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So I've seen two distinct narratives concerning life in the middle ages (I'm talking 11th to 14th century specifically). Of course the common view is that the middle ages were the fucking worst, that harvests were poor and farming technology made little progress from antiquity due to religious beliefs. Peasant work was back-breaking, hygiene was poor and famines were frequent. But a revisionist narrative goes that medieval people had holidays almost a third of the year, they actually worked many less hours than we do today, and the ''dark ages'' is an enlightenment myth.
tl;dr the middle ages, absolutely shitty or less shitty than usually thought?
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middle ages didn't exist
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>>1632595
Every historical categorization is ultimately artificial, and there is debate as to when the medieval period would have begun and ended, but how about we talk about the timespan specifically gave, you fucking pedant.
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>>1632606
no, i literally meant that the said timespan didn't exist. it's forged to history books centuries later to mark their own superiority.
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>>1632640
Mhmmm, so what timespan are you talking about here? Whole 5th to 15th century?
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>>1632661
pretty much. there was really closer to hundred than thousand years between falling of each rome.
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I have little to no knowledge about the subject, but I wanted to point out that the things you mentioned are in no way mutually exclusive.
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Absolutely shitty. The dark ages not being a completely shit existence is a fucking revisionist meme on par with Lost Cause fags regarding the Civil War.
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>>1632585
world went through a mini ice age & volcanic eruptions kill agriculture
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>>1632585
Everything goes in waves. People memed too hard on the Dark Ages, so now to be intelligent you have to present them as a bountiful golden age that the accursed, useless "Renassaince" cut short. Once the pendulum fully swings back the other way, the way to present yourself as intelligent will be to contradict the golden age narrative.
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>>1632676
that was in 16th-17th century.
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>>1632684
no ur a fucking retard
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OP you should read the book 'Misconceptions about the Middle Ages' by Harris and Grigsby. It's a work of academic literature but it isn't as dry as work of that calibre usually is since the authors were aware it was going to be mostly non-historians reading it.
Like most academic literature it's pretty pricey in most places but if you can get it second hand then you should definitely do so, it's a great book.
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world went through a mini ice age & volcanic eruptions kill agriculture
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>>1632585
It wasn't as bad as people claim but it wasn't some paradise.
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>>1632678
You seem to be misunderstanding how this works. It's not a like a pendulum and these views are not always "extremes" of some sort.
Anti-X isn't always "just as bad" as X
Most mainstream scholars who criticize the term "Dark Ages" aren't saying it was a paradise.
This is a strawman that morons like this >>1632671 want to believe.
If anything is this position, the total "Dark Ages" position that was the extreme and the modern one, that the Middles Ages did see significant cultural and technological advance, that is the toned down.
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>>1632768
Educated answer.
What are you doing is this forsaken place of memes and religious shitposting?
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