Life and Death

[chargirlgenius]

I love Barbara Hanawalt, but man, is she depressing. She wrote about every day life for children in London, and now I’m finally reading The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England. She used coroners’ inquests for her main source of evidence, so every anecdote used to prove a point includes somebody dying!

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Obviously, people in the past faced death much differently than we do today. When you could easily die of a fever or an abscessed tooth, life, death, and risk took on different shapes than they do now. We now live in a world when we can know days in advance that a deadly storm is coming, and can get out of the way. I can’t even fathom what life (and death) was like before this was possible.

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Stay safe, everybody. I don’t think I have many on my flist from Texas, but I’m sure that people have friends and family there.

Comments

[ardenkris.livejournal.com]

I actually had her for a professor in college. She's great; but yes, depressing subjects.

She's now at OH state, if I am not mistaken.

[chargirlgenius.livejournal.com]

I found out she was at Minnesota *after* I moved away. *sigh*

[glasseye.livejournal.com]

The Ties that Bound is such a great book; we used it in my medieval history course in undergrad.

[chargirlgenius.livejournal.com]

I've had it for a while, but I've had a LOT of books for a while. I think if I read everything that I owned I could fly through a grad program. :-)

[frualeydis.livejournal.com]

I never found her books depressing. Maybe beacuse what she proved was that people did care about their children; which has been a hotly debated subject since the 1960s.
For more on children in the Middle Ages you should really read Shulamith Shahar.

/Eva

[chargirlgenius.livejournal.com]

I agree with that. I was happy to see that premise illuminated.

I only get to read a page on each way to the parking lot, so I'm reading in snippets. So far, it's "A wall fell on this lady", "a guy crawled into the oven and roasted himself", "a girl tripped and fell into a cauldron of hot liquid." Oy!

[msmcknittington.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's because I'm such a soft touch, but how could people ever doubt that parents in the past cared for their children? Is that the "child as livestock" approach that people use to explain away farmers having large families?

[chargirlgenius.livejournal.com]

One assumption is that infant and child mortality was so prevalent, that parents must have steeled themselves against the loss, by not caring so much. Then you factor in the fostering system, plus many incidents where infants were babysat by toddlers, or where children were left alone so the parents could work. What this doesn't take into account is that both parents *had* to work, and hanging a swaddled baby in the tree or on the wall was actually much safer than leaving and infant in a cradle on the floor to be mauled by a pig (which happened).

[frualeydis.livejournal.com]

What Char said. I just want to add that the theory was mainly created by a french intellectual born early in the 20th century - Philippe Ariès and if he had any children he probably never really did things with them until they got bigger; that's the way things were.
Also, the same argumetn is quite often heard when peoplke are discussing the high infant mortality in Africa. It's not true there either of course.

/Eva

[quodscripsi.livejournal.com]

Plus you factor in the fact that he uses almost no medieval evidence and is an early modernist.

[noxcat.livejournal.com]

I'm in Texas, but Austin is on the 'dry' side of the storm. So far, no rain, just s few wind gusts that are similar to a cold front coming through. But Ike hasn't made landfall yet...

[quodscripsi.livejournal.com]

That book transformed my life. I think it is easier to handle the incidentals that she uses that happen to end in death the more familiar you get with them. The first book I read that used this sort of technique used saint miracle collections so the outcome was usually nice. These days I often don't even notice the outcome unless I'm looking for it.

While it is not a good page a day read try and get a copy of Lost Worlds: How Our European Ancestors Coped with Everyday Life and Why Life is so Hard Today by Imhof. While it deals heavily with 17th and 18th century Germany he looks at the problem from the opposite direction from most historians. Westerners tend to have a progressive view of the world so we tend to want to believe that things including our lives are always getting better. He starts with the arguement that our ancestors knew something(s) that we don't and that is why despite all our progress we seem to be having a more difficult time with life.

If you ever want to read a book that will make your guts just twist and you'll wish you were reading about incidental death try the Trial of Giles de Rais. It is the only book I have ever had to stop reading because I was having nightmares.

[belledlr.livejournal.com]

I, too, Had Dr. Hanawalt as a prof at the same time as ardenkris. What doesn't necessarily come through in her books is how humurous she really is. She was my favorite professor of all time and I view her as somewhat of a mentor. I took a Medieval Woman's class by her and it was the best class ever. All we did was read period women authors (Margery Kemp, Christine de Pisan, etc) and then discuss them after we read their works. It was awesome for a SCAdian! She is at Ohio State and I have her e-mail addie if you ever want to discuss her books or sources with her.

[chargirlgenius.livejournal.com]

What doesn't necessarily come through in her books is how humurous she really is.

Actually, it does come through, but it’s subtle and somewhat sardonic. I forget what it was now, but a few days ago I found myself laughing at one of her statements.