#medieval context
This election should not surprise anyone who teaches history. I teach medieval and early modern history at several unis in London.
The study of history in these eras shows us very clearly that Western society is built for white male protestant property owners.
This same society has been built over the bodies of black and brown people, and kept whites without property deliberately marginalised. Within it, the role of women has always been to be scapegoats for the worst of male excess, and vessels for sexual gratification/the getting of heirs.
You should not, therefore, be surprised to see a misogynist racist ruling what has always been a white supremacist society.
As historians, it is our job to show our students the roots of this society - SHOW them the thought processes that have built our world.
Today I am teaching two seminars - one on courtly love, one on the rise of Protestantism.
So - for courtly love we are going to discuss how noble society built a) the concept of women as objects to be admired and desired and b) we’ll talk about the concept of upper class men being entitled to the bodies of lower class women. I’ve talked about the concept of courtly love, the rape of poor women and Trump before here, of course, and we’ll expand on that.
We’ll also talk about how this concept plays out in pop culture, and how we romanticise the *idea* of women, but hate their sexual autonomy. In particular we’ll talk, like I have on this blog, about Hot Line Bling, and how Drake reuses concepts of courtly love. We’ll talk about how society is still pushing for a quiet, sexually cowed woman to be controlled by more powerful men, not only in the realm of politics, but in pop culture.
We’ll talk about how it has ALWAYS been this way and that electing a man who brags about dominating women is nothing new.
In my early modern class I am teaching the Reformation. We will use this as an opportunity to discuss the glorification of the individual white male and his theoretical ability to speak for God.
The Reformation argues for the ability of individual white males to interpret the Bible for themselves, and therefore God’s will. Granted, before the Reformation the Church - a group of white males - interpreted God’s words. After the Reformation, however, every individual white man is told that he has the wherewithal to understand God, with or without training.
That no one needs to be educated and learn to interpret allegory is underscored by a movement away from Latin. Latin needs to be taught to people. In the vernacular, any uneducated person can read the Bible, and interpret it for themselves. In the Reformation we see the enshrining of the individual uneducated white male’s opinion. White men now speak for God. What is more, white men don’t need to speak any language other than their own. There is no need to find common ground with others.
We are all just living in the continuation of this world. A world that is built around the lionisation of mediocre white men with money. This is our job as historians - to show this. To show our students how we got here and how we are STILL here.
If you haven’t been connecting the study of history to the present day with your students, you’ve been doing it wrong. Those who study history are unsurprised by Trump’s election, and the racism and sexism in America, because it was always there. It has always and ever been present in the Western world as a whole, and is on even further display in a country which was created to enshrine the desires of a group of slave-holding white men.
Go wake your students up. Teach them the history, point them in the direction of things like the Ferguson Syllabus. Give them the tools. This is our job. This is the work. History matters. Tell your students how the world was made this way, and how they can change it.
(This post is a re-condensed tweetstorm. Interested parties can get this stuff 140 characters at a time here.)
Yesterdaywe discussed, again, why it is that the use of the word ‘medieval’ as a pejorative is, in general, quite lazy and a convenient way of distancing ourselves from the terrible things which take place in our own time.
Having said that, the medieval world still very much influences many of our political institutions, and our mind-sets. If we consider, for example, that the Church and a universal concept of the West as the home of Christendom to be the overriding hallmarks of the medieval period, it helps us understand why for many people, theoretical Christian values are seen as an inherent part of being Western.
Bearing this in mind, we can say that Trump, inadvertently or not, has indeed hit upon something that we can certainly say has medieval roots – his assumption of power over women’s bodies due to his status.
We’ve discussed courtly love on severaloccasions on this blog before, and in particular we’ve discussed one Andreas Capellanus. His major work, De Amore, was written in the same sort of style as Ovid’sArs Amatoria, and is a series of instructions about love addressed to a young man at court. It functions, essentially, as a framework within which chivalric romance was to take place. Amongst other things, Capellanus, explains how it is that love responds to absence, how love is to be attained, and how love is to be conducted.
At court, Capellanus advocates that lovers conduct their affairs cerebrally, for to consummate love at court would mean damaging the reputation of the women involved. Best then to write letters and share moody glances, for ‘neither a previously undefiled maiden, nor a widow, or married woman can experience any injury from such love…’. In a world where marriage is about property exchange, and in which sexual liaisons were considered, literally, damning, Capellanus advocated for restraint in love towards nobel ladies.
Capellanus also advocated that young courtiers rape women of lower status.
More specifically, Capellanus felt that young courtiers should ‘praise [peasant women] lavishly’, if they found the girls attractive, and encouraged them to ‘not delay in taking what you seek, gaining it by rough embraces. You will find it hard so to soften their outwardly brusque attitude as to make them quietly agree to grant you embraces, or permit you to have the consolations you seek, unless the remedy of at least some compulsion is first applied to take advantage of their modesty.’
This dichotomy – that one must respect ladies of the court, but can take literal possession of the bodies of lower class women – is played out in Trump’s own treatment of women. He is able to refer to himself as ‘a gentleman’, whilst simultaneously advocating for sexual assault because he sexually assaults women who he considers to be his social inferiors: women who are at work and can’t complain when an old guy with a mouth full of Tic Tacs shoves his tongue down their throats; women who are not famous; thirteen year old girls with no social connections. They do not need to be deferred to because they are not in the same social circle as Trump. He need not ‘delay in taking what [he] seeks.’
This is, of course, fucking horrifying. It’s also deeply ingrained enough in Western Culture that Trump’s supporters (who he still fucking HAS somehow), are here to tell you "… this is what guys talk about when [women are] not around. So if you’re offended by it, grow up. And by the way, this is what you guys [women] talk about over white wine when you have your brunches, so take it easy with your phony outrage. This is the way the world works. It’s not a big thing.’
This is, indeed, the way the world works, and has been working since Capellanus committed ink to parchment. It is called rape culture, and it is seriously medieval. Not that we’re doing any better.
At Going Medieval, we are loath to wade in on the whole Trump thing, as it is best not to dignify sentient dumpster fires with a response.
This guy though - this fucking guy - whilst attempting to draw attention away from that one time he got caught bragging about sexually assaulting women, (it is assumed that he’s done it plenty of times whilst not being caught), declared that the current state of the world ‘…is like medieval times, we haven’t seen anything like this - the carnage all over the world’.
Presuming that Trump is not referring to Medieval Times - that fake jousting restaurant - this sort of idiocy is squarely in the Going Medieval wheelhouse, and we are forced to respond.
Using ‘medieval’ as a pejorative in this instance is profoundly lazy and dangerous, because it allows people to distance themselves from the horrors of the world as it currently exists whilst also throwing an entire millennium under the bus. The terrible things that this bloviating comb-over is referring to are happening squarely in and as a result of modern, and indeed neo-liberal, political instability.
In the medieval period there were not roving gangs of ultra-religious Muslims killing those that the perceived to be not devout enough. (Do keep in mind that according to the U.S. National Counter-terrorism Center the victims of between 82 and 97% of religiously motivated terror attacks are Muslim.) In the medieval period, in fact, the Islamic world was experiencing what was referred to as The Islamic Golden Age, a period of extreme stability that was characterised by prodigious development in the arts, sciences, and economic development. This was not a time of barbarous cultural self-immolation.
If, in fact, the literal-embodiment-of-rape-culture-who-is-somehow-a-legitimate-presidential-candidate was instead referring to the world being in a state of war, or in the midst of violent conflict as ‘medieval’, I would urge him to check the numbers.
Did wars happen during the medieval period? Well it was a thousand year or so stretch of time, so, yeah. Wars did not happen with any greater frequency during this time period, however, and they in no way carried the death toll that modern war does. If you compare the death tolls of various wars, you will see the Mongol Conquests as a comparatively bloody conflict, but they took place over a period of about 120 years, and still are dwarfed by the death tolls of WWII, which managed to kill about five million more people despite only lasting six years. How, then, is medieval military conflict more barbaric than those wars which take place in the modern era?
In fact, take a look at that death toll list one more time. Of the 28 most deadly wars, all but five take place in the modern era. The whole-sale slaughter of people in wars is, therefore, not a medieval phenomenon, but a modern one.
This guy - this walking example of white male privilege - in fact gives the game away in his own moronic comment. Something cannot simultaneously be ‘medieval’ and something which we have never seen. If something hasn’t been seen before it is a modern construct, not medieval.
When people refer to things they find unpleasant as ‘medieval’ it allows them to keep the horror at arm’s length without responding to the ways that our society now has created them. It gives us as inhabitants of the modern period a way of saying that we and our decisions are not responsible for or engaged in these practices.
Modern people do and are doing terrible things. Humanity is not engaged in a linear march away from barbarism.
To call terrible things medieval is to deny that humans now are capable of unimaginable horror.
Then again, I suppose that these sort of denials are de rigueur for Trump.
