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

[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.