When we think about the Middle Ages, we either think of a dark, plague-ridden, dreary place sandwiched between the glories of Rome and the intellectual progress of the Renaissance, or a mystical period of gallant, chivalrous knights and damsels in distress. Whether we like it or not, perceptions of the Middle Ages permeate our culture, from Tolkien to "Game of Thrones" to "The Legend of Zelda," but we still have a lot of lies and half-truths spread about what Medieval times really were like, and if we dispel and correct those, we find that the truth, as always, is much stranger than fiction.
1. Medieval people believed the world was flat.
Virtually everyone knew that the earth was a sphere in the Middle Ages—knowledge that had been around since Pythagoras in the 6th century B.C. and was taught by the likes of Plato and Aristotle. Aristotelian cosmology, for all its flaws, was taught in Medieval universities, and over and over again told us that the world was round, and we get reports and descriptions of a spherical earth throughout the Middle Ages. The myth that Medieval people thought the earth was flat mostly comes from 19th century pseudo historians.
2. The Medieval world afforded no opportunities for women.
Medieval society was undoubtedly patriarchal. Noble lands were almost always headed by and passed on to men. Having children was an essential duty of women of the household and women were considered the “property” of their husbands but, depending on the region, we also have records of women inheriting and owning property, running businesses, and having more say in their lives than we’d might expect. There was also a belief that since both men and women had to produce “seed” to have a child, there was a requirement that both the man and the woman had to orgasm during the conjugal act, and a man’s poor bedroom abilities were sometimes grounds for annulment. In fact, with the shutting down of convents and, with them, any all-female communities, a lot of these rights were lost with the onset of the Protestant Reformation and the Early Modern Period.
3. No one in the Middle Ages knew about proper hygiene.
Although Medieval people didn’t know much about hygiene, they knew the basics. They knew that too much contact with dirt or bodily fluids could cause illness, so it was important to keep ones face clean. We even have evidence that Medieval people brushed their teeth; dental hygiene was actually better than it was now, due to the lack of sugar in the diet, which had yet to be made a commodity. They had some wacky ideas about bathing, saying things like it was harmful to enter a bath if you’ve had too much or too little sex in the weeks beforehand, but bathing was universally recognized as a necessary and healthy activity.
4. Knights were gallant and noble and kept strictly to codes of "chivalry."
Nowadays we tend to think of “chivalry” as holding doors open for women and giving up one's seat on a crowded bus, whereas in Medieval times, it was more of a system of social morays to prevent a heavily armed warrior class from hacking each other to bits. Despite this, chivalry be damned, history has shown that knights were capable of brutal and merciless acts of violence, perhaps especially against civilians. The rules of engagement provided by chivalry dealt mostly with the protection and conduct of other knights, not civilians. So if a knight captured another knight, there was a strict protocol of ransom, care and return that had to be followed. If a knight was raiding a peasant town, he was basically free to burn, pillage and murder as much as he liked. Even its rules for treatment of women were backhanded and misleading at beast; one chivalric code states that, although knights were obligated to protect women in distress, if a knight “wins” a woman from another knight in combat, then he can “do what he likes with her” with impunity.
5. Medieval people didn't know how to have fun.
Here’s a riddle for you:
A curiosity hangs by the thigh of a man, under its master's cloak. It is pierced through in the front; it is stiff and hard and it has a good standing-place. When the man pulls up his own robe above his knee, he means to poke with the head of his hanging thing that familiar hole of matching length which he has often filled before.
The answer? A key! Did you think it was something else? Coupling that with the fact that this was from the Exeter Book, an extensive anthology probably copied by pious monks makes it even more hilarious.
Medieval people had just as much of a sense of humor as the people of any other period. Comedy played a big role in Medieval society; comedic interludes like "The Second Shepherd's Play" were mainstays of the peasantry’s Corpus Christi Festival, and racy stories called Fabliaux that routinely featured sexual, satirical, and oftentimes scatological jokes, circulated both in the lower and upper classes. These tales influenced the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer who, in his "Canterbury Tales"features a story about a Friar who gets a tour of hell, and inquires to his angel guide as to why there are no Friars there. The response is:
"'Yes,' said the angel, 'millions come!'
…' then said he (to Satan)
'Expose your ass and let this friar see
Where friars here all have their nesting place!'
And quicker then than half-a-furlong race,
And just as bees come swarming from a hive,
Out of the devil's ass there shot a drive
Of twenty thousand friars in a rout
Who throughout hell went swarming all about”
The perpetuation of myths and fabrications about the Middle Ages undersell it for the wonderful, eccentric and endlessly fascinating period that it is. Clearing some of those misconceptions can help us see that the true Middle Ages are stranger, more surprising and infinitely more interesting than anything that romantic notions and blanket statements can offer.
