People making up ahistorical shit about the medieval period to make them seem like backwards religious fanatics is far older than tiktok. Every medievalist or early modernist I know has to start their classes by dragging their students through the basics of "no, the world wasn't backwards and then suddenly reasoned because of the renaissance."
It is a general problem with a lack of respect for historians.
> It saddens me greatly if it's all been whitewashed down to "Dark Ages wrongspeak, Early Middle Ages rightspeak" and "Middle Ages backwards, Renaissance forwards" today because that is so grossly worthless.
It always is alarming how often you see people say "smart people don't say X anymore, smart people say Y now," and a large segment of people jumps on board without any critical thought. It's not that criticism of the term is entirely without merit, but such criticism could be applied to all simplistic labels for historical epochs. Yet you don't see people take such issue with terms like "Bronze Age Collapse," because these comments aren't coming from a consistent intellectual framework, but rather from people mindlessly repeating a shibboleth.
I found that article completely infuriating. I am not a young person, and I can tell you that I have never heard anything like the "myth" that the article posits. I'm sure that the actual historical Renaissance doesn't live up to the myths of cultural rebirth, but I have literally never heard anyone say anything about life expectancy, or lack of plague. If anything, when I picture the Renaissance, I picture it happening against a backdrop of wars between the Italian city-states, in an era of advances of military technology. To pick a pop culture example of this is "Da Vinci's Demons", which begins with Da Vinci inventing some kind of super-gun for use in a war within Italy.
Seeing this kind of fake myth constructed before my very eyes has made me wonder how many of these stories of "People used to think this stupid thing, but now we know better" I've fallen for over the years.
> Fletcher’s more substantive aim of exhibiting the “terror” lying behind the “beauty” of the Italian Renaissance is in my view less successful. First of all, although awestruck tourists might marvel at the beauty of Italy’s art and architecture without much sense of the blood and suffering that accompanied it (unless, of course, they watched Showtime’s series The Borgias, in which case they would have a sensationalized view), no scholar of the period would be surprised. In this regard, Fletcher is jousting with something of a strawman, or at least a largely mid-19th-century gossamer version of the Renaissance.
Straw man indeed. As a layperson, I didn’t imagine Renaissance Europe to be an abrupt transition from medieval to 21st century living standards or political stability. Of course there were atrocities and quality of life was dramatically poorer and more brutish than it is today. What would be remarkable to my lay mind is some interpretation of that brutishness as a development or consequence of enlightenment developments (as opposed to an extension of medieval conditions); however, I doubt such a case can credibly be made.
If it was just about overblown myths of a rebirth of classical knowledge, then that would be one thing. But the post claims that a bunch of myths of everyday life in the Renaissance that simply don't exist.
That was not my point. My point is criticizing the revisionism surrounding the origins of the Renaissance and creating a more realistic measure of merit around the central figures of it.
> that the 'dark ages were not dark' is in this day and age a revisionist argument aimed at diminishing the role and impact of the European Renaissance
What's your evidence for this claim?
> this topic is (unexpectedly) political presently
Reading texts critically, thinking about the context that produced them, and debating the author's rhetorical strategies has a lot more to do with Renaissance humanism than with postmodernism. Simply reading all historical texts with the expectation that the author meant to tell the facts and nothing but leads to the acceptance of frauds like the Donation of Constantine:
But there was more: by claiming that the Renaissance—and all its glittering art and innovation—was caused by individualism, Burkhardt was really advancing a claim about the nature of modernity.
All the text is an ellaborate argument against this. He's framing it as if it's a historic simplification to promote this value.
Why is it a fallacy? Because Renaissance was brought by a number of factors and several of them had in common that they were more on the individualism side than what existed in the middle ages.
So what does he does to undermine this wide consensus? He invents some conspiration to appropiate Renaissance spirit, idealize it and use it to promote some agenda. That's called projection, BTW.
Middle ages weren't so bad? In what sense? If you take it to mean material life conditions, it could be right. But it was a millenium with an oppresive military/theocratic system that for the most part stalled all progress in the western world.
When the civilization started to get rid of that yoke of course it caused bloodbaths, revolutions and all kind of disasters.
Question is, would have been it better to keep the old regime around?
> The Renaissance happened in Europe. What non-white voices are you adding to that?
This is a perfect example. People respond to even basic expansion of viewpoints with incredulity.
First, I mentioned women. Gender analysis in mainstream history academia has developed a lot over the last 30 years. "There weren't any women" doesn't pass even a casual glance like "there weren't any poc" does for a renaissance course.
Second, although white voices are obviously the dominant voices of the renaissance, it is important to understand that cross-national communication networks existed during the early-modern era. The story of the introduction of coffee to europe is a classic one where analysis has traditionally focused on the europeans involved but this failed to consider that both sides of the trade were essential to the story. Since it is the renaissance, obviously art and architecture play a huge role. But art and architecture travel between nations and you can't tell the full story of european renaissance art without considering the turks (and others).
I feel for the poor researcher that wrote "Until then, Heege’s work survives as a “vestige of medieval life lived vibrantly: the good times being as good as they ever have been, and probably ever will,” according to the study."
I can see this now being downvoted. Sadly, we still have some medieval revisionists also in 2016!
Please take some time to read more on the subject rather than to just say "this never happened" just because you don't like it (i.e: revisionism).
What I posted was a way to challenge the western view of "we figured it all out ourselves", where in reality, we borrowed inspiration from many cultures and then erased the ones we didn't like from history.
Crediting the right people for their achievements is fundamental for being a real meritocracy. A racist theocentric revisionist view of the world is not a meritocracy.
One should be aware reading it that the 'dark ages were not dark' is in this day and age a revisionist argument aimed at diminishing the role and impact of the European Renaissance in shaping our modern art and culture.
Not saying that this particular article is necessarily an example, just wanted to bring an attention to the fact that the this topic is (unexpectedly) political presently and everything presented on it might turn out to be as neutral and scientific as reporting on other hot-button issues of today.
I don't mind character switches and such in media, but reaching a point in conversation like the one above, where the comment I'm replying to is asking everyone to RTFM history books to discover this supposedly hidden massive diversity in the Middle Ages is frankly, just a bad comment.
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