High Middle Ages Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Jesus Had a Vagina (According to Medieval Christian Mysticism)

About a month ago, a whole host of right-wing media outlets, including The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the New York Post, NBC Montana, and Fox News, published a flurry of wildly sensationalist articles claiming that a dean at the University of Cambridge said that Jesus was transgender. As Candida Moss, a scholar of the New Testament and early Christianity who is the Edward Cadbury Professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham, points out in this article she wrote for The Daily Beast, however, and as I will discuss further in the first section of this post, this claim is entirely false; the dean in question actually said no such thing.

At the center of this controversy, however, stands a very strange and fascinating fact, which is well known to scholars and students of medieval western European art and mysticism, but which is not well known to the general public. As bizarre and improbable as it may sound, medieval western European Christians frequently depicted the wound that Jesus is said to have received in his side on the cross in a manner closely resembling a vulva. Although scholars disagree about what exactly these depictions indicate, most agree that the medieval people who made them and venerated them were conscious of this resemblance. In this post, I will explore the history of these depictions and what they may tell us about late medieval gender and sexuality.

Why Are Some Names Used in the ‘Iliad’ Used in English Today While Others Are Not?

If you have ever read the Iliad, you have probably noticed that there are many characters in it who have names that are not commonly used as given names in countries that are predominantly English-speaking today. I’m talking about names like Agamemnon, Menelaos, Patroklos, Idomeneus, Hekabe, Andromache, and so forth. Meanwhile, there are also names like Alexandros, Helene, Hektor, and Kassandra that are still used today in Anglicized forms like Alexander, Helen, Hector, and Cassandra. Many people have wondered why some of these names are commonly used today in English, while others of them are not.

As it turns out, the vast majority of the names that are used in the Iliad have never been widely used in English, but a handful of these names have passed into English through various channels, mostly not through the Iliad itself. Of all the names of characters in the Iliad, the two that have been in continuous use as names for people in English the longest are Alexander and Helen, which passed from Greek into Latin and from Latin into English very early due to both of these names having been held by particularly famous and revered ancient figures. The names Hector and Cassandra first passed into English a bit later via the medieval “Matter of Rome” (i.e., the corpus of romances based on ancient Greek and Roman stories), but they didn’t become popular until the eighteenth century.

Why Were Women Prohibited from Fighting in Most Ancient Societies?

Someone on Quora recently asked the question “Is there a real reason why ancient armies didn’t have female soldiers, or was it just sexism?” This question immediately triggered a whole flurry of defensive replies from various male military history buffs proclaiming all the reasons why women are supposedly naturally unsuited for ancient warfare and why it was supposedly perfectly logical for ancient militaries to exclude women.

The most upvoted answer to the question is this one, written by a man named Alex Mann, arguing that women are naturally physically shorter, weaker, and smaller than men, that pregnancy and menstruation would hinder them from fighting, and that they would be an overall detriment to any ancient army. The answer currently has 2,722 upvotes and hundreds of comments, many of them showering praise on the author for his supposed clarity and perceptiveness.

Other men have provided answers drawing similar conclusions. The arguments that these men present, however, are demonstrably quite shoddy. In this essay, I intend to demonstrate that there is, in fact, no logical reason for an army to have a rule categorically excluding all women and that the real reason why women were excluded from ancient militaries is indeed simply sexism.

Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature” Debunked

In our society we revere scientists far more than we revere historians. Consequently, people are often more willing to listen to what scientists say about history than what historians say about history. Unfortunately, often times, when scientists try to speak or write about history, they make glaring mistakes.

For instance, I have already written extensively about how the 1980 television miniseries Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, written and presented by the astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan, promoted all sorts of egregious misconceptions about the Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia and about the supposed destruction of the Library of Alexandria.

The book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, written by the linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker is one that has been bothering me for a long time. I promised that I would write an article about it in this article I wrote last year about violence in the pre-modern world, but I have been holding back until now because I am aware of how popular the book is and what an impact it has had on so many people’s lives.

Bill Gates, for instance, described it in a review as “one of the most important books I’ve read – not just this year, but ever.” Unfortunately, this book is filled with all kinds of historical inaccuracies and I think it promotes some ideas that, while they may seem comforting in the short-term, are actually deleterious in the long-run.

Why Are the Byzantines Significant?

At the time I started writing this article, the most upvoted answer to the question “Why was the Byzantine Empire important in world history?” on Quora was an answer by Bryden Walsh that basically says that the Byzantines aren’t important in world history and that the only reason why anyone imagines that the Byzantines have any historical relevance is because people have overromanticized them due to their association with the old Roman Empire.

Walsh bitterly insists at one point in his answer, “But unlike the neighbouring Islamic civilisations, or the Catholic societies of the west, Byzantium did nothing to move human civilisation forward.” Near the end of the article, he says that the modern world doesn’t owe “anything to Byzantium” at all and that the modern world is “the opposite of everything the Byzantines believed in.”

This is, unfortunately, a reflection of the view towards the Byzantine Empire that has dominated the west for centuries. Despite its perennial appeal, this view is also totally inaccurate; the Byzantine Empire has affected the modern world in ways that few people even realize and there is much to be gained from studying it.

Did Everyone in Pre-Modern Times Believe in Astrology?

There is a popular perception that people in ancient and medieval times all believed in astrology because they were all stupid and ignorant. This idea, recently promoted by the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson in a tweet, is inaccurate for two main reasons.

Firstly, believing in astrology only makes someone wrong; it doesn’t necessarily make them stupid. Secondly, there were some intellectuals in both ancient and medieval times who did reject astrology.

Ancient Cities Weren’t All Just Abandoned

There seems to be a widespread misconception that, after 476 AD, civilization just disappeared from the Mediterranean world and all the cities of the ancient world were totally abandoned. That’s not what really happened. In fact, all the most famous cities of the classical world survived after the so-called “fall of Rome.” People didn’t just leave or die out and leave all the cities completely barren.

Cities like Athens, Sparta, Alexandria, and Rome have long, fascinating post-antique histories and are even still populated even today. In this article, we will explore what really happened to these cities after the so-called “fall of Rome” and the “end of antiquity.” The true history is actually a lot more interesting than the popular narrative about civilization just totally collapsing.

How Much Were Gold Coins Really Worth During the Middle Ages?

In modern fantasy games set in worlds based loosely on medieval Europe, gold coins are portrayed as the normal medium of everyday exchange. In Dungeons & Dragons, for instance, players collect generic “gold coins” and use these coins to buy just about everything, including supplies for their quests and drinks at the local tavern. Trading in “gold pieces” is also a common trope in many fantasy novels.

People in Europe during the Middle Ages really did use gold coins, but gold coins were much rarer and much more valuable than they are often portrayed in modern fantasy games and novels. Daily commerce in Europe during the Middle Ages was conducted not with gold coins, but rather with silver and bronze coins. In fact, most ordinary people during the Middle Ages probably rarely even saw gold coins.

Why Flaming Arrows Are Kind Of Stupid

When I was in fifth and sixth grade, I played a game with my friends where we pretended we lived in a fantasy world called “Clod.” Most of my friends pretended to be rulers of various fictional countries within this world. One of my friends pretended that he was the king of the elves. Whenever there was a battle, he always made a big deal about how his elven archers shot flaming arrows, which he always said were so much more deadly than regular arrows.

As it turns out, though, flaming arrows were rarely ever used in open combat by pre-modern peoples and the idea of using flaming arrows in open combat is actually kind of stupid. Flaming arrows were a real thing, but they weren’t often used and, when they were used, they weren’t used the way they are normally portrayed in movies and books.

Here’s What Movies and Television Shows Get Wrong about Medieval Swordfights

By this point, most of my readers are probably aware that movies and television shows aren’t a very good place to get your historical information from. These works are made purely for entertainment purposes by people who generally aren’t historical experts. Consequently, they are inevitably full of inaccuracies. Even films that are supposedly based on historical events often greatly distort the history to suit their own ends. (Think, for instance, of the movie 300, which I debunked in this article from November 2019.)

In this article, I want to debunk a few common inaccuracies I have noticed seem to recur in swordfight scenes from films and television shows set in medievalesque worlds. Cinematic fight scenes are always extremely unrealistic and governed solely by the “Rule of Cool” rather than by what is actually realistically possible in a combat situation. Here are a few major inaccuracies I have noticed: