history – Going Medieval

Let me explain something to you: periodisation and the Middle Ages

Last week, I was having a nice little chat on BlueSky, my go-to site for chatting shit and avoiding work now that twitter is unusable, with some very nice people, and I was asked a thoughtful question about how we talk about the different eras of the Middle Ages.

My top medieval books of 2023

I am unbelievably shaken to be once again at the end of the year, and babes, for me it’s been a year of books. Firstly because, of course, my book The Once And Future Sex made its debut in the world. As I type this, it is in the process of being translated into several other languages, and is already out as Die Ideale Frau auf Deutsch. As a result, I spent a lot of this year thinking about and explaining it to people, which has been a real delight and privilege.

On history versus chronicles

I wrote a piece, years back at the beginning of the Trump administration about the difference between journalism -wherein facts are both reported and various narratives scrutinised to a larger public- and chronicles, a sort of narrative timeline wherein various theoretically important events occur. This week I have been thinking about this again, as well as the general public’s relationship to how we transmit information, given a fairly chilling announcement from the UK government.

A short history of Jan Hus, the Protestant leader you’ve never heard of, or, Martin Luther jacked Hus’s whole style

So because it is 2017, we are currently living through a cruel time in which people are attempting to celebrate the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation. This, in and of itself is problematic as hell, because it feeds into the idea that the study of history is a study of Great Men™ who came along in a manly way and moved the world forward. That ain’t the case. History is really more of a study of a number of trends. It’s looking at a million pieces of day-to-day writing and interpreting them in their context. Sure, dudes came along who – given this context – were able to influence society. However, society as a whole was not a blank slate, just waiting for some guy to come swing his dick around in order to change course.

History is a discipline, not a virtue

There has been much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth over the past few days on the part of white supremacists who suddenly have a heart-felt attachment to the ‘history’ of Confederate monuments in the United States. The monuments, they argue, must be preserved because they honour the legacy of a bunch of guys who lost a war to enslave other people and participation trophies are important. Never mind that the majority of Confederate monuments have not survived to us from the American Civil War, and were erected during the Jim Crow era of the twentieth century. No no! They must be preserved, in situ, because they are a part of history.