#Eleanor Janega

[grison-in-space]

The “natural” and “evolutionary” preference for hourglass shapes would be news to medieval male Europeans, who as we have seen were much more interested in pear shapes. How do we explain medieval men’s desire for pot bellies if men analyze women’s bodies for signs that they may be pregnant and eschew them if they are? And what about today’s high fashion models who are tall, have small to medium-sized breasts, and slim hips yet are considered the epitome of the ideal body? All these designations of attractiveness leave out most women, even if they turn to a surgical option.

Further, our society does not praise most of the other medieval beauty preferences. We may still regard blond hair as a beauty ideal, but we are fickle on much else. In the last fifty years, we have lauded tanned skin and fair complexions—note that Black and brown women’s skin tones don’t even enter into Western beauty standards. Eyebrows go from pencil thin to bushy. And we don’t share the medieval penchant for “high free” foreheads. If standards are based on evolutionary processes, why do our current preferences differ from older ones, and why have ours changed even during different decades?

There is no single and consistent beauty ideal that has existed over time, even within Europe. Beauty is a social construct and has different characteristics in different ages. Justifying social beauty norms through scientific means is as much a social construction as Matthew of Vendôme’s effort was, and we can pay them exactly as much heed. Maybe less, because at least Matthew was giving us some poetry to read as well.

Eleanor Janega, The Once and Future Sex. 2023.

[haggishlyhagging]

Medieval Europeans regarded embroidery as an art, much as we today consider painting. It was considered a female task, and even chambermaids were expected to be competent in it. Yet it was a coveted line of work, as one early Irish law tract stated that "the woman who embroiders earns more profit even than queens." Embroiderers could find employment with professional clothing makers or in tapestry workshops.

By the thirteenth century, given that embroidery was held in high esteem and could bring in money, the field contained plenty of men as well. In England, over time women come up less frequently on the lists of embroiderers than men and more often in conjunction with a husband, even when their work was exceptional. In May 1317 "Rose, the wife of John de Bureford, citizen and merchant of London," sold "an embroidered cope for the choir" to the French queen Isabella (ca. 1295-1358), who gave it as a gift "to the Lord High Pontiff." Rose was clearly a very skilled artist, since she was commissioned by the queen, but was not skilled enough to be named as an artist in her own right. We don't know how many other working embroiderers were subsumed into their husbands' workshops with even their first names lost to us. Once a field became truly profitable, men nudged women out of it. It was all well and good to let ladies have fun with a needle and thread. But if there was cash to be made, men suddenly showed up front and center and excluded women from the role.

-Eleanor Janega, The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society

[coochiequeens]

This is why we still need Women’s History Month.

By Martha Gill

What was life like for women in medieval times? “Awful” is the vague if definite answer that tends to spring to mind – but this is an assumption, and authors have been tackling it with new vigour.

The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society by Eleanor Janega, and The Wife of Bath: A Biography by Marion Turner both contend that women were not only bawdier but busier than we thought: they were brewers, blacksmiths, court poets, teachers, merchants, and master craftsmen, and they owned land too. A woman’s dowry, Janega writes, was often accompanied with firm instructions that property stay with her, regardless of what her husband wanted.

This feels like a new discovery. It isn’t, of course. Chaucer depicted many such cheerfully domineering women. The vellum letter-books of the City of London, in which the doings of the capital from 1275 to 1509 were scribbled, detail female barbers, apothecaries, armourers, shipwrights and tailors as a matter of course. While it is true that aristocratic women were considered drastically inferior to their male equivalents – traded as property and kept as ornaments – women of the lower orders lived, relatively, in a sort of rough and ready empowerment.

It was the Renaissance that vastly rolled back the rights of women. As economic power shifted, the emerging middle classes began aping their betters. They confined their women to the home, putting them at the financial mercy of men. Female religious power also dwindled. In the 13th century seeing visions and hearing voices might get a woman sainted; a hundred years later she’d more likely be burned at the stake.

“When it comes to the history of gender relations, storytellers portray women as more oppressed than they actually were”

Why does this feel like new information? Much of what we think we know about medieval times was invented by the Victorians, who had an artistic obsession with the period, and through poetry and endless retellings of the myth of King Arthur managed somehow to permanently infuse their own sexual politics into it. (Victorian women were in many respects more socially repressed than their 12th-century forebears.)

But modern storytellers are also guilty of sexist revisionism. We endlessly retread the lives of oppressed noblewomen, and ignore their secretly empowered lower-order sisters. Where poorer women are mentioned, glancingly, they are pitied as prostitutes or rape victims. Even writers who seem desperate for a “feminist take” on the period tend to ignore the angle staring them right in the face. In her 2022 cinematic romp, Catherine called Birdy, for example, Lena Dunham puts Sylvia Pankhurst-esque speeches into the mouth of her 13th-century protagonist, while portraying her impending marriage – at 14 – as normal for the period. (In fact the average 13th-century woman got married somewhere between the ages of 22 and 25.)

But we cling tight to these ideas. It is often those who push back against them who get accused of “historical revisionism”. This applies particularly to the fantasy genre, which aside from the odd preternaturally “feisty” female character, tends to portray the period as, well, a misogynistic fantasy. The Game of Thrones author George RR Martin once defended the TV series’ burlesque maltreatment of women on the grounds of realism. “I wanted my books to be strongly grounded in history and to show what medieval society was like.” Oddly enough, this didn’t apply to female body hair (or the dragons).

This is interesting. Most of our historical biases tend to run in the other direction: we assume the past was like the present. But when it comes to the history of gender relations, the opposite is true: storytellers insist on portraying women as more oppressed than they actually were.

“The history of gender relations might be more accurately painted as a tug of war between the sexes”

The casual reader of history is left with the dim impression that between the Palaeolithic era and the 19th century women suffered a sort of dark age of oppression. This is assumed to have ended some time around the invention of the lightbulb, when the idea of “gender equality” sprang into our heads and right-thinking societies set about “discovering” female competencies: women – astonishingly – could do 

things men could do!

In fact the history of gender relations might be more accurately painted as a tug of war between the sexes, with women sometimes gaining and sometimes losing power – and the stronger sex opportunistically seizing control whenever it had the means.

In Minoan Crete, for example, women had similar rights and freedoms to men, taking equal part in hunting, competitions, and celebrations.

But that era ushered in one of the most patriarchal societies the planet has ever known – classical Greece, where women had no political rights and were considered “minors”.

Or take hunter-gatherer societies, the source of endless cod-evolutionary theories about female inferiority. The discovery of female skeletons with hunting paraphernalia has disproved the idea that men only hunted and women only gathered – and more recently anthropologists have challenged the idea that men had higher status too: women, studies contend, had equal sway over group decisions.

This general bias has had two unfortunate consequences. One is to impress upon us the idea that inequality is “natural”. The other is to give us a certain complacency about our own age: that feminist progress is an inevitable consequence of passing time. “She was ahead of her time,” we say, when a woman seems unusually empowered. Not necessarily.

Two years ago, remember, sprang up one of the most vicious patriarchies in history – women were removed from their schools and places of work and battoned into homes and hijabs. And last year in the US many women lost one of their fundamental rights: abortion. (Turns out it was pro-lifers, not feminists, who were ahead of their time there.)

Both these events were greeted with shock from liberal quarters: how could women’s rights be going backwards? But that only shows we should brush up on our history. Another look at medieval women is as good a place to start as any.

 Martha Gill is a political journalist and former lobby correspondent

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The internet is not a (link)dump truck

Monday (October 2), I'll be in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab. On October 7–8, I'm in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

The second decade of the 21st century is truly a bounteous time. My backyard has produced a bumper crop of an invasive species of mosquito that is genuinely innovative: rather than confining itself to biting in the dusk and dawn golden hours, these stinging clouds of flying vampires bite at every hour that God sends:

https://themagnet.substack.com/p/the-magnet-081-war-with-mosquitoes

Here in the twilight of capitalism's planet-devouring, half-century orgy of wanton destruction, there's more news every day than I can possibly write a full blog post about every day, and as with many weeks, I have arrived at Saturday with a substantial backlog of links that didn't fit into the week's "Hey look at this" linkdumps.

Thus, the eighth installment in my ongoing, semiregular series of Saturday linkdumps:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

This week, the miscellany begins with the first hesitant signs of an emerging, post-neoliberal order. The FTC, under direction of the force-of-nature that is Lina Khan, has brought its long-awaited case antitrust case against Amazon. I am very excited about this. Disoriented, even.

When was the last time you greeted every day with a warm feeling because high officials in the US government were working for the betterment of every person in the land? It's enough to make one giddy. Plus, the New York Times let me call Amazon "the apex predator of our platform era"! Now that it's in the "paper of record," it's official:

https://pluralistic.net/ApexPredator

Now, lefties have been predicting capitalism's imminent demise since The Communist Manifesto, but any fule kno that the capitalist word for "crisis" also translates as "opportunity." Like the bedbugs that mutated to thrive in clouds of post-war DDT, capitalism has adapted to each crisis, emerging in a new, more virulent form:

https://boingboing.net/2023/09/30/bedbugs-take-paris.html

But "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop" (Stein's Law). Perhaps our mistake was in waiting for capitalism to give way to socialism, rather than serving as a transitional phase between feudalism and…feudalism.

What's the difference between feudalism and capitalism? According to Yanis Varoufakis, it comes down to whether we value rents (income you get from owning things) over profits (income you get from doing things):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

By that metric, the FTC's case against Amazon is really a case against feudalism. Through predatory pricing and acquisitions, Amazon has turned itself into a chokepoint that every merchant, writer and publisher has to pass through in order to reach their customers. Amazon charges a fortune to traverse that chokepoint (estimates range from 45% to 51% of gross revenues) and then forces sellers to raise their prices everywhere else when they hike their Amazon prices so they can afford Amazon's tolls. It's "an economy-wide hidden tax":

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-ftc-sues-to-break-up-amazon-over

Now, feudalism isn't a straightforward proposition. Like, are you sure you mean feudalism? Maybe you mean "manorialism" (they're easy to mix up):

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

Plus, much of what we know about the "Dark Ages" comes from grifter doofuses like Voltaire, a man who was capable of dismissing the 800 year Holy Roman Empire with a single quip ("neither holy, roman, nor an empire"). But the reality is a lot more complicated, gnarly and interesting.

That's where medievalist Eleanor Janeaga comes in, and her "Against Voltaire, or, the shortest possible introduction to the Holy Roman Empire" is a banger:

https://going-medieval.com/2023/09/29/against-voltaire-or-the-shortest-possible-introduction-to-the-holy-roman-empire/

Now, while it's true that Enlightenment thinkers gave medieval times a bum rap, it's likewise true that a key element of Enlightenment justice is transparency: justice being done, and being seen to be done. One way to distinguish "modern" justice from "medieval" trials is to ask whether the public is allowed to watch the trial, see the evidence, and understand the conclusion.

Here again, there is evidence that capitalism was a transitional phase between feudalism and feudalism. The Amazon trial has already been poisoned by farcical redactions, in which every key figure is blacked out of the public record:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-09-27-redacted-case-against-amazon/

This is part of a trend. The other gigantic antitrust case underway right now, against Google, has turned into a star chamber as well, with Judge Amit P Mehta largely deferring to Google's frequent demands to close the court and seal the exhibits:

https://usvgoogle.org/trial-update-9-22

Google's rationale for this is darkly hilarious: if the public is allowed to know what's happening in its trial, this will be converted into "clickbait," which is to say, "The public is interested in this case, and if they are informed of the evidence against us, that information will be spread widely because it is so interesting":

https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/secrecy-is-systemic

Thankfully, this secrecy is struggling to survive the public outrage it prompted. While the court's Zoom feed has been shuttered and while Judge Mehta is still all-too-willing to clear the courtroom during key testimony, at least the DoJ's exhibits aren't being sealed at the same clip as before:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/27/23892215/google-search-antitrust-trial-documents-public-again-judge-mehta-rules

In 2023, the world comes at you fast. There's an epic struggle over the future of corporate dominance playing out all around us. I mean, there are French antitrust enforcers kicking down doors of giant tech companies and ransacking their offices for evidence of nefarious anticompetitive plots:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/28/23894863/nvidia-offices-raided-french-competition-authority

As ever, the question is "socialism or barbarism." But don't say that too loud: in America, socialism is a slur, one that dates back to the Reconstruction era, when pro-slavery factions called Black voting "socialism in South Carolina."

Ever since, white nationalists used "socialism" make Americans believe that "socialism" was an "extremist" view, so they'd stand by while everyone from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump smeared their opponents as "Marxists":

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4066499-trump-paints-2024-campaign-as-righteous-crusade/

As Heather Cox Richardson puts it for The Atlantic, "There is a long-standing fight over whether support for the modern-day right is about taxes or race. The key is that it is about taxes and race at the same time":

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/american-socialism-racist-origins/675453/

The cruelty isn't the point, in other words. Cruelty is the tactic. The point is power. Remember, no war but class war. All of this is in service to paying workers less so that bosses and investors can have more.

Take "essential workers," everyone from teachers to zookeepers, nurses to librarians, EMTs to daycare workers. All of these "caring" professions are paid sub-living wages, and all of these workers are told that "they matter too much to earn a living wage":

https://www.okdoomer.io/praise-doesnt-pay/

The "you matter too much to pay" mind-zap is called "vocational awe," a crucial term introduced by Ettarh Fobazi in her 2018 paper:

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

Vocational awe is how creative workers – like the writers who just won their strike and the actors who are still fighting – are conned into working at starvation wages. As the old joke goes, "What, and give up show-business?"

https://ask.metafilter.com/117904/Whats-the-joke-thas-hase-the-punchline-what-and-give-up-show-business

In this moment of Big Tech-driven, AI-based wage suppression, mass surveillance, corruption and inequality, perhaps we should take a moment to remind ourselves that cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion. Or, more to the point, the warning was about high-tech corporate takeover of our lives, and the suggestion was that we could seize the means of computation (a synonym for William Gibson's "the street finds its own use for things"):

http://www.seizethemeansofcomputation.org/

We are living in a lopsided cyberpunk future, long on high-tech corporate takeover, short of computation seizing. This point is made sharply in JWZ's "Dispatch From The Cyberpunk City," which is beautifully packaged as a Hypercard stack that you run on an in-browser Mac Plus emulator from the Internet Archive:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/09/neuroblast-dispatch-from-the-cyberpunk-city/

Cast your gaze ahead, to the near future: Public space has all but disappeared. Corporate landlords use AI-powered robots to harass the homeless. The robots, built slick and white with an R2-D2 friendliness now most resemble giant butt plugs covered in graffiti and grime.

Science fiction doesn't have to be a warning. It can also be a wellspring of hope. That's what I tried to do with The Lost Cause, my forthcoming Green New Deal novel, which Bill McKibben called "The first great YIMBY novel":

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

Writing a hopeful novel of ecological, social and economic redemption, driven by solidarity, repair, and library socialism, was a powerful tonic against despair in this smoke-smothered, flooded, mosquito-bitten time. And while the book isn't out yet, there are early indications I succeeded, like Kim Stanley Robinson's reaction, "Along with the rush of adrenaline I felt a solid surge of hope. May it go like this."

And now, we have a concurring judgment from The Library Journal, who yesterday published their review, which concludes: "a thought-provoking story, with a message of hope in a near-future that looks increasingly bleak":

https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-lost-cause-2196385

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/30/mesclada/#melange

[scifrey]

Videos to Watch if You Enjoyed "Cling Fast"

How Much Booze Did Medieval People Really Drink? - Dr. Eleanor Janega teaches us how to booze it up, White Horse-style.

Could You Make a Living in Medieval London? - Another great Eleanor Janega video about occupations, scandals, and the every day lives of every day folks in Medieval cities.

What Was Life Really Like For A Medieval Peasant? - the last of the Eleanor Janega videos about what kind of life Hob Gadling would have lived before he met his Stranger.

A Tudor Feast - domestic historians and archeologists Ruth Goodman, Alex Langlands, Peter "Fonz" Ginn and Hugh Beamish - under the supervision of Marc Meltonville of Hampton Court Palace's Tudor kitchens - prepare and serve a tudor banquet at Haddon Hall in Derbyshire. Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four

Who Do You Think You Are: Danny Dyer Learns Tudor Etiquette - A segment from the Ancestry.com series following actor Danny Dyer as he explores his royal roots.

Who Would Be King of England Today According to Henry VIII's Will? - chartmaker Matt Baker takes us through the royal family tree from Henry the Eighth to the present day, if his edict that the next monarch in the event that his three children (Mary, Edward, and Elizabeth) produced no heirs, then the crown should next fall to the children of his youngest sister. And not, as actually happened, go to James of Scotland.

Royal Myths: Elizabeth I and the Spanish Armada - Dr. Lucy Worsley talks us through the propaganda and fibs that have sprung up around Good Queen Bess, and whether or not she really did declare that she had the stomach of a king.

Dancing Cheek to Cheek: The Devil's Work - Another great series by Dr. Lucy Worsley, chief curator of Royal Historic Palaces, but this time she's joined by Strictly Come Dancing's Len Goodman. They trace the history of dance in Britain, and this episode features some rowdy Medieval and Elizabethan numbers.

Turn Back Time: Tudor Monastery Farm - This series sees Ruth, Alex, and Peter return to the Elizabethan age, this time spending a year on a farm worked by peasants and serfs in service to the church.

The Tudors' Bizarre 12 Days Of Christmas Ritual - The Tudor Monastery Farm Christmas special.

Hardwick Hall: A window onto the Elizabethan world - Sheffield Hallam University gives a great look at Hardwick Hall (more glass than wall), the estate home of the wealthiest woman in Britain at the time, and the kind of place Hob would have aspired to build.

Tudor Food & Etiquette Explained in 14 Minutes - Quick and dirty explanation of where your napkin goes and who the 'chairman of the board' was.

Tudor Houses Explained in 10 Minutes - Not particularly engagingly presented, but a video chock full of visual examples of different kinds of Tudor houses and buildings.

Modern History: The Knight - Jason Kingsley introduces us to the concept behind Modern History and in particular their first series, “The Knight”. Jason has been fascinated by history his whole life, in particular the medieval period and the life of knights. (This is the first video of a playlist).

Royal Armouries - Elizabethan Swordsmanship - a demonstration by weaponsmasters at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds. (I recommend turning on closed captioning for this one, as the sound was recorded live with no mics.)

Getting Dressed - Tudor Royal Household - a nice, even-paced and well produced video showing what it was like to get dressed in queen Katherine Parr's household.

Dressing Up a Tudor Man - my personal heroes at Prior Attire show us what the blokes were wearing at the time. Keep in mind that this is 40 years too early for Hob and Dream's disastrous Shakespeare-ruined feast. (I recommend turning on closed captioning for this one, as the sound was recorded live with no mics.)

And just for the fun of it:

Medieval Pickup Lines from the folks behind (I believe?) Whores of Yore, and Top Tudor Historian Rates Famous Movie Scenes, wherein Dr Nicola Tallis, British historian and author of three books on the Tudors, rates scenes from five blockbuster movies set in the Tudor period. (I love how scandalized she gets.)

If you want more, I really recommend anything at all featuring Doctors Lucy Worsley, Eleanor Janega, and Ruth Goodman (search their names on YouTube and you'll find a wealth of clips, full episodes, and even playlists.)

[eccebitch]

We know [Medieval people found religious art sexy] from decidedly hostile witnesses: Protestants. In the early modern period, when a number of Christians broke from the Catholic Church, one of their myriad complaints was about religious images in churches. In 1520 one Protestant in Strasbourg complained, “I often had base thoughts when I looked upon the female saints on the altars. For no courtesan can dress or adorn herself more sumptuously and shamelessly than they nowadays fashion the Mother of God, Saint Barbara, Katherine, and the other saints.”

— Eleanor Janega, The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society (2023)

[dwellordream]

“...It is a certifiable fact that the Islamic world had good medicine on lockdown in the medieval period. One reason for that was the House of Wisdom, or the Great Library of Baghdad, which was established in the eighth century by the Caliph Harun al-Rashid. We’re not sure exactly whether the House of Wisdom was founded as an active learning institution or just a really nice library that had tonnes of good books, but by the reign of Al-Ma’mun it was a public learning institution. We know that in the House of Wisdom they certainly compiled, copied, and disseminated any medical texts they could get their hands on. And here is the thing – they could get their hands on kinda a lot of stuff, actually, because they were positioned between the Eastern Roman Empire, aka Byzantium, and Asia. They were therefore perfectly placed to amalgamate various medical traditions. They worked with the texts of Galen and Hippocrates, which underpinned medieval European ideas of medicine, but also brought in Persian medical tradition including The Vendidad which is one of the world’s earliest medical texts and covers herbal medicine, surgical medicine, and prayer. They were also able to incorporate Indian Ayurvedic traditions. Not only did they have cutting edge medicine, but they also had a range of really great hospitals that you could rock up to and get cared for in. For Islamic rulers endowing a hospital was a big deal, much like supporting monasteries and nunneries (which served the function of hospitals) was for Christian rulers back in Europe. I mean rulers still do this, at least here in the UK.[3] (Yay. Love 2 be a subject.)

This excellent tradition gave birth to one Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi, or al-Razi, or Rahzes if you need the white people version. He, like most of this blog’s important favs (heeeeey Hildegard) was a polymath and wrote something like 200 hundred manuscripts on various topics from medicine to physics, as you do. More to the point for this discussion, he was one of the first people to advocate for experimental medicine, and because he was an alchemist (calm down, it’s like being a chemist, it’s not about making gold) he came up with chemical alcohol and sulfuric acid, very important medical compounds. He was also one of the first people to use humoral theory to differentiate various sicknesses. One of his most famous works specifically did this with measles and smallpox. As if that wasn’t enough, he was also the first person to notice and write about the pupil’s reaction to light. In other words, he was a big fucking medical deal in the early medieval period and doing really serious work. So, yeah this graph is not incorrect there. The early medieval Islamic world was certainly making strides during that extremely specific time period. But here’s a thing that we would call “problematic”: we are here talking about how Islamic medicine was good at the time but for some reason al-Razi, the physician so good that students came from China to learn from him, doesn’t get a mention.[4] Weirdly, and even more appallingly, it also cuts off right before Ibn Sina, aka Avicenna, aka arguably the other most important medieval medical mind is born (c. 980). Ibn Sina was also, you will be unsurprised to learn, a polymath. He worked on everything from astronomy to theology, alchemy and astronomy. What medieval people really lost their minds over were his works The Book of Healing and The Cannon of Medicine two absolutely core texts of medieval medical science. These texts became the standard medical texts even outside of the Islamic world. In European medieval universities like Salerno, and were such important game changers that they remained pretty much the core medical texts into the seventeenth century. As a result, medieval and early modern people would mention him in pretty much the same breath as Galen or Hippocrates. You couldn’t talk about medicine without talking about all of them, which is why the seventeenth-century picture at the top of this post exists.

So yeah, why would this graph do that? Why would it cut off just before introducing one of the biggest medical thinker of the medieval period, and just totally overlook the other? Well, the answer to that is that it is just straight up racist.

You’ll notice that two of the medieval and early-modern big three – Hippocrates and Galen are introduced on this timeline –  as is Aristotle’s tiresome woman-hating ass, but when al-Razi and Ibn Sina remix that work and break new ground that’s not enough to get a shout out. These are the most influential medical thinkers of a thousand-year period, and we’re just not gonna talk about it, apparently.

There is absolutely no reason to leave these men off the chart. But they aren’t because the textbook author needs you to believe that “Islamic physicians make scientific progress that goes unnoticed elsewhere” is a thing. If no one else was listening then why bother learning the names of two fathers of medicine? Well one, because they are important in and of themselves, but also you should probably include them because that statement is not true. I suppose the author is trying to say that “elsewhere” means “outside of the Middle East”, but as al-Razi’s Chinese student could have told you, that certainly wasn’t the case. So who do they mean is ignoring it? Europeans. They mean Europeans. And they are wrong.

Islamic medicine absolutely got into Europe because, as I will never tire of pointing out, in the early medieval period a whoooole big piece of Europe was Islamic. You know, pretty much the entire Iberian peninsula? Al Adaluz? Where women were partying, date palms were growing, and I can absolutely assure you they had Islamic medicine? Yeah, there.  Or how about in Islamic Sicily, where Muslims ruled comfortably from the ninth century until the Normans showed up in the twelfth? (That’s where the term al arrabiata comes from for spicy Sicilian pasta sauces. They are modified Arabic recipes. There you go, your trivia fact of the day.) People were certainly taking notice of Islamic medicine there, but the graph doesn’t want you to consider that because Islamic people were doing it, so it doesn’t count even when it happens in Europe. Even if you are going to go out of your way to ignore the fact that there were whole-ass Islamic European kingdoms indicates, it’s also not like there was no contact between the Islamic and Christian world and that medical tracts didn’t move back and forth. The barriers between Islamic and Christian kingdoms are in flux during this time. Territory and people moved back and forth more or less constantly, and they took things with them when they went. Especially good stuff like advanced medical techniques. Both men’s books show up all over Europe and have even made it as far as back-water England by the late medieval period. Peterborough Abbey alone was bragging about having ten books of al-Razi’s in the fourteenth century.[5] The fact of the matter is that medieval European people were THIRSTY for Islamic medicine and absolutely took notice of what was going on with it. Sure, a lot of that uptake happened after the stated time period, and more generally in the high to late medieval period, but it isn’t like they didn’t know it was happening. Just because not all Europeans had access to Islamic medicine that doesn’t make it an irrelevancy. Not all Americans have access to medicine now, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. (*sips tea*)

So sure this is all racist and wrong, but why does it matter? It matters because a text book leading with the idea that the Early Medieval period was a time of stagnation and ignorance, before casually mentioning the great advances that Islamic medicine made in this period, is staunchly upholding the idea that white people are and always have been the centre of the world. For the author of this text and – one more time – an entire editorial board to write off a whole time period because Europe wasn’t necessarily at the cutting edge of scientific advancement is ridiculous. It is not only European integration of a concept which makes it worth noting.

This mindset is a difficult one to overcome because, fundamentally, it is a belief system that our society perpetuates in order to justify our current world and our own colonial and imperial apologist mindset. And this is how that very specific narrative is perpetuated. It goes unchallenged in peer reviewed textbooks and is passed on to everyone who reads them as an accepted truth that has been rigorously researched. It is no such thing.”

- Eleanor Janega, “On Medical Milestones, Being Racist, and Textbooks, Part I.”

[mariavlc82]

Medieval historian Eleanor Janega ranks women's fashion from the Middles Ages.

[crazy-walls]

"for knights, one of the best things about war is you have an opportunity to capture other knights. because once you do, you can take him back home (...)"

...sounds a little gay to me but i'm here for it

[snkrfnd]

The Deor Hord: An Old English Bestiary by Hana Videen

The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women's Roles in Society by Eleanor Janega

The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe by Martyn Rady

Just got back from my local bookshop! My 8 yr old picked out the 2024 Guinness Book of World Records.

[grison-in-space]

On medieval notions of maidenly beauty:

These images were objects of religious devotion and veneration; people would pray with them, focusing their minds on them, or being reminded of what they had lost with the Fall of Man. While the women had to be beautiful to make the religious point that they were holy, these images were also considered sexy.

We know that from decidedly hostile witnesses: Protestants. In the early modern period, when a number of Christians broke from the Catholic Church, one of their myriad complaints was about religious images in churches. In 1520 one Protestant in Strasbourg complained, “I often had base thoughts when I looked upon the female saints on the altars. For no courtesan can dress or adorn herself more sumptuously and shamelessly than they nowadays fashion the Mother of God, Saint Barbara, Katherine, and the other saints.”

The fact that this unnamed man was turned on by church statues is not only a testament to the human erotic imagination but also funny and instructive. As we have seen, the medieval concept of beauty was painstakingly constructed and repeated ad nauseam down through the centuries, which can make it difficult to ascertain whether the average medieval individual agreed with it. Did most people think small-breasted women with big thighs and pot bellies were beautiful, or was this was just a literary and artistic conceit? This unnamed Protestant’s religious complaint shows that not only did individual men agree with the artistic beauty ideal, but it also turned them on in church.

To be fair, this particular reminiscence does come, as stated, from an antagonistic source. The gentleman in question was trying to make a point about the Catholic Church and the sins that it inspired with its excesses. Protestants were extremely fond of painting churches white and removing all statues. Implying that you used to get distracted and even turned on by images of saints during Mass was a great way to make a point about why it was time to break out the whitewash. However, if he had said he found the church frescos sexy in a social climate that disagreed, it would have been tantamount to admitting a strange fetish to his congregation. As a result, we can take this gentleman at his word and assume that the religious art was, indeed, titillating.

Eleanor Janega, The Once and Future Sex (2023).

I am both giggling my way through this book with great delight and also contemplating the extent to which my body resembles the medieval aesthetic ideal of the almighty golden pear.

[haggishlyhagging]

Part of the reason that we don't tend to think of medieval women as workers is that the major expectation for them was that they would be wives and, crucially, mothers. A young woman, no matter her place in society, spent much of her time preparing for her eventual role as wife and mother in the household of her husband's family. Her parents wanted to ensure that they brought up their daughter in such a way that she would not "be a sore vexation to her bridegroom," as the Church father and theologian John of Chrysostom (347-407) put it. So when a young unmarried woman did receive, say, an education, it was largely tied to investing in her theoretical value as a bride. Well-educated women made for good wives since they could later educate their own children, as we will see. They would also be expected to run their own households, a job that involved fiscal acumen, and in the case of larger households, to manage staff. When a medieval girl was educated, it wasn't necessarily an altruistic activity to better her for her own good. It was a calculated marketing strategy and a means of marking her as an excellent potential mother.

The focus on motherhood and the getting of heirs existed for a number of reasons. As discussed in Chapter 3, for the rich, it was a way of ensuring that the property that a family had amassed would be passed down to a younger generation and their interests would be protected. Poor families needed children not necessarily to safeguard property but to have help on it. In an agricultural society, extra hands to help on the farm were in demand, especially when they didn't have to be paid wages. But regardless of whether you wanted kids to carry on your legacy or to help on the farm, you had to contend with one significant barrier: infant mortality. Children died at an incredibly high rate, not only in the medieval period but up until the twentieth century. At the very lowest, somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of all medieval children under seven died, though some put the mark as high as 50 percent. As a result, families required many more births of children than we are accustomed to in order to ensure viable heirs.

Producing all the heirs that their male relatives demanded put women's lives in real danger, but this danger was an accepted part of their position and calling as wives. The Hali Meidhad or Letter on Virginity, which was written in the English Midlands, acknowledged the pain, danger, and worry of mothers, stating that "in carrying [a child] there is heaviness and constant discomfort; in giving birth to it, the cruelest of all pains, and sometimes death; in bringing it up many weary hours. . . . By God, woman, . . . you should avoid this act above all things, for the integrity of your flesh, for the sake of your body, and for your physical health." The danger and pain—the real labor of childbirth and child rearing—were thus not lost of medieval commentators. This was the job that medieval women were expected to carry out, and it sucked.

Beyond childbirth and -rearing, the position of wife in and or itself implied work. According to Jerome, "Men marry, indeed, so as to get a manager for the house, to solace weariness, to banish solitude." The Letter on Virginity likewise directly challenges the idea that women benefit from subsuming themselves into marriage and motherhood. When a submissive would-be wife states that men's strength is needed for help with work and to secure adequate food, and that wealth is the result of marriage and several healthy children, the Letter asserts that such a picture of marriage deliberately misleads women, and that any advantages that they experience from marriage and motherhood come at too high a personal cost. Marriage, the Letter insists, is not a way of forming a team and enjoying a family but is "servitude to a man." Sugarcoat it one might, but marriage was not a romantic partnership but a contract, in which women signed themselves up for a life of grinding maternal labor as well as work alongside their husbands, for which they would not be acknowledged in historical records.

Medieval women appear as parts of households, or “wives of” named men in historical records. But wives were expected to take on the role of helpmeet and coworker alongside their husbands. Even those who heeded the warnings of the Church and turned from a life of motherhood toward God would find themselves working away inside nunneries. Similarly, single laywomen had to work to get by, and society marked out positions specifically for women who, for whatever reason, were not attached to a household. All these women are worth seeing as workers.

-Eleanor Janega, The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society

[bookpython]

Элеанор Янега: Как выжить женщине в Средневековье. Проклятие Евы, грех выщипывания бровей и спасительное воздержание

Противоречивые требования преследовали средневековых женщин всю жизнь. Женщине следовало быть красивой, но не следовало ничего для этого предпринимать. Ей надлежало блюсти благочестие, но ее считали безнадежно порочной по природе. Они должны были хранить домашний очаг, рожать детей и много работать. Женщины были виноваты во всех бедствиях - от грехопадения Евы до всемирного потопа и чумы. Как же они справлялись со всем этим?

[scifrey]

Thanks for the tag @moorishflower; sorry it took me so long to find time to do it!

Last Song: The Grand Hotel by Regina Spektor

Currently Watching: Catching up on Tasting History, which is no surprise at all to anyone who knows me even a little.

Currently reading: The Regency Book of Drinks: Quaffs, Quips, Tipples, and Tales from Grosvenor Square by Amy Finley (Author), Niege Borges (Illustrator), which is not BAD, just not what I WANTED when I bought it. I thought it would be a book filled with real, actual historical recipes from Regency ballrooms and clubs like Almack's. Instead it is modern bar book (and a very good one for that, with a great introduction to individual spirits and cocktail hardware), and a bunch of pithy asides that directly reference the Bridgerton TV show without going far enough to get sued. It's fine, but disappointing.

I'm also reading Fangirl, Vol. 3: The Manga by Rainbow Rowell (author and adaption), Gabi Nam (Illustrator), which was adapted by the author of the YA novel herself, instead of the very enjoyable @sammaggs. We will see if I find it as compelling when I get further into it...

Current obsession: Historical documentaries by Lucy Worsley, Eleanor Janega, Alice Loxton, Ruth Goodman, etc... I am still on the kick that produced The Hob Adherent Sandman fanfic series, and it's leaked into my rewrite of Time and Tide (which I think has made the manuscript more grounded and historically interesting. But we'll see if my editor agrees when I hand it in at the end of the month.)

Tagging: @anotherwellkeptsecret, @once-upon-a-reblog, @carnelianmeluha, @ibrithir-was-here, @tickldpnk8

[eccebitch]

The fact that [Medieval people found religious art sexually arousing] is not only a testament to the human erotic imagination but also funny and instructive. As we have seen, the medieval concept of beauty was painstakingly constructed and repeated ad nauseam down through the centuries, which can make it difficult to ascertain whether the average medieval individual agreed with it. Did most people think small-breasted women with big thighs and pot bellies were beautiful, or was this was just a literary and artistic conceit? This unnamed Protestant’s religious complaint shows that not only did individual men agree with the artistic beauty ideal, but it also turned them on in church.

— Eleanor Janega, The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society (2023)