Knights: more like Tony Soprano than Lancelot ~the History Channel

[D.Shaffer]

What? C'mon, share!

I cant remember the exact lines but they had comments like (And I'm paraphrasing)

'...was called the child lover, because he refused to kill children. The other vikings found this hilarious'
'Anytime you face someone that others call 'the skull splitter', you have to be a little bit concerned.'
'It was like putting up a huge sign that said 'Uncle Olaf wants you'

 

[lukelightning]

Please don't insist on historically accurate classes. Playing a historically accurate wizard would suck.

"What's your power?"
"Uh, I pretend to have magic powers, and do rituals and spells that don't actually do anything."

 

[lukelightning]

How are we supposed to learn history when it keeps changing?

That was the joke some Russian made about education in the Soviet Union. History books were so prone to revision that the saying was something like "What's harder than predicting the future? Predicting the past."

 

[Numion]

It's precisely because of that that I'm inclined to distrust it. It seems every age wants to repaint history to suit itself. When what we discover from history is precisely what we expect to discover, it really worries me. Why should I be inclined to think that the current spin is any less spin than the romantic view of the knight as chivilric idea?

Yes, history is subjective instead of objective.

 

[Woas]

I watched this program the other night too. The highlight of it was when I heard this very familair voice from one of the people they interview starting up, but the show hadn't switched to the speaker yet (they started to talk over some reinactment). Then once they switched, I realized the speaker was a professor I had while at college! I was surprised. I didn't think that actually happend.

 

[green slime]

Yes, history is subjective instead of objective.

Or, rather, perhaps, history is objective, but the intrepretation of the events themselves, the meaning of the events for contempory peoples as well as those of the present age, are as subjective as any communication between two souls.

 

[Harlath]

On the "Dark Ages" thing, views of history tend to move in cycles. The end of the 20th century saw a revisionist (not intended pejoratively, some things require revision!) movement that attempted to make the "Dark Ages" less gloomy. Some even put forward the idea of the "Dark Ages" as being "Late Antiquity".

Predictably, there is now a counter-revisionist movement. Bryan Ward-Perkins (feel the double-barreled name!) wrote a good introduction to this: "The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization" . Its under 200 pages of actual material and very well written for an academic book.

None of this is as frustrating as the mistake in Geoffrey Hodgson's (otherwise excellent text on the history of economic thought) "How economics forgot history" which has society moving from tribalism to classical antqiuity then straight to feudalism (what happened to the breakdown of the Roman Empire?)! As my gf's history professor always told her, "We don't use the F word lightly!"

 

[Celebrim]

On the "Dark Ages" thing, views of history tend to move in cycles. The end of the 20th century saw a revisionist (not intended pejoratively, some things require revision!) movement that attempted to make the "Dark Ages" less gloomy.

I don't really have a problem with the term 'Dark Ages', though I do have a problem with how broadly that the term is applied. There is a dark period in Western Europe from about 400 AD to about 900 AD, which is prior to the period of knights, fuedalism, crusades, castles, chivilry platemail and longswords that most people think about when they think about 'Medieval Times'. By the time you get to all those things that people know about, Western Europe is no longer dark and in particular Northwestern Europe is not dark for the first time in its history.

My personal feeling is that by the time you get to Alfred the Great and Charlemange, the 'Dark' part is basically over, the long decline has been reversed, and Europe is getting back on its feet again.

Similarly, my take on antiquity was that it was basically in social decay from about 200 BC on. The Hellenistic period marked a long swing toward stagnation, the slave based economy was holding technological advancement back, there were fundamental problems with the Greek moral/ethical system (something Socretes was already getting into hundreds of years earlier), people were already looking backward rather than looking forward, and the Hellenized culture was falling into decadence and apathy. I mark the beginning of the end to Cassius's sacking of Rhodes (42 BC), and the loss of the Library in Alexandria (at least in part, date uncertain, but possibly 48 BC). They weren't lethal blows to the learning of the Ancient world, but after that technology is every bit as stagnant as it was in the Dark Ages. The writing goes on for several more centuries, and Roman survives through a couple of purges, but the energy is already going out of the ancient world long before anyone recognized the lights were off.

 

[green slime]

Similarly, my take on antiquity was that it was basically in social decay from about 200 BC on. The Hellenistic period marked a long swing toward stagnation, the slave based economy was holding technological advancement back, there were fundamental problems with the Greek moral/ethical system (something Socretes was already getting into hundreds of years earlier), people were already looking backward rather than looking forward, and the Hellenized culture was falling into decadence and apathy. I mark the beginning of the end to Cassius's sacking of Rhodes (42 BC), and the loss of the Library in Alexandria (at least in part, date uncertain, but possibly 48 BC). They weren't lethal blows to the learning of the Ancient world, but after that technology is every bit as stagnant as it was in the Dark Ages. The writing goes on for several more centuries, and Roman survives through a couple of purges, but the energy is already going out of the ancient world long before anyone recognized the lights were off.

Sort of reminds one of a more modern tale of stagnation and decline.

 

[Numion]

Or, rather, perhaps, history is objective, but the intrepretation of the events themselves, the meaning of the events for contempory peoples as well as those of the present age, are as subjective as any communication between two souls.

I meant history as a science.

What we know of the past is subjective depending on the people who study history.

It's not just the interpretation of historical events that's subjective - the actual events are too (what might've or might've not happened).