Medieval Times

Thanks that looks interesting I will investigate.

xpost i don't think the plague killed 1/3 of humanity (more like 1/6 or 1/5); a bit more than 1/3 of european population, though, for sure.

i've always wondered how the plague managed to "skip" a chunk of europe near contemporary poland and ukraine.

Colder climate, lesser flea population? or just more landlocked?

very low population density would have inhibited transmission

there probably wasn't a lot to choose between being in mediaeval ukraine vs being dead

they probably had decent potato DUMPLINGS!?

why did ilx just capitalize and add a "!?" to that last word?

let me try that again... DUMPLINGS!

interesting.

potato?

have you never seen DUMPLINGS! amateurist

because https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DUMPLINGS!_%28film%29

lol wow it even breaks links

um okay it's a movie

this is sort of like pee-wee's word of the day

DUMPLINGS!

"there probably wasn't a lot to choose between being in mediaeval ukraine vs being dead"

I reckon that 1930-33 period of famine in Ukraine was probably very terrible, slow death in famine is always the worst. Better off dying from brutal violence than famine imo. And also there was lots of brutal violence, casual rape and murder going on in this period.

vlacil's films the valley of the bees, about some wandering teutonic knights, and especially his deranged blood feud story marketa lazarova are worth seeing if eastern european mediaeval grimness appeals

it isn't what I was waffling on about but they both look very good!

waffling on about DUMPLINGS!

Ha, that's fun!

marketa lazarova is so good

marketa lazarova is so good

It's fantastic! More immersive than the theme restaurants, too.

yeah i love a film that can provide such a total, enveloping vision of a world (and a moral order) that's so foreign to our own

another film like that is the much more obscure "fall of otrar," a kazakh film from the moment of the soviet union's collapse. it's about the mongol conquest.

i also like how vlacil uses all the stylistic and narrative innovations of the 1960s new waves to try to evoke the animist, superstitious worldview of the characters in the film. i guess i group it w/ "fall of otrar" and (as everyone says) "andrei rublev" b/c they all feel somehow both epic and oppressively claustrophic.

er, claustrophobic

I recently started reading The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000 by Chris Wickham. Seems like a good survey of the first half of the middle ages, by a writer up to date on Medieval scholarship.

also, this series of more academic books seems interesting:

http://www.palgrave.com/series/the-new-middle-ages/NMAG/

i've read the first few chapters of Inheritance of Rome, it was good stuff, cdn't remember the title so thanks

Hadn't heard of The Fall of Otrar before, if its anything like Rublev or Vlacil sign me up.

"there probably wasn't a lot to choose between being in mediaeval ukraine vs being dead"

I reckon that 1930-33 period of famine in Ukraine was probably very terrible, slow death in famine is always the worst. Better off dying from brutal violence than famine imo. And also there was lots of brutal violence, casual rape and murder going on in this period.

― xelab, Saturday, February 28, 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There is an account of the '33 famine in Grossmann's Forever Flowing too.

was reading fossier the axe and the oath a while back which is pretty eccentric but good at giving a picture of regular people getting married, laughing at blind ppl, their sense of time, their households, the constant looming fear of the plague etc.

Terry Jones of Monty Python fame has done some really interesting material revisioning Medieval material to something a lot more realistic. His Chaucer's Knight takes what was apparently a symbol of great chivalry for several centuries into the rather farcical figure the same character would have been viewed as in Chaucer's time.
He also did a BBC series of Medieval lives based around archetypal character types. Very worth looking at I thought. Really enjoyed watching it.
I think there have been several other BBC series by other people over the last 5 or 10 years that have re-envisioned what was [probably actually thought by somebody of the time rather than the received version which has been refracted heavily by historical perspective in the interim. Inside the Medieval; Mind from around 2010 comes to mind and i think I've seen a few others. Though matybe they have been more about the upper echelons of society for the most part. Histories of various Queens etc showing that women could hold power or at least heavily influence it.

Hadn't heard of The Fall of Otrar before, if its anything like Rublev or Vlacil sign me up.

it's just as good, honestly. i know martin scorsese has repped for it after seeing it at a festival in the early 90s. sadly it's almost completely impossible to see... a print circulated by seagull films a few years ago, but the only VHS i know looks atrocious and doesn't have subtitles. so you'll probably have to wait a while to see it.

Thanks for the rare earth books and movies recommendations on this thread good people.

i guess i group it w/ "fall of otrar" and (as everyone says) "andrei rublev" b/c they all feel somehow both epic and oppressively claustrophic.

I think that feeling of claustrophobia in the two I've seen (Rublev and Marketa) is more subject than style, since they take such different approaches to the latter. It's the ignorance and desperation closing in on the characters. I get the same feeling from The Passion of Joan of Arc.

And, yeah, thanks for the tip about Otrar. I'll be on the lookout.

well it's also the way the narratives seem to cycle between a few locations... like no matter how far the characters go, they seem to return again and again to the same environments.

A package of 3 books by/on Paracelsus arrived yesterday! I will probably hit this thread up again once I make some progress with "The Devil's Doctor".

Reading about Anabaptist, who sound like communist/anarchist medieval Christians. Communes and cult leaders. Peasant revolts. Crazy stuff!

Organized religion was more or less the mafia. The Indulgences thing is straight up Godfather. All the water was polluted by the medieval versions of corporations, so everyone drank beer or wine. Most revolts were suppressed through keeping the populace literally drunk, as well as over-taxed and mal-nourished. Companies in control of grain (which made up most of the diet, hunting/meat/protein being forbidden to the poor) did Wall Street-style speculation and market manipulation. A monolithic banking family known as The Fuggers controlled most of the markets, and even loaned money to people bribing their way into politics/church. The more thing's change...

so many groups of the medieval heretic movements sound great, i quite fancy becoming a cathar

you might be interested in this: the pursuit of the millennium ...been looking for a copy myself for a quite awhile, supposed to be very good.

Gordon Leff's Heresy in the Later Middle Ages also good - a bit drier but strong on structures + dynamics of heresy & spiritual reform

(never finished it though, must see to that. Took the tip from Helen DeWitt)

I don't really think of anabaptists as medieval fwiw - blurry period lines & everything, but they aren't really a distinct thing till the reformation.

Yes, The Pursuit of the Millennium has all manner of craziness in it, for instance the sect who didn't believe in wearing clothes... I think that was in Bohemia, which seems to have been quite the place back in the day. So many crazy Germans too.

Sorry to diverge from this thread-repurposing but I was just wondering about this post from the original thread:

lol buena park. all the other locations are in real places.

― dance cook (get bent), Sunday, 7 August 2011 05:36 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

What's the deal with Buena Park?

if you like radical religious cults and sects World Turned Upside Down is required reading!

getting far from the middle ages, but I've been dipping into Richard Greaves's Deliver us from Evil, about the where the radical underground went after the Restoration. It's good, feels more coherent and more readable than Hill's Experience of Defeat.

Just watched "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" for the first time in ages. AMAZING

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7qT-C-0ajI

"I told you, we're an Anarcho-Syndacalist Commune!" So so great! I did not get this joke when I was a kid.

Half this movie is fantasy ridiculousness, the other half extremely cutting historical satire.

I am almost done with "The Devil's Doctor", which has been a pretty amazing book. Right now I am near the end of Paracelsus's life, where he is sort of wandering around, getting banished from towns for madness, alchemy, or necromancy. He has spent his life as an iconoclast, which has turned many against him, making him even more bitter, wild, and ecstatic in his approach. Physical medicine during the medieval ages was so horrific -- often the cure was worse than the symptom -- that mental health was barely a concern. The mentally unstable were feared for being transmitters of diseases both real (the plague) and imaginary (demonic possession). Millenarians and Flagellants and other apocalyptic Christian cults traveled from town to town generally freaking out a populace that was dying off at a rate that would be extremely alarming to us today.

The peak of the activity was during the Black Death, then called the Great Death, which began around 1347. Spontaneously Flagellant groups arose across Northern and Central Europe in 1349, except in England. The German and Low Countries movement, the Brothers of the Cross, is particularly well documented - they wore white robes and marched across Germany in 33.5 day campaigns (each day referred to a year of Jesus's earthly life) of penance, only stopping in any one place for no more than a day. They established their camps in fields near towns and held their rituals twice a day. The ritual began with the reading of a letter, claimed to have been delivered by an angel and justifying the Flagellants' activities. Next the followers would fall to their knees and scourge themselves, gesturing with their free hands to indicate their sin and striking themselves rhythmically to songs, known as Geisslerlieder, until blood flowed. Sometimes the blood was soaked up in rags and treated as a holy relic.

In Germany they claimed they could resurrect emperor Frederick II, who would bring an age of social justice. Konrad Schmidt claimed to be Frederick and baptised himself in the blood of his followers. His Thuringian rebels left their worldly occupations and prayed preparing the Judgment Day for 1369. The Inquisition burnt him before he could go on with his plans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagellant

his brother sleep is even more annoying:

skeleton, england, 15th century pic.twitter.com/o9QJOQxayu

— weird medieval guys (@WeirdMedieval) July 2, 2022

I thought this was going to be about the chain theme restaurant, where they employees are currently unionizing!!! Have seen the slogan suggestion "Jousting for jobs!" at least once already. Here for it.

smirking death supports the medieval union

that 5th from bottom line looks like it reads "I shit you so glad"