There have been a range of good things on the web as usual, but a great number of them have already been accumulated by Judith Weingarten in the latest Carnivalesque! So, instead, let me just follow up on an earlier post by saying, that Bad History series I mentioned is to continue, and it is inviting submissions. I would absolutely love for some of the discerning heavyweight medievalists who sometimes read this little screed here to weigh in on this. I think this is a kind of popular outreach we can all enjoy; I certainly have a candidate myself which I’ll try and put together in the next few days. And, after all, the last time someone did this there was a book in it after a while…
(Hat tips to Cliopatria and archy.)
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29 December 2009 at 13:55
It does look like fun. Nothing springs to mind, but I’ll look into it if something occurs…
Not that I’m heavyweight by any stretch of the imagination. :P
29 December 2009 at 14:27
Well, in terms of actual body mass neither are several of the people I was thinking of, but they punch above.
One contender, although not as far as I know by a reader of mine: this article by Paul Freedman, on the use of spices in the Middle Ages, pointing out the obvious thing that they were far harder to afford than fresh meat so wouldn’t have been used to disguise rotten food. Weirdly, just after a similar piece got plugged at About.com’s medieval history blog. Great minds think alike, presumably…
31 December 2009 at 21:00
The big problem for medievalists is that History and Policy are really looking for historical myths that actually affect current political arguments/policies. So they’re not going to be interested in our outrage about Vikings with horned helmets and the like.
In the UK the collapse of a historical reference frame from before 1939 means that policymakers/commentators don’t tend to use medieval myths to justify anything. And the two myths that spring to mind aren’t really areas I know enough about myself to write on. One is the claim that the medieval warm period shows C21 global warming is natural. The other, which a historian of early medieval Islam might be best placed to deal with is, is the claim that the problem with Islam is there is no separation of church and state, whereas I think they had some aspects of this much earlier than Christianity.
Mind you, the last person I read claiming that the rise of the West was principally due to its separation of the church and state was a history professor, so maybe we need a Bad Historian column as well.
2 January 2010 at 17:12
There is no theoretical separation of religion and state under Islam but quite a lot of medieval Islamic military leaders found it convenient to make sure the Caliph was well separated from anything like government. I don’t know how readily that translates to the modern era. The whole schtick about jihād, though, could definitely use patches centuries across knocked out of it.
Ironically, I already have something about the medieval warm period in the pipeline but hadn’t thought about it for this purpose, mainly because I’m keenly aware I don’t have enough of a grasp of the science to understand all of the ways it’s been used. (The piece concentrates on the idiot knee-jerk ones.) I’d have thought your obvious stance was preconceptions about the sexuality of women, and how many of ours are Victorian not medieval. I realise that this may mean messing with the Equilibrium, but you’ve certainly addressed such themes before in passing…
14 January 2010 at 15:39
[...] Peter Reynolds | Leave a Comment Let me try this non-aggressive corrective thing again. I posted a little while ago to the effect that I had one piece of bad history I’d like to contribute to the pile of [...]