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https://www.exurbe.com/black-death-covid-and-why-we-keep-telling-the-myth-of-a-renaissance-golden-age-and-bad-middle-ages/>
"Brilliant Medievalists have been posting Black Death pieces correcting
misconceptions and flailing as one does when an error refuted 50 times
returns the 51st (The Middle Ages weren’t dark and bad compared to the
Renaissance!!!). As a Renaissance historian, I feel it’s my job to
shoulder the other half of the load by talking about what the
Renaissance was like, confirming that our Medievalists are right, it
wasn’t a better time to live than the Middle Ages, and to talk about
where the error comes from, why we think of the Renaissance as a golden
age, and where we got the myth of the bad Middle Ages.
[...]
* This post is for you if you’ve been wondering whether Black Death =>
Renaissance means COVID => Golden Age, and you want a more robust
answer than, “No no no no no!”
* This post is for you if you’re tired of screaming The Middle Ages
weren’t dark and bad! and want somewhere to link people to, to show them
how the myth began.
* This post is for you if you want to understand how an age whose relics
make it look golden in retrospect can also be a terrible age to live in.
* And this post is for you if want to ask what history can tell us about
2020 and come away with hope. Because comparing 2020 to the Renaissance
does give me hope, but it’s not the hope of sitting back expecting the
gears of history to grind on toward prosperity, and it’s not the hope
for something like the Renaissance—it’s hope for something much, much
better, but a thing we have to work for, all of us, and hard."
Long but excellent and thought-provoking essay. Via Ed S.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://www.xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
http://www.glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
http://www.sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
