Phillip Campbell with Ryan Grant about the Middle Ages

[Matto]

https://athanasiuscm.org/2019/02/20/interview-039-phillip-campbell-on-the-nitty-gritty-of-the-middle-ages-and-why-most-people-will-hate-it/
This is an interesting interview. Scandalous indeed. About the middle ages.

[Josephine87]

This is so interesting, thank you for sharing!  I'm about an hour and ten minutes in. 

I wonder at the ahistorical slander against Puritans, do these men think Puritan families weren't living in one room homes and having sex while the children were in the room, even possibly in the same bed?   It is a pet peeve of mine.  Not saying Puritan theology is great, but there is a lot of misunderstanding about them.  They did crazy stuff, but "Puritanism" we think of is more of "Victorianism".

[awkwardcustomer]

I got to 1.37.  When does the scandalous stuff start?  So far, nothing has shocked or even surprised me. 

What did make me wonder was the claim that business was carried out inside churches, in the nave or side chapels.  I always understood that the church porch was the place for making deals etc, but never the church interior as the Medievals tended to maintain very strict boundaries between the sacred and the secular.

[Lambda Phage]

1. I'm less disturbed by medieval depictions of nudity than the way these guys act like we are defective for our modesty. An image of St. Bernard being breastfed by the Blessed Virgin does not bother me. It is clearly meant to be metaphorical, in the way Campbell describes. But acting like breasts were never sexual and that we're wrong for thinking them so is maddening (He later admits that late medieval clothing highlighted a woman's bossom... I wonder why). If the viewer of such a work of art is appalled, it's not because his sense of modesty is wrongly excessive, it's because he misunderstood the intentions of the artist, which is understandable when you live in an age where everything is sexualized. Whether or not American modesty vs European immodesty is a result of a Puritan heritage, I never trust somebody who acts like American modesty is a bad thing.

2. Gregory Clark, renowned secular economic historian, has highlighted how few illegitimate births there were in pre-industrial Europe. When you consider that pre-modern contraceptive practices were entirely ineffective, and the "Western European marriage pattern" in which people married later in the West than in the East, and the large number of women in the West who never married, the only conclusion is that these people actually waited until married to have sex. Contrary to popular opinion fornication is not inevitable. Ubiquitous? Not a chance. Sure there were illegitimate births, but at far lower rates than today when we have effective contraception on demand. That's truly amazing. Abstinence actually does work sociologically and there is an entire epoch of data to support it. Primary sources and contemporary anecdotes are great and invaluable. But sometimes the generalizations drawn from them do not hold up against statistical analyses which can tell us more about whole populations than a handful of writings by select individuals (which again, they admit with regards to the spiritual writings of the saints).