Everybody knows that, during the middle ages, serfs lived in filth, damsels sat helpless at the tops of towers, and knights were noble and totally didn’t casually rape women. Oh, and Alchemists were lunatics. Everybody knows it, so…yeah, it’s bullshit.
Serfs got more vacation time than you. Women weren’t the frail flowers with no say (and more than a few could have kicked my ass). Knights were more on the killing, less on the goodliness, and lived for gold, glory, and girls. They strike me as the NBA megalomaniacs of their day.
Our long-standing stereotypes often contain a grain of truth. The problem is that grain spends a weekend at a Renaissance Fair and gets everything wrong.
Remedial Medieval
One of the very coolest things about all this social networking, internet-connective, cross-pollinated, online pseudo-intellectualism is that I discover tons of things that literally millions of people learned about years ago, like gravity and the existence of water. The most recent example of this comes thanks to a seemingly random Buzz-post from internet friend and fellow Gamer with a Job, Erik Hanson.
Back in 2004, Monty Python alum Terry Jones helped produce a series of half-hour BBC documentaries that examines the collective, popular misunderstandings we have about the Middle Ages. In spite of having read, years ago, a few books like these, the existence of these programs was unknown to me. Now we have YouTube and a proliferating BBC, so there are no excuses.
You can view the whole set of videos, for free (though ads exist), by clicking here. The series is called Medieval Lives. Embedded below is episode one: The Peasant.
I caught myself laughing and – for a split second – unaware that I was learning anything. That’s how to educate, and it’s magical. That it exposes our misconceptions is doubly useful. The knowledge comes with a humility pack-in.
An Aside
I loved Monty Python growing up. The sketches are wonderfully ludicrous and the movies are quite fun. But, around the 800′th time you’ve seen the Parrot Sketch, the impact isn’t just lost, but stomped into a thin slurry.
So many of the comedians I idolized in youth are doing stuff that’s far more interesting. Michael Palin has those awesome travelogues, Terry Gilliam is a bizarre and wonderful filmmaker, and Terry Jones just proved that history can be interesting and fun. Here in the States, I think of Steve Martin. He’s always entertained me with his films and essays, but now all I want to do is listen to him play the banjo.
