sense
> of the good of it.
I wonder if anyone's done an SF book with a torturer as the protagonist?
--
Deadpan Hedgehog
Notmuchhere: http://www.electric-hedgehog.net/
Otherface: Jena RDF/Owl toolkit http://jena.sourceforge.net/
Bill Swears
> armor throughout that period. William the Conqueror certainly didn't have
> any "divine right" to be king of England, and he didn't confer nobility on
> his followers -- if you actually look at what happened, it's pretty clear
> that the invaders basically split the loot up among themselves, and that as
> the guy who'd organized and let them, William got the biggest share.
Yet, William the conquerer had papal approval, and even a writ
specifically excluding him from the Truce of God, so he could beat up on
anybody else who violated it.
http://www.societaschristiana.com/Encyclopedia/W/WilliamConqueror.html
bill
Anna Mazzoldi
> In article <xn0e59bb...@news.individual.net>,
> "Anna Mazzoldi" <AnnaU...@iol.ie> wrote:
>
> > Ben Crowell wrote in rec.arts.sf.composition:
> >
> > > There is a lot of debate about what family really meant in the
> > > Middle Ages. For instance, some historians claim that our whole
> > > concept of childhood is a modern invention, but others disagree.
> > > With respect to marriage, certainly the customs were different,
> > > but I'm not convinced that 100% of medieval marriages were like
> > > livestock sales,
> >
> > I'm pretty sure they weren't, especially if we're talking about
> > peasants. When there wasn't much property, status or power to gain
> > or lose one way or the other, families would exercise much less
> > control on marriages. This doesn't necessarily mean that young
> > people got to marry based on romantic love -- but they did get to
> > make their own choices choose more than their richer or socially
> > superior contemporaries. And this would go for both men and women
> > -- which would make poor women, *in this one thing*, better off
> > than the rich ones.
>
> I suspect that, at all levels, women had some control over who they
> married, although not unlimited control. In saga period Iceland, as I
> understand the situation, a woman's first marriage could be arranged
> without her consent, but not subsequent marriages.
This seems to be a recurring pattern: being a widow is often the most
independent situation for a woman in pre-modern times. In most cases,
though, it's closely linked with the economic situation: the widow is
independent because she acquires property and/or position from her
deceased husband (for example, in medieval/renaissance Italy, there
were female "masters" of the craft guilds: these were masters' widows
who had inherited the workshop and with it the title and position).
> And Njalsaga, at
> least, leaves one with the impression that marrying your daughter to
> someone she didn't want was distinctly risky.
>
> I'm also reminded of a pre-Islamic arabic story, where a man has
> decided to marry one of his daughters to a suitor. He asks the first
> daughter, she says no, so he asks the second, who says no, so he asks
> the third, who says she will do as her father thinks best. Not the
> same society we were discussing, but I suspect a similar pattern.
These other examples, however, seem to rely entirely on the parents'
goodwill (and possibly wisdom <g>): I'm sure there have always been
parents who didn't force their daughers (or sons) to marry against
their wishes. That the possibility is contemplated is significant, but
I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from it.
--
Anna Mazzoldi <http://aynathie.livejournal.com/>
Freedom defined is freedom denied. (Illuminatus)
Gerry Quinn
<"crowell05 at lightSPAMandISmatterEVIL.com"> says...
> There is a lot of debate about what family really meant in the Middle
> Ages. For instance, some historians claim that our whole concept of
> childhood is a modern invention, but others disagree. With respect
> to marriage, certainly the customs were different, but I'm not
> convinced that 100% of medieval marriages were like livestock sales,
> or that 100% of modern marriages are made purely based on romantic
> love. Some info that will challenge some of your preconceptions:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boswell
> http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/13653.ctl
That does nothing to challenge my preconception that people with an
agenda interpret history to suit it...
- Gerry Quinn
Dorothy J Heydt
Lucy Kemnitzer <rit...@cruzio.com> wrote:
>On Thu, 28 Jul 2005 05:03:35 GMT, djh...@kithrup.com (Dorothy J
>Heydt) seems to have said:
>
>>In article <42E8560C...@cits1.stanford.edu>,
>>Brooks Moses <bmoses...@cits1.stanford.edu> wrote:
>>
>>>I should also note, speaking of those quibbles, that I have walked more
>>>than a mile simply to go to lunch, and thought little of the distance.
>>
>>I used to walk two miles to work every morning, before the CFS
>>got acute. (I did walk about ten blocks this morning. We'll see
>>whether I can keep it up.)
>
>
>Good for you. How do you feel afterwards?
Tired; which is how I felt before. But if I can do it without
feeling terminally exhausted....
Patricia C. Wrede
news:ddfr-77DAD6.2...@news.isp.giganews.com...
> I suspect that, at all levels, women had some control over who they
> married, although not unlimited control. In saga period Iceland, as I
> understand the situation, a woman's first marriage could be arranged
> without her consent, but not subsequent marriages. And Njalsaga, at
> least, leaves one with the impression that marrying your daughter to
> someone she didn't want was distinctly risky.
There are some pretty good books on the subject of medieval women at all
levels, ranging from historical surveys like the Geis's "Women in the Middle
Ages" to primary sources like Christine di Pizan's various works, which
certainly give that impression. And at least in the upper levels of society
there are a number of records of women such as Eleanor of Acquitaine,
Eleanor de Montfort, and Katherine Tudor who managed, one way or another, to
marry whom they pleased despite objections from male relatives (who were, in
many cases, kings and who thus putatively had both political and familial
authority to arrange their daughters/sisters marriages). Anecdotal evidence
is not the same as a good historical survey, but there are enough such
examples and reactions to them that it's clear these were not shocking,
isolated instances of women doing the unthinkable, but rather more along the
lines of "just what you'd expect from...<insert grumbly reason du jour>"
Patricia C. Wrede
Brian M. Scott
wrote in rec.arts.sf.composition:
> Patricia C. Wrede wrote:
>> William the Conqueror certainly didn't have
>> any "divine right" to be king of England, and he didn't confer nobility on
>> his followers -- if you actually look at what happened, it's pretty clear
>> that the invaders basically split the loot up among themselves, and that as
>> the guy who'd organized and let them, William got the biggest share.
> Yet, William the conquerer had papal approval, and even a writ
> specifically excluding him from the Truce of God, so he could beat up on
> anybody else who violated it.
The succession was disputed, so he was adding every string to his
bow that he could wangle. Had Harold won, as he so nearly did,
few would have doubted his legitimacy.
[...]
Brian
Joann Zimmerman
> Filimonker wrote:
>
> > ......................... But a torturer would not make a very pleasant
> > main character, particularly not one that infliced torture out of a sense
> > of the good of it.
>
> I wonder if anyone's done an SF book with a torturer as the protagonist?
Oh, snide, snide! Well played.
--
"I never understood people who don't have bookshelves."
--George Plimpton
Joann Zimmerman jz...@bellereti.com
Patricia C. Wrede
The "Truce of God," according to this source, was established in the duchy
in Normandy; it had nothing whatever to do with England. It's also pretty
clear that it didn't stop William's underlings from rebelling and fighting
against him -- "From the years 1047 to 1060, Duke William...was nearly
constantly at war, either with rebellious underlings, or at last even with
King Henry himself..." He certainly didn't have papal approval for his
marriage to Matilda.
Again, what you seem to be viewing as a top-down hierarchy and authority
looks to me a lot more like the equivalent of getting the New York Times
editorial page to endorse your candidacy for a political office -- might be
nice to have, might make a good excuse to do what you were going to do
anyway, but not something that made any sort of practical difference in what
you did or how you felt about it.
Patricia C. Wrede
Joann Zimmerman
Good going! Keep it up, and hand us the occasional progress report.
(I'm off the treadmill for a few days because I tore off most of my
little toenail in a complete stupidity in the bathroom, so I need a
little vicarious exercise. It's particularly annoying right now in that
it's cooler than it's been for weeks, and I just bought several new
pairs of shoes.)
Joann Zimmerman
nos...@cits1.stanford.edu says...
> Filimonker wrote:
> > "David Friedman" <dd...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote in message
> > news:ddfr-31095A.0...@news.isp.giganews.com...
> >>In article <7AtFe.1428$jA4.2@amstwist00>,
> >>"Filimonker" <an...@nowhere.net> wrote:
> >>>She would be no stranger to death and to
> >>>suffering. Her world would extend a mile or so beyond her home.
> >>
> >>Farther than that.
> >
> > Possibly. And possibly not. A man would have a larger world, but a woman's
> > movements would be a lot more controlled, I think. She would possibly go to
> > the fields, or to the market in some nearby town, but would it be more than
> > that?
>
> Completely aside from all the quibbles about whether a woman would
> likely ever travel a mile from home, I should be a bit startled (and
> possibly offended, given context) to find someone claiming that my world
> didn't contain Mexico or Europe or Australia, simply because I haven't
> personally travelled there.
Right. I've never been to France (blame the French unions for that) but
I've studied French, worked with French manuscripts, written papers on
French artists, and love French cheese, cooking, wine and particularly
champagne. I'd say France looms rather large in the makeup of my
personal world.
And as a counter-example to Filimonker's suggestion, I'd like to propose
Margery Kempe. Admittedly she was a bit extreme, but she certainly got
around.
David Friedman
Joann Zimmerman <jz...@bellereti.com> wrote:
> > Completely aside from all the quibbles about whether a woman would
> > likely ever travel a mile from home, I should be a bit startled (and
> > possibly offended, given context) to find someone claiming that my world
> > didn't contain Mexico or Europe or Australia, simply because I haven't
> > personally travelled there.
>
> Right. I've never been to France (blame the French unions for that) but
> I've studied French, worked with French manuscripts, written papers on
> French artists, and love French cheese, cooking, wine and particularly
> champagne. I'd say France looms rather large in the makeup of my
> personal world.
I think part of his point was that in a world of low literacy, no
printing press, no radio or TV, and slow travel, people wouldn't have
that sort of familiarity with distant places. They might have heard of
foreign countries but have wildly inaccurate ideas of what they were
like.
Joann Zimmerman
dd...@daviddfriedman.nospam.com says...
I think you'd still have travellers' tales. Anyone came by the village,
they'd tell all the news. So you'd get the not-quite-latest royal
gossip, definitely wierdly filtered news from the Crusades, and a precis
of what's wrong with the woolen trade. I suspect that while Outremer,
Saxony and Sicily are on the fringes of your world, they are definitely
there, if only because your cousin's nephew was a mercenary.
Astigmatic Owl
"Joann Zimmerman" <jz...@bellereti.com> wrote in message
news:MPG.1d52adb2f...@news.individual.net...
> In article <hqt9cd.fa1.ln@ehedgehog>, e...@electric-hedgehog.net says...
>> Filimonker wrote:
>>
>> > ......................... But a torturer would not make a very pleasant
>> > main character, particularly not one that infliced torture out of a
>> > sense
>> > of the good of it.
>>
>> I wonder if anyone's done an SF book with a torturer as the protagonist?
Yes. Susan R. Matthews (a Seattle author) wrote a series about a young
doctor who is forced to become a torturer for the military judiciary system.
Part of the tension comes from the fact that he is very good at it. See:
An Exchange of Hostages
Prisoner of Conscience
Hour of Judgement
Bill Swears
backed any horse that might win. If on occasion there was a conflict
between the king and his Archbishop, they still loved one another and
swore undying mutual benevolence and all that.
Which left open all the conflict between church in the field, and the
nobility. If both had papal approval, God's imprimature through the
pope as it were, then whoever won the argument was right, and the church
in rome still had a claim on some voice in future decisions.
Bill
--
Bill Swears
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Ben Franklin, 1755 "Historical Review of Pennsylvania"
To think that was once a right wing comment. In the land of Homeland
Security it seems.. Suspiciously left-wing.
Bill Swears
Exactly. mutually beneficial hypocrisy. William disagreed with, and
even flouted instructions of the church, but then asked for blessings
and prayers, and propped up his local ministry.
But it had a practical application in the way you sought allies. And,
probably more than I'm comfortable with, it probably played into the
mindsets of the nobility. They wanted to know they were annointed of
god. It took away personal culpability for one. Exceptions? Oh,yes,
but even kings are not immune to faith, the desire for redemption.
Bill Swears
> In article <hqt9cd.fa1.ln@ehedgehog>, e...@electric-hedgehog.net says...
>
>>Filimonker wrote:
>>
>>
>>>......................... But a torturer would not make a very pleasant
>>>main character, particularly not one that infliced torture out of a sense
>>>of the good of it.
>>
>>I wonder if anyone's done an SF book with a torturer as the protagonist?
>
>
> Oh, snide, snide! Well played.
>
Stephen R. Donaldson's "Gap" series comes pretty close. Two of his
protags come as close to out and out evil as I've seen in science fiction.
Bill Swears
which is actually sort of a relief. Now we're faced with people who
have all of those things, yet aggressively court their own ignorance.
Marilee J. Layman
<bobhi...@att.net> wrote:
>
>"Joann Zimmerman" <jz...@bellereti.com> wrote in message
>news:MPG.1d52adb2f...@news.individual.net...
>> In article <hqt9cd.fa1.ln@ehedgehog>, e...@electric-hedgehog.net says...
>>> Filimonker wrote:
>>>
>>> > ......................... But a torturer would not make a very pleasant
>>> > main character, particularly not one that infliced torture out of a
>>> > sense
>>> > of the good of it.
>>>
>>> I wonder if anyone's done an SF book with a torturer as the protagonist?
>
>Yes. Susan R. Matthews (a Seattle author) wrote a series about a young
>doctor who is forced to become a torturer for the military judiciary system.
>Part of the tension comes from the fact that he is very good at it. See:
> An Exchange of Hostages
> Prisoner of Conscience
> Hour of Judgement
Well, more famously, Gene Wolfe's torturer books, they have Sun in the
title.
But you should read the .sigs. Chris signed this one Deadpan
Hedgehog, which indicates he was being silly, of *course* everybody
knows the Wolfe books. Then Joann commented on how appropriate it
was, just below here:
>> Oh, snide, snide! Well played.
--
Marilee J. Layman
Brian M. Scott
<jz...@bellereti.com> wrote in rec.arts.sf.composition:
> In article <hqt9cd.fa1.ln@ehedgehog>, e...@electric-hedgehog.net says...
>> Filimonker wrote:
>>> ......................... But a torturer would not make a very pleasant
>>> main character, particularly not one that infliced torture out of a sense
>>> of the good of it.
>> I wonder if anyone's done an SF book with a torturer as the protagonist?
> Oh, snide, snide! Well played.
The Hedgehog is indeed in fine form. (The remarkable thing to me
is that both Severian and Koscuisko are actually pretty
sympathetic characters. Are there any others?)
Brian
Zeborah
>And at least in the upper levels of society
> there are a number of records of women such as Eleanor of Acquitaine,
> Eleanor de Montfort, and Katherine Tudor who managed, one way or another, to
> marry whom they pleased despite objections from male relatives (who were, in
> many cases, kings and who thus putatively had both political and familial
> authority to arrange their daughters/sisters marriages).
...And of course examples of women who didn't manage: eg La Grande
Mademoiselle (the Princess de Montpensier, Louis XIV's cousin -- the one
who wanted to marry Lauzun. Who probably would have been a terrible
choice in the end. But there were a few other people before that who
she'd hoped to marry and all fell through.)
Zeborah
--
Gravity is no joke.
http://www.geocities.com/zeborahnz/
Catja Pafort
> Actually, most medieval English towns have charters granting the rights to
> hold markets in their market squares - usually on a specific day of the
> week. Most towns still hold these markets on this day. These usually date
> from the 12th and 13th centuries. Seems kings back then were very fond of
> granting charters. :-)
Of course they were. Only that we tend to get it wrong: Charters don't
grant freedoms, charters are attempts to curb freedoms someone has
already taken for themselves. Which sometimes leads to several charters
in a row...
Catja
Catja Pafort
[Kevin Cheek]
> > That awaited the Reformation. By that time Christianity was already
> > established for over a millennia most of Europe. Even the Nordic regions
> > were by that time predominately Christian.
>
> I think "over a millenia (um)" overstates it a bit. The reformation was
> a going concern in the 16th century. In the sixth century, how much of
> Europe outside the old borders of the Roman Empire was Christian? I seem
> to remember Charlemagne, c. 800, warring against pagans on his borders.
Missions from Ireland arrived in Germany from the sixth century onwards;
many new monasteries were founded until the eighth century at which
point I would assume saturation with nominal Christianity. (Evidence
points to amalgamation of pagan ideas/practices with Christianity for
much longer.)
> If your comment about the Nordic regions is referring to the time of the
> reformation, it's a considerable understatement. If you mean "by a
> thousand years before the reformation," it's a large overstatement,
> since the shift to Christianity was mostly in the 10th century.
For a while, both existed side by side; there's evidence from Haithabu
that Christian crosses and Thor's hammers were produced at the same time
- *in the same form*.
> > Yet the religious aspect permeated every aspect of society. As a people,
> > they were more religious than those of the 21st Century. How much this
> > was taken to heart is another question.
>
> I don't know if that is true or not--it might depend where. My
> understanding is that the U.S. got considerably more religious between
> about 1800 abnd 1830 and that the level of religious belief, insofar as
> it can be objectively measured by things such as church attendance or
> donations, hasn't changed much since then. The pattern in Europe, I
> gather, has been quite different.
Going to church is a social event; always has been - you meet neighbours
you don't see otherwise, you get to hear news, including from far away
places, proclamations are read out; church is also a place where you
needed to be seen to maintain social status, and I wouldn't attempt to
judge how much of that was going on in times past.
> I was told by someone who should have known that the archaeological
> evidence suggests that on an average Sunday in the Middle Ages, most
> people didn't go to church--there wasn't enough space.
Not convinced by that. Sermons don't necessarily take place in church or
at the same time. Until lately, many catholic churches in Germany
offered at least two, if not three masses on Sunday - so one lot goes at
seven, the next at ten - and you've doubled the number of possible
attendants.
> Also, moderns may be "religious" in different senses--environnmentalism,
> nationalism, political ideologies and the like. Not religion strictly
> speaking, but often a similar thought pattern. I think a lot of
> recycling and similar behavior makes more sense as religious ritual than
> as consequentialist act. Or consider the concern over flag burning.
There's 'religious' and there's 'spiritual' - while organised religion
seems to be on the wane in Europe, belief doesn't necessarily.
Catja
Catja Pafort
> Filimonker wrote:
>
> > ......................... But a torturer would not make a very pleasant
> > main character, particularly not one that infliced torture out of a sense
> > of the good of it.
>
> I wonder if anyone's done an SF book with a torturer as the protagonist?
Not quite yet.
I've got two protags who would qualify. One of them is a palace guard
who does gruntwork in the torture chamber. He's a simple man in many
ways, and if he had to hurt someone to get intelligence that would save
himself or his friends from a plot, well, that was that.
And then someone else is given at his mercy, whose only fault is to be a
magician, but who has committed no crimes, and is accused of no crimes
- and he feels pity with him, and that is that - he cannot go back.
The other one is a young man with emotional baggage who falls into the
hands of a very strict religious order which bears vague resemblance to
the spanish Inquisition.
He's full of hate, and full of fear, and he has a similar experience -
once he starts seeing his victim as human, he begins to thaw.
I could not write them otherwise; without the redemption. Of the two, it
is the cold utility of the first that scares me more; he really does see
torture as a legitimate means of gathering intelligence.
Catja
Kevin J. Cheek
> The church owned large tracts of land, and used religion to enforce the
> roles of royalty and serfdom. Christianity wasn't spreading through
> europe because it was a neat idea, it was spread by martial enforcement,
> and it promulgated the feudal system as divine guidance.
I can think of only one place in Europe where Christianity was spread by
martial enforcement: Russia. Vladimir went shopping for a religion, chose
Christianity over Islam, and declared that Russia was a Christian
country. That was sometime around 988 or 990 AD. Which led to his
subjects' mass baptism at his command. Besides Russia, Spain may have
engaged in this somewhat in the war against the Moors, but that's
strictly from speculation.
For a church to own lands and exercise political control, it first must
have influence. So either it gains an ear of a leader, such as Vladimir
(who may have wanted favor from the Byzantine), or gains the hearts and
minds of the people. And I'm not so certain if the Christian Church so
much entrenched the system as supported the system because it knew
nothing better. The closest we get here is Church approval of secessions
and the concept of Divine Right of Kings.
> There can be little doubt that the only authorized religion was trying
> very hard to be universal, but it was overlaid on the culture by force,
> then used as tool to enforce serfdom for the vast majority of
> agricultural labor (and most trades). People hung on to undocumented
> family icons for many generations, just as christians hung on in russia
> during communism. I'm defining culture as the majority of people in an
> agricultural economy, where virtually all agriculture is performed on
> lands owned by the church direct, or by royalty ordained of God. Serfs.
> My relatives and probably yours. Not slaves, exactly, but bound to the
> land, (or their trade) and required to work not only their own land, but
> land belonging to the church/peer proper. Largely in exchange or
> protection against other feudal lords.
Well . . . as you point out the feudal system required was a certain
amount of labor for the serf's lord and a certain amount of labor for the
church. The serf had land which may or may not be owned by his lord on
which he farmed to provide for his family. I'm probably wrong on this,
but it strikes me as sort of an intermediary between a share cropper and
a tenant farmer. I don't think it was as close to slavery as it was under
the Russian system following Ivan the Terrible. Still, IIRC, there were
complaints about the workload and the amount of goods stored in the tithe
houses (which were supposed to distribute the goods to the poor and
needy).
> But, wasn't Chaucer himself something of a sport? A fellow who lived on
> his wits and his writing in a time and place where most people were
> effectively slaves, writing about a europe that existed mostly in the
> minds of the literate, who stood on a pedestal of flesh?
Chaucer was a sport and a half and some speculate he died under
mysterious circumstances. He wrote a bawdy spoof about a monk who dies
and goes to Hell, which echoed popular sentiment of the hypocrisy that
had invaded some orders. What we have in "The Canterbury Tales" is a
slice of English life of that period. Chaucer's "The Pardoner's Tale" is
a spoof on the same order as his monk in Hell. But think of it like a
sitcom spoof of a televangelist. It's funny because it's an exaggeration
of what some traveling preachers were saying and doing. Then compare it
with "The Parson's Tale." Here we have a straightforward character sketch
of a sincere minister through his sermon. Both are a fine sampler of what
our farm wife would have heard.
--
-Kevin J. Cheek
Remove corn to send e-mail.
Brian M. Scott
<kev...@maize.planttel.net> wrote in
<news:MPG.1d51f0047...@nntp.planttel.net> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
[...]
> I can think of only one place in Europe where Christianity
> was spread by martial enforcement: Russia.
You could make a case for Charlemagne against the Saxons.
Perhaps for Jogaila in Lithuania.
[...]
Brian
Dorothy J Heydt
Kevin J. Cheek <kev...@maize.planttel.net> wrote:
>
>I can think of only one place in Europe where Christianity was spread by
>martial enforcement: Russia.
Norway was another: King Olaf decided to Christianize his people
whether they liked it or not.
I have a set of flatware, stainless business ends and pewter
handles, called "Konge Tinn" (Royal Pewter) and decorated with
figures of a King (labled Heilag Olaf, Saint Olaf) and some
Viking spearmen (labeled og Hans Menn, and his men), and some
drakkars here and there. Very pretty.
dd...@daviddfriedman.com
Yes. But then, a substantial number of parents have goodwill and/or
wisdom. Hence "some control."
I once had a very long conversation (Bombay to Sydney) with a woman
from southern India who was flying out to join her husband. It was an
arranged marriage, and she was as curious about our odd customs as I
was about theirs. It sounded as though her parents made the initial
choice, but it was understood that she had a de facto veto if, once she
met the suitor, she didn't like him.
James A. Donald
James A. Donald wrote:
> > You have been reading too many Marxists. Marxist
> > influences in a fantasy novel look silly, unless
> > they are there as deliberate postmodern irony.
Bill Swears
> If we disagree I'm a marxist?
Not what I said. I said you have been misled by the
version of history that Marxists push.
Marxist history features class struggle for control of
the state leading to social progress, of which communism
is to be the final stage of that steady and inexorable
social progress (historical forces). Hence Marxists
have to demonize the past, and demonize it worse, the
further back it goes, and have to project the strong,
unitary, Westphalian state to back before Westphalia.
This Marxist history is inconsistent with the tolerably
benign social order characteristic of fantasy novels,
and inconsistent of the diverse and often reasonably
bening social order of the real medieval past.
It is also inconsistent with the very anarchic, wild
west social order of fantasy novels, for example
Tolkien's "Shire", and with the often somewhat anarchic
social order of the past before Westphalia.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
Qc0eHPxt0CgKm8tE40nE0JIaiAks7reSvHDJfp1+
4Y+3T9eyJfjo/CX3IchneIkytOAcwP657qCLucVxZ
James A. Donald
Zeborah:
> that's James A Donald's tactic, and
> don't take it to heart, he counts the majority of the
> newsgroup's population as marxist.
liar
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
qpOyPiaomu524SaM+Ymd41yHnBdDOW2Bgmt5bc4k
4OQGEaU/o6P4TFBjTyT4136bxOs2UOq1h0tfMRxCx
Darkhawk (H. Nicoll)
> You could make a case for Charlemagne against the Saxons.
> Perhaps for Jogaila in Lithuania.
I love not particularly well known historical names. I never see them
spelled the same way twice.
(My grandmother's name was Jadwiga. Hence my knowledge.)
--
Darkhawk - H. A. Nicoll - http://aelfhame.net/~darkhawk/
They are one person, they are two alone
They are three together, they are for each other
- "Helplessly Hoping", Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young
dd...@daviddfriedman.com
Patricia C. Wrede wrote:
> "David Friedman" <dd...@daviddfriedman.nospam.com> wrote in message
> news:ddfr-77DAD6.2...@news.isp.giganews.com...
>
> > I suspect that, at all levels, women had some control over who they
> > married, although not unlimited control. In saga period Iceland, as I
> > understand the situation, a woman's first marriage could be arranged
> > least, leaves one with the impression that marrying your daughter to
> > someone she didn't want was distinctly risky.
>
> levels, ranging from historical surveys like the Geis's "Women in the Middle
> Ages" to primary sources like Christine di Pizan's various works, which
> certainly give that impression. And at least in the upper levels of society
> there are a number of records of women such as Eleanor of Acquitaine,
> Eleanor de Montfort, and Katherine Tudor who managed, one way or another, to
> marry whom they pleased despite objections from male relatives (who were, in
> many cases, kings and who thus putatively had both political and familial
> is not the same as a good historical survey, but there are enough such
> examples and reactions to them that it's clear these were not shocking,
> isolated instances of women doing the unthinkable, but rather more along the
> lines of "just what you'd expect from...<insert grumbly reason du jour>"
I suspect one tactic available, and used, was for a woman to let
herself be "seduced" by the man she wanted to marry--perhaps even get
pregnant by him--and then present her parents with a fait accompli. The
tactic is discussed explicitly by Casanova in the 18th century, and I
think there is indirect evidence of it elsewhere.
rkb...@pacific.net.sg
dd...@daviddfriedman.com wrote:
>
> I once had a very long conversation (Bombay to Sydney) with a woman
> from southern India who was flying out to join her husband. It was an
> arranged marriage, and she was as curious about our odd customs as I
> was about theirs. It sounded as though her parents made the initial
> choice, but it was understood that she had a de facto veto if, once she
> met the suitor, she didn't like him.
I'm from India, and of course many people I know have had arranged
marriages. The norm is that the young couple do meet (usually with
other people present, though I know of one case where the whole thing
was organized by phone, and the couple met only when it was time to
marry).
In a modern arranged match, the couple may be allowed some hours of
time alone. They both have de facto veto power.
In a more traditional setting it is usually understood that the girl's
side (which makes the approach) is in fact favorably inclined, and
there is considerable anxiety about whether the boy's side will find
her acceptable.
If not, there are face-saving escape clauses (like the family pundit
saying the horoscopes don't match).
The underlying logic though is twofold: that young people, especially
from middle-class or wealthy and therefore sheltered backgrounds would
not really know what a good spouse was; and that marriage is an
alliance between families, not just individuals. Unfortunately, parents
were far more likely to consider character and prospects than
temperament, and the fact that many arranged marriages turn out well
reflects I think on human adaptability and the value of commitment.
The traditional arranged marriage depends on the ability of the parents
of the two doing their due diligence to assure themselves about the
character and circumstances of the man (or woman) in question. Families
that did a bad job could be cheated, and would either have a terribly
embarrassing situation where the wedding would be stopped; or they
would be forced to make the best of a bad situation.
Rupa
Zeborah
> Hedgehog wrote:
>
> > I wonder if anyone's done an SF book with a torturer as the protagonist?
<snip>
> I could not write them otherwise; without the redemption. Of the two, it
> is the cold utility of the first that scares me more; he really does see
> torture as a legitimate means of gathering intelligence.
My protag has probably been involved with torture in the past, though
he'd always have done his best to limit it. The police of the society
he's in use it routinely: to some extent for gathering information, but
mostly after you've done the grunt-work of gathering information the
normal way, hunting up clues, etc, and you're now certain that this is
the crim wot done it: because the law says that a person can't be
convicted of a crime unless/until they confess.
The book's not about torture, though, and we don't see any.
Irina Rempt
> The book's not about torture, though, and we don't see any.
Which I am extremely glad of.
Irina
--
Vesta veran, terna puran, farenin. http://www.valdyas.org/irina/
Beghinnen can ick, volherden will' ick, volbringhen sal ick.
http://www.valdyas.org/foundobjects/index.cgi Latest: 28-Jul-2005
Gerry Quinn
b.s...@csuohio.edu says...
> The succession was disputed, so he was adding every string to his
> bow that he could wangle. Had Harold won, as he so nearly did,
> few would have doubted his legitimacy.
He'd be an English superhero on the level of Arthur, probably.
Slapped down the invading Danes, marched south and slapped down the
invading French. What more do you want?
[Okay, they were all Danes really...]
- Gerry Quinn
Anna Mazzoldi
> I suspect one tactic available, and used, was for a woman to let
> herself be "seduced" by the man she wanted to marry--perhaps even get
> pregnant by him--and then present her parents with a fait accompli.
> The tactic is discussed explicitly by Casanova in the 18th century,
> and I think there is indirect evidence of it elsewhere.
It's called "fuitina" in Sicilian (and the word has entered into
Italian); it's taken as a rather normal occurrence (though I imagine it
used to be more common in the past). Isn't it one of the meanings of
"elopement"?
--
Anna Mazzoldi <http://aynathie.livejournal.com/>
Freedom defined is freedom denied. (Illuminatus)
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
> dd...@daviddfriedman.com wrote in rec.arts.sf.composition:
>
> > I suspect one tactic available, and used, was for a woman to let
> > herself be "seduced" by the man she wanted to marry--perhaps even get
> > pregnant by him--and then present her parents with a fait accompli.
> > The tactic is discussed explicitly by Casanova in the 18th century,
> > and I think there is indirect evidence of it elsewhere.
>
> It's called "fuitina" in Sicilian (and the word has entered into
> Italian); it's taken as a rather normal occurrence (though I imagine it
> used to be more common in the past). Isn't it one of the meanings of
> "elopement"?
Getting pregnant wasn't necessary. Once you had been alone at night with
somebody, you were bound to marry him - it was taken as a given that
intercourse had taken place and you were no longer a virgin.
This unfortunately worked wether the girl was consenting or not.
There's a wonderfully spooky example of this king of things - enshrined
in biology - in Jo Walton's _Tooth and Claw_.
--
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan - ada...@spamcop.net - this is a valid address
homepage: http://www.fantascienza.net/sfpeople/elethiomel
English blog: http://annafdd.blogspot.com/
LJ: http://www.livejournal.com/users/annafdd/
Melonie Medellin
Filimonker wrote:
> I'm quite interested in history, and in particular in a field that I suppose
> would be called 'history of mentality' in English.
>
> An example. Consider a medieval farmer woman in the real world. Now from an
> external p.o.v. one could look back at her with something akin to empathy.
> She was born in the wrong time for her to have any of the liberties that we
> take for granted. She worked from the day she could walk, and until the day
> she died prematurely. She bore many children, and she was considered
> property to be sold in marriage for advantages. The concept of the nuclear
> family (a later invention) was miniscule, and her purpose in life was to
> better the status of her kin. If that meant that she was a piece of property
> to sell to another kin for certain advantages, then that was how things
> would be. Externally, she was to be pitied, that farmer woman. With
> hindsight.
>
<snip>
>
> Her mentality would make her quite alien to us in large ways and small ways.
> That is a very fascinating thought. But I've only seen this reflected in a
> few works of fantasy. Most of the time it seems the people populating a
> medieval fantasy world are modern people dressed in medieval clothes, with a
> few swords flung in.
>
> Do you agree with this? If yes or no, how come?
I've read the comments on this thread and have enjoyed the history
immensely, however, I think perhaps one point has been missed.
Canterbury Tales and Don Quixote are two of my all time favorite books,
but I have yet to curl up on the couch late into the night to read
either of them. Fantasy is intended, as is most alternative fiction,
to entertain. I am not entertained by reading about a woman who is
burying her third of five children. The authentic lifestyle of a
medieval noble or even a dark ages peasant isn't entertaining either;
it's brutal and I would even go so far as to say offensive. I enjoy
reading about such things and am especially interested in the
transgressions of "the church", but I don't want to get those books out
of the SF/F section of the bookstore.
The original post discusses the lack of authenticity in many or most
fantasy novels, but I would ask you to consider how much authenticity
do you really want to endure when you are trying to break out of the
norms of your own life and escape into a magical world hidden in the
pages of a book. As for me, I can only say that I deal with enough
harsh reality in my daily routine. I don't want to read about more of
it, even if it is a different era.
As a side note, John Ringo touches on the subject of the subjugation of
women in the early centureies in one of his recent novels (Against the
Tide I think) and he did a pretty good job of summing the rationale up
into a few paragraphs. Perhaps if you are looking for authenticity
while still attempting to create an enjoyable read for your audience,
you should consider the reason the medieval centureies were as harsh as
they were and incorporate that into your novel as opposed to the full
reality of the day, which as I pointed out alread isn't a fun read.
Just a thought.
Melonie
Ben Crowell
> I've read the comments on this thread and have enjoyed the history
> immensely, however, I think perhaps one point has been missed.
> Canterbury Tales and Don Quixote are two of my all time favorite books,
> but I have yet to curl up on the couch late into the night to read
> either of them. Fantasy is intended, as is most alternative fiction,
> to entertain. I am not entertained by reading about a woman who is
> burying her third of five children. The authentic lifestyle of a
> medieval noble or even a dark ages peasant isn't entertaining either;
> it's brutal and I would even go so far as to say offensive. I enjoy
> reading about such things and am especially interested in the
> transgressions of "the church", but I don't want to get those books out
> of the SF/F section of the bookstore.
three types of writing we could be talking about here:
1. fantasy (what the thread was originally about)
2. genre fiction in a historical setting
3. alternate history stories
I think the issue of psychologic/historical realism is *least* relevant
in case #1. Look at Tolkein, who basically invented the swords and
sorcery genre. He was a medievalist himself, but there's virtually
no accurate depiction of medieval society in his books, and that
makes sense, because he's not depicting Earth, he's depicting
Middle Earth. It's hard to even imagine the story getting off the
ground if the Shire is like medieval Europe. If Bilbo is a
serf or a slave, he can't leave. If he's a noble, he has feudal
obligations, and he can't just run off on a long voyage because he
feels like it. Tolkein basically needs him to be a middle-class guy
with cash in the bank, so that's what he makes him.
I disagree with Melonie, however, that a realistic medieval setting
can't be made to work. One thing to keep in mind is that human beings
are individuals, and the hero of our story is likely to be someone
exceptional, not a Willy Loman. Our hero can be a serf, but an
exceptional serf who does exceptional things. Our hero can be
a village priest who doesn't happen to be the stereotyped narrowminded
patriarchal oppressor. Etc.
Dorothy J Heydt
Melonie Medellin <cav...@cox.net> wrote:
>
>I've read the comments on this thread and have enjoyed the history
>immensely, however, I think perhaps one point has been missed.
>Canterbury Tales and Don Quixote are two of my all time favorite books,
>but I have yet to curl up on the couch late into the night to read
>either of them. Fantasy is intended, as is most alternative fiction,
>to entertain. I am not entertained by reading about a woman who is
>burying her third of five children. The authentic lifestyle of a
>medieval noble or even a dark ages peasant isn't entertaining either;
>it's brutal and I would even go so far as to say offensive. I enjoy
>reading about such things and am especially interested in the
>transgressions of "the church", but I don't want to get those books out
>of the SF/F section of the bookstore.
>
>The original post discusses the lack of authenticity in many or most
>fantasy novels, but I would ask you to consider how much authenticity
>do you really want to endure when you are trying to break out of the
>norms of your own life and escape into a magical world hidden in the
>pages of a book. As for me, I can only say that I deal with enough
>harsh reality in my daily routine. I don't want to read about more of
>it, even if it is a different era.
Okay, you don't. I don't either. But there are those who do.
Consider how G. R. R. Martin's current series is doing: he's
rewriting the War of the Roses as fantasy, and it is sheer
unadulterated grimth from cover to cover. I quit midway through
Volume One, having observed (and comments by tougher readers have
borne this out) that he was systematically making me care about a
character and then killing him off in some gruesome way, rinse
and repeat. And yet the things are selling like hotcakes.
Brian M. Scott
<dark...@mindspring.comDarkhawk> wrote in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> Brian M. Scott <b.s...@csuohio.edu> wrote:
>> You could make a case for Charlemagne against the Saxons.
>> Perhaps for Jogaila in Lithuania.
> I love not particularly well known historical names.
I think that he's more often seen in his Polish persona, as
Jagiełło (or Jagiello, if you can't read that).
> I never see them spelled the same way twice.
> (My grandmother's name was Jadwiga. Hence my knowledge.)
A Slavic borrowing of German <Hedwig>.
Brian
Brian M. Scott
lightSPAMandISmatterEVIL.com> wrote in rec.arts.sf.composition:
[...]
> Look at Tolkein, who basically invented the swords and
> sorcery genre.
Er, no: he didn't write s&s, and Robert E. Howard, who did
(Conan, Bran Mak Morn, etc.), was dead before _The Hobbit_ was
published.
[...]
Brian
Patricia C. Wrede
news:1122650383....@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> The original post discusses the lack of authenticity in many or most
> fantasy novels, but I would ask you to consider how much authenticity
> do you really want to endure when you are trying to break out of the
> norms of your own life and escape into a magical world hidden in the
> pages of a book. As for me, I can only say that I deal with enough
> harsh reality in my daily routine. I don't want to read about more of
> it, even if it is a different era.
It's your choice to not read about it. The popularity of horror novels and
the grittier hardboiled/noir mysteries suggests that a good many people find
"harsh reality" something they *do* want to read about in fiction. Nobody
I've ever heard of likes all books to the same extent, nor do I know of any
writers who have ever been able to please everybody.
There is also a significant difference between what the reader needs to
know/see and what the writer needs to know/see in order to portray whatever
he/she is going to portray. If you are aware of the differences between a
medieval mindset and a modern one, and have a reasonable grasp of how things
actually worked, then you have a choice: you can pick and choose things to
portray that will give your work more authenticity, depth, and richness in
any of a number of directions -- you can choose to focus on the way certain
hardships were considered normal, or on differences in attitudes, or a
number of other possibilities -- or you can decide *not* to make use of any
of those things because they don't suit what you're trying to do, and
therefore you'll just go with modern folks in fancy dress. If you aren't
paying attention, aren't aware that there *is* a difference in mindset, then
you don't have the choice. You have to write modern people in fancy dress,
because that's all you know.
Patricia C. Wrede