10 myths about the middle ages

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I enjoyed reading this, perhaps you will too.

http://listverse.com/2009/01/07/top-10- ... ddle-ages/

T'was enjoyable.

I'd have liked more references though. But I'm just picky like that.

Hmmm...not at all sure about section 3 - Oppressed Women.

Joan of Arc's rise was more to do with the general belief in her being sent from God than anything to do with her sex. Her success at Orleans was a one off. To use her as a symbol of enlightened attitudes to women in the Middle Ages is a bit of a red herring. Even through much of the Renaissance, women were mostly ignored, unless they had money enough or were well-connected enough to give them a unique status.

In England, at least until the 1600s, women were, often, very shabbily treated. Any woman who was widowed (not exactly uncommon) faced the possibility of a truly terrible time ahead, as male inheritors, within the immediate and extended family, had precedence. They could, effectively, decide her future for her and her interests seldom came first. From a religious point of view, widows (having experience of sex) were looked upon with great suspicion by the church and were either forced into remarrying for all sorts of dubious reasons, or simply shunned if they refused to comply. For catholic widows, convents offered one refuge. Protestant widows had no such option to fall back on if family members decided to get nasty when dividing up a dead husband's estate.

References:

I've taken this from what I remember of Michael Wood's six-part TV series about England.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tw231

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvan ... llage.html

Yeah, I kinda thought 3 seemed a bit weak.

Um also that story about them being somewhat cleaner than it was supposed to be is a bit smelly as well. Think of how someone's breath might have been who hasn't used toothpaste not once in their life, not to mention have seen a deodorant or a shampoo. I'm not saying that they didn't bathe at all, still I think they were quite, well smelly!

They also had open sewerage(s) at those times and general life expectancy was between 35-45 at best, due to the lack of proper medical care.

For anyone interested:

http://www.suite101.com/content/cleanli ... es-a288904
http://www.middle-ages.org.uk/middle-ages-hygiene.htm
http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2007/ ... t_on_clean

And a link about some sophisticated and some a bit less sophisticated medieval toilets:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/2960146.stm

Very interesting topic, thanks for posting.

Hmm sure the Middle Ages might have not been as bad as Hollywood made us to beleieve......but surely Europe under Roman rule was much more safe and much more advanced.

I remember my biology teacher saying that humans have a specific bacteria that lives on the skin in a symbiotic relationship that provides a certain level of cleanliness... it has antiseptic properties that help to keep away other bacteria and keep the skin "clean". She also said that modern man washes this bacteria away and that few people have it nowadays. I don't know if what she said is true or partially true though; the comments above just reminded me of it. So maybe medieval man didn't smell as bad as one would imagine. There is also the issue of familiarity - if everyone smells the same then probably nobody notices.

I've enjoyed reading that. It was straight forward and to the point. I also had no idea that The Middle Ages started in the 5th Century. I thought that they started in the 13th Century.