[241/366] The good medieval place

[cosmolinguist]

I read a fun article today from an actual medievalist who's very excited about one slightly spoilery bit of The Good Place. Personally I think the number 521 was just picked for being suitably large and random, but this person has picked it up and run with it. So we can read about how "good" the Middle Ages were -- it wasn't actually as much less complex as we often think. Is a modern Doug buying his modern grandmother modern roses really less ethical than its medieval counterpart?

And the act of growing roses also has an ethical class-based dimension. Roses, perhaps even more then than now, were symbols of luxury and conspicuous consumption at the end of the Middle Ages. Roses were grown in huge quantities, not just because they were pretty, but to meet the incredible demand among the aristocracy for rose water (used, both then and now, as perfume and to flavor food). Mia Touw, in her article for Economic Botany, “Roses in the Middle Ages,” notes that in medieval Persia, an extensive rose industry sprang up to meet the incredible demand of rich people’s noses and tongues. This was big business—rose water was exported en masse reaching as widely as Spain and China. So if roses were such an in-demand luxury, wouldn’t it be better to sell the roses and give the money to the poor?

And even discounting this, who is to say that Douglass did not exploit labor? If Doug is wealthy enough to own a pleasure garden with roses in it, it is absolutely likely that he has tenant subsistence farmers laboring on his lands.

And there's a lot more to the blog post, about the medieval Christian points system as evidenced in the "penitential" genre of medieval literature, which told priests what kind of penances to assign to different sins. Which always included "Weird Sex Stuff," so anyone telling you that e.g. homosexuality didn't exist until modern times is definitely ill-informed because same-sex stuff got a lot of attention in things like the penitentials.

Comments

[davidgillon]

so anyone telling you that e.g. homosexuality didn't exist until modern times is definitely ill-informed because same-sex stuff got a lot of attention in things like the penitentials.

Never mind the whole Theban Sacred Band pushing it back to the 4th Century BC.

[cosmolinguist]

Oh yes but the Christians who like to pontificate about their homophobia write off that whole pre-Christian era as a time of heathens and sin so to some people it's a much bigger deal that medieval Christendom also involved same-sex stuff.

[polyfrazzlemented]

But I bet you can’t guess the one act in this catalogue of smut that gets the worst condemnation. The one act called “the worst of evils”, which carries a penance “to the end of life”:

Qui semen in os miserit.

In other words, taking semen in the mouth.

That actually means the opposite: "miserit" is the perfect subjunctive of "mitto, mittere", so this means "who has released semen into the mouth."

[silveradept]

That was a fun read, thank you, and my degreed-medievalist self is always thrilled when someone goes "oh, honey, things were far more complex than the picture you get in popular literature."