Category: totally agree

elucubrare:

The author of the Charlemagne book I’m listening to puts a lot of emphasis on the difference between modern people and medieval people, and how we can never really enter into a medieval mindset. and to a large extent, I think he’s right.

I mean, I think there are at least two levels:

First, there’s “people have always been people”: people have always had petty complaints about shopkeepers, and loved children and siblings, and made toys and left graffiti. Modern apartment-dwellers can understand many things about Romans living in insulae - annoying neighbors, fourth-floor walkups, absentee landlords.

But second, there’s a larger mindset that we can try to understand but never share: medieval people lived in a world that was much less certain than ours, in many ways. Not only practically uncertain - you don’t know if the harvest will fail, so you don’t know if you’ll have enough to eat that winter - but uncertain in that there are so many more unknowns about the world - if the harvest fails, you don’t know why. You can’t predict the weather; you don’t know what causes the weather. That has to affect your decision-making, and the way you live your life, in so many ways I can’t even begin to speculate on.

In the end, I think it’s important to remember both - these are people, with people’s quirks and faults and desires, both large and small – but they’re people in a context, with points of view, and in circumstances that are completely different from ours.