Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/07/06/hear-a-medievalist-professor-answer-an-array-of-interesting-medieval-questions.html
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Glad to see some medievalists who are genuinely cool and the interesting featured on this site.
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Do they offer any insights into the peasantry’s thoughts regarding the source from which supreme executive power might derive?
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Is it @Medievalist?
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… A farcical aquatic ceremony?
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Moistened bints.
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I know tons of medievalists who are genuinely cool (and some who really aren’t). Unfortunately, yeah, they don’t tend to make it into general pop culture. Too much self promoting also tends to be frowned upon in the field (as it is anywhere in the humanities, especially outside the Anglo-Saxon world), unless you make it over a certain threshold and you are a superstar of the field and suddenly everyone wants to offer you talks and approve your grant applications.
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Full marks for me, no surprises. In fact, I’m pretty sure the first versions of the grail type story had not a cup but a serving tray. With regards to age, I seem to recall you were required to be on the militia rolls up until your 50s. They started closing bath houses at some point for supposed lewd behavior. Jousts, also the equivalent to a military job fair at one point.
Really liked the “How did they live through the Black Death. They didn’t.” part.
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Contributed by Popkin!
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Another more serious critique of historical films (largely but not exclusively medieval) is:
Also highly entertaining, and a good way to lose a week or two:
You can tell that my interest in that period is reaching a middle.
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Still no answers to the question on everyone’s mind…
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My wife and I watched this video last night. I’ve been finding many videos YouTube push into us end up featured here. Either the suggestions I’m receiving are lining up more and more with the contributors or to algorithm is lazily giving a bunch of us the same thing.
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It’s interesting how many misconceptions there are about the period (which largely seem to date back to the 19th century), though the life expectancy one has to be even more modern. The high child mortality that existed really skews modern people’s notions of life expectancy then. That whole dynamic is so completely alien now (having a very high chance of dying as a young child, then having a pretty flat, though elevated, death rate for the rest of your life), thanks to vaccines and antibiotics. Both of which are very recent, yet we’ve already forgotten what they’ve done for us, and as a culture we’re rushing headlong to return to the bad old days of rejecting vaccines and returning to high child mortality rates.
The bit about swords having names reminds me of a book I read about Anglo-Saxon runes, and how swords and other objects often had words inscribed on them. To the bafflement of archaeologists, the words often seemed to be gibberish (characters inconsistently formed, words that didn’t mean anything), suggesting that the metal smiths who inscribed the words were themselves illiterate, but there was some status (or magic) value to the words, so they added them for their (also illiterate) customers. Making it all very much the Mediæval equivalent of Westerners with “Chinese” tattoos. (“Dude, sorry to break it to you, but your sword doesn’t say ‘honor,’ it says ‘pthpth’.”)
Yeah, then in some later versions, it was also a (meteorite) stone. The cup thing is quite a bit later. It was basically a mcguffin added to the Arthur story by Chrétien de Troyes, that later authors turned into something they could weave into Christian mythology. It’s totally weird to me that some modern people think it’s part of Christianity, much less that it’s a real thing, when it was so obviously invented by a writer of fiction as a plot device and then turned into something else. It’s like people searching for Harry Potter’s wand…
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The ‘We’re Not So Different’ podcast is an excellent and sweary listen about medieval life. One of the presenters is the awesome Doctor Eleanor Janega who I could listen to forever. She also contributes from time to time to History Hit on YouTube.
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Archaeologists being baffled is such a trope in British headlines that it is really annoying many of us. Just Google the phrase to see how many headlines that are that start with that construction.
In fact, it’s such a common topic of humour among archaeologists that archaeologist-cum-stand-up-comedian Matthew Knight has a show about it at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.
Bewildered. Stumped. Baffled. Just some of the words typically used to describe archaeologists when their discoveries make headlines. But contrary to popular belief, archaeologists don’t (often) spend their days wandering around confused by the ancient burials, monuments and hoards they encounter. Sure, people in the past did weird things like burying heaps of metal in the ground, but so do people in the present.
Dr Matthew Knight (National Museums Scotland) explores some of these weird and wonderful prehistoric activities and asks: are archaeologists truly as baffled as they seem?
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WTF? Pan and scan on a video like that? I felt like was being forced to watch Wimbledon.
@Shuck “(which largely seem to date back to the 19th century)” That’s pretty much all of British History in a nutshell.
@Doctor_Faustus How can archaeologists ever be baffled? Anything that is not immediately clear, is obviously of ritualistic use.
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I do like the “X Support” series. It’s exactly the sort of thing that’s suitable for short videos. You get intriguing questions about a subject, enough to satisfy a little curiosity, or the start of a trail that will lead you down a rabbit hole if you want to take a deeper dive on any of the questions raised.
That, plus it’s good to hear from experts who want to share their knowledge with you. That leads to a sort of enthusiasm loop that really draws people in.
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Well, obviously!
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It seems to happen with any topic that baffles a journalist. Projection, I guess?
My favourite ones lately are the headlines about how the James Webb Space Telescope “Shocks!!!” astronomers. My dude, we did not spend $10B just to get our suspicions confirmed. That is not how science works.
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