The Power of Ideas/ The Power of Language

There's a wonderful, haunting post on a visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC by JJ Cohen at In the Middle. Read it.

I don't have much to add, except to say that perhaps it should serve as a stark reminder of how powerful an idea/ a language is in making people do things -- even things they might not ordinarily do, like humiliate a co-worker they'd formerly respected or walk 4,000 miles to kill some people they'd never met.

Doesn't EVERYONE Prefer Drinking and Whoring?

So, the Middle Ages will soon be on your TV, courtesy of a large amount of $ shelled out by CBS. It's a short article but I'll summarize: kind-of like a medieval Entourage, the story follows 4 friends, one of whom reluctantly becomes king even though he prefers drinking and whoring to "procession and war" (as the article says). I wonder who the historical advisor is on this one? I wonder if that historical advisor told the producers that drinking and whoring were every bit as much a part of being a king as procession and war, despite what Shakespeare wrote about old Henry V?

Anyway, I don't really know what to make of all this, except to say that I'm intrigued but won't get my hopes up...

Rebuilding the Middle Ages

In case you didn't know, The Billings (MT) Gazette is a goldmine for information relating to the recreation/ reimagination of the Middle Ages -- or maybe it's just something about Big Sky country that makes people think of the period. I dunno.

Anyway, a while ago, there was this article about a guy in Laramie, WY, who's rebuilding a "Viking-Age" Mead Hall, complete with carved tribute to King Alfred the Great. More recently, there's another article about a guy in Heron, MT, who's trying to create a whole 17th-century "medieval" village. Now, putting aside the fact that it's debatable whether the 17th century is "really" medieval, the goal, as I understand it, is to create some sort of idyllic commune, where artists and philosophers will mingle in eco-friendly splendor (even if the developer's still hoping to make a buck or 2 off the whole thing). Interesting idea. Strange, but interesting nonetheless.

Then, all of this made me think of another article I read a while ago, an article about how the Middle Ages are big in Belgium. Much like the SCA or Civil War reenactors here in the US, many Belgians apparently spend their weekends living as if they were in the Middle Ages (I also had no idea that carrots were spawn of the devil, although many children have probably been on to that fact for some time). Oh, and there's also a medieval theme park beginning construction somewhere in Colorado and, of course, Medieval Times dinner-theater, but the proposed theme park in Canterbury was shot down.

Now, where in the heck did all of this come from? More often than not, "medieval" is a kind of dirty word -- the way it's spat out by Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction. It means darkness, dirt, and ignorance. Probably, the rehabilitation of the Middle Ages has something to do with this quotation from Ivonne Janssens of Aarschot, Belgium: "[Life] was far less stressful in the Middle Ages, because there were no phones and no vacuum cleaners."

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Sorry, that was my head hitting the keyboard.

I think that's also what's going on with the recreated medieval village in MT -- an idyllic, eco-friendly, social utopia. Because, you know, that's what the Middle Ages were. I certainly spend a good amount of time in my teaching trying to convince my students that the Middle Ages weren't all violence and ignorance. There was literature, art, scientific advancement, philosophy -- and great names are too numerous to list.

Nevertheless, I still think it's difficult to escape that fact that the Middle Ages were not a particularly nice time and certainly not a time I would choose to live in, if I indeed had that choice. If Ms. Janssens so likes the Middle Ages (and I don't mean to pick on her so specifically), perhaps she should spend some time in Darfur or the Congo or someplace similar because there you could really replicate what much of Europe experienced -- crushing poverty, endemic disease, and lives subject to the whims of a caste of self-serving warlords who can (more-or-less) rape and pillage at will. Undeniably, that's the Middle Ages too. Dan Reff's great recent book, Plagues, Priests, and Demons, reminds us all that real things happened to real people in the past. Often its too easy to read a text, even something so spare as a set of annals, and abstract what was going on. Yeah, it may be neat to be a 13th-century duke or duchess but only if you get to go home at the end of the day, if you get to see a doctor when you get sick, if you get to stop at the grocery store on your way home, and if the other pretend magnate down the street is committed to the illusion and uses the flat of his sword when he tries to take your land.

Literacy and Underwear

Apparently, wearing underwear led to an increase in literacy. The commenters on that post point out that this is not a particularly new claim, even if they have to cite Barbara Tuchman's book on the Black Death. It seems rather silly, all-in-all, but I guess there might be a kernel of truth there somewhere. At the very least, it's an interesting story to tell undergraduates...

Anyway, there is a interesting argument there though. Which was more influential in the rapid increase in books and hence, the argument goes, the rise in literacy: the press or the paper -- the chicken or the egg, if you will? Personally, I don't think you can really chalk this all up to technological innovation/ development, since you have to get people to want to read first. Creating a society that values the written word is a much larger step. There's a great story about your friend and mine (and Jeff's), Charlemagne, who tried to learn to write, even keeping tablets under his pillow to practice before bed, but never could master it. Well, probably a lot of that is simply because he didn't need to. Now, fast forward to the 14th century, and you have all sorts of reasons to be able to read and write -- managing your books if you're a merchant, keeping records of your property if you're a landowner, etc.

So, my question is, what kind of literacy is relevant today? I mean, what do you need to know to be literate in today's society. Is it still books? I don't think so. What about computers or TV? Apparently, to be an academic, you need to watch South Park (even though I don't -- I prefer The Family Guy). Is that the key? How would you recommend something of (the good parts of) our culture?