chargirlgenius: (Default)
chargirlgenius ([personal profile] chargirlgenius) wrote2008-09-12 12:57 pm
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Life and Death

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!


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.


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.

[identity profile] quodscripsi.livejournal.com 2008-09-14 07:49 pm (UTC)(link)
Plus you factor in the fact that he uses almost no medieval evidence and is an early modernist.