Mail time!

One of the most I think literally ironic things that has ever happened to me was that when I I was just out of college and I was driving to meet my girlfriend now a wifeiler life.

front of me and my forehead hit the windshield. And the last thing that I heard from the car before before it died, because uh, the engine had been seriously damaged rip was uh uh and the lyric is in uh an airbag saved my life and and rite is that it like faded out, and I like, I was like, huh, well that was pretty funny, right, I was. I was fine, you know, Yeahale.

for a walk. Yeah, so like that's what's going on here. Uh. You know, some people are just a little a little too hype that it is possibly spring, and you know, like I don't want to jump I don't want to jump the gun too early because the equinox is like not till this weekend, I think, and you never know, like false spring is crafty, right, so you can't just like go around getting your hopes up. So yeah, I'm like trying to readjust the time difference and things of

this nature. But yeah, yeah, things are you know, everything's coming up Millhouse.

ten minutes later and another thing. And it's just because it's just like constantly burning in the back of your mind and it's like.

I'll try it again. Yeah, hello, and welcome back to We're Not So Different, a podcast where occasionally my muscle memory fails and I forget how I intro this show on the I don't know two hundred something something episode.

things of this nature. But whenever you fear stalwart patron, I swear upon the nearest, the nearest holy relic in my vicinity that we're going to catch up and get this mountain of questions down to a reasonable number by doing a mail back episode a month for a while. Anyway, you good folks know the deal. Patriots get to submit questions that we answer on the show, and we're going to do that right now, and it will be a big pitch for the Patreon too. Hey, patreon dot com,

slash wnstpod five bucks a month. It's cool and you will enjoy it all right here, we go. Let's let's do it. Gafsey, Gafsy, always with the good questions. One of the interesting elements of medieval European historiography is the sense of timelessness, with pictures of Jesus being nailed up by legionnaires in chain mail and romance as that feature

aneas jousting. Was this understanding of the past being largely the same, or if you prefer, not so different as the present a feature of European historiography specifically, or is it a more general pre modern phenomenon.

in the modern day. So he's just like you, He's just like me, right, So kind of like what that is doing is it's reinforcing the idea that this is as relevant now as it was when Jesus died, right, And this is kind of similar to the phenomena in medieval religious art of children being pictured as kind of like tiny adult. What that is is an art motif that is showing that children's souls have equal importance to

adult souls. Right, So when you see pictures of Jesus and the Apostles, et cetera, etc. Who are dressed like medieval people, what they're saying is like, yeah, this could as easily happen now, right with India's jousting and things like that. What they're attempting to do is kind of show a similar thing, which is under line the noble nature of this person. So that's kind of like when you do a Shakespeare production in modern clothing. You know,

like that, that's kind of like the same thing. So it's like what you're doing is you're just kind of like underscoring here is a social milieu from which he came. This is kind of what it means. And I mean you do kind of tend to see this up until modernity, right you hit the renaissances and suddenly they're like, no, I were, motherfucker's in a toga, which you know, not

to say that. You know, medieval people don't also have their fair share of these people are wearing togas art because obviously they do, but there is much more of an emphasis than in art on realism quote unquote, and so you don't have the time to kind of play with motifs and things like that because everyone is much stupider. So there you go.

for like fifteen years now. It's you know, so we we do it too. It's just you know, we kind of may are able to wink and nod at it a little bit, whereas they're more like this illustrates X because you know, the thing, the things were a bit

more didactic back then. You know, things represented big moral you know, concepts more, you know, even more so than like stuff does now, because we're not you know, we're just not telling the same We tell similar stories, we use similar tropes, we just don't tell them the same way. Uh as far as I could tell anybody, Yeah, you know. And uh also, Jesus looks cool in chain mail, Like what do you want? Like you know, like.

the question. Next we come up to Jazz the Texican, who says, I'm visiting my mom and found my old much Love Stuff panda and it got me wondering what were medieval children's toys, Like, do we have any examples or descriptions of much loved dolls or wooden animals, et cetera.

They tend to just be made out of cloth. Mind like, you know, no one's using porcelain to make dolls at this point in time, so you know, dolls made out of cloth are big for girls. Less I can tell you less about like stuffed toys in terms of like Teddy Bears and things like that, that doesn't seem to be present so much. Those tend to be a little bit more wooden, I think as a general rule of thumb, whereas like dolls kind of get made out of toyst of cloth. But I can't rule it out. It's just

that I've never seen depictions of it. And you know, obviously things that are made out of cloth were not going to have them anymore because they've all rotted by now. So it's very hard for us to still have cloth things from the era. So I cannot rule it out. It very well might have happened. We do know that animal toys are incredibly popular. There's also you know, all of the toys like balls obviously incredibly popular, stick and hoop, big thing. A fun thing to go look at is

one of the Broygals. I forget if it's older or younger, has a painting called Games Children Play and it shows you, yeah, and it shows you all different things that they're playing with that you know, everyone's favorite being like poking like some cow dung with a stick, which is.

That's a big deal. Yeah, you know, things of this nature kind of exactly what you would expect to see you will see, is the answer.

you know, normal kids stuff. Also, I will say one thing that kids have always had is little action figures and dolls that have removable helmets, Like those date back like like four thousand years. Like, you know, kids have always loved a cool little accessory on their dolly or their action figure or whatever it is. They're like, look, the helmet comes off, the hair, the dress comes off. You're just like, yes, yes, give me this, give me

this pointless bullshit that I nonetheless love. Uh yeah, Jess, thank you very much for the question. Uh Next, we got one from Alikants, who says, would there be any chance of elaborating on the story of Saint George and his Palestinian roots and why British Gammons want to make Saint George's Day into another white right wing Christmas for themselves? Oli,

I'll go ahead and answer. The second part is because they're British Gammons and they're ontologically evil eleanor please elaborate because I know nothing about the.

So Saint Patrick's Day is a day off in Northern Ireland, Saint David's Day is a day off in Wales, Saint Andrew's Day is a day off Inland Scotland. And we specifically don't have Saint George's Day off because we cannot be trusted because gammon sucks so much, and it's like so we we very specifically don't have it because those people can't fucking behave themselves. So yeah, we should have

it off. Everyone else in the UK does, and most countries in Europe you get your local Saints Day off, so I you know, one presumes that in George they're getting Saint George's day off. You know, it's it's hardly revolutionary to have Saint George's the patri state of your country. But we just suck, so we're not allowed to and that and that's just that's just that on that now

in terms of what you're talking about. So a fun fact about Saint George is that we think that this kind of trope of like somebody killing a dragon maybe even goes back into like the ancient Egyptian period. Uh So, for example, at the Temple of Edfu, which is like part of the Ptolemaic dynasty, there's a temple of Horus and there's all these depictions of him as a human, sometimes a human with the head of a falcon, and he is like harpooning Set, who was shown as a

hippopotamus usually right. This then later on gets changed into him killing a crocodile. And so we found like in Tuta Common's tomb, like Set killing a crocodile as a human. And so then this is like everyone is like, hell, yeah, we got to have one of those, right, So you get Saint George, and uh, the legend here is that Saint George is essentially like Cappadocian, uh so, kind of

like Greek Turkic of some description, but very specifically. His mother is regarded as having been Palestinian, uh so, very so there is kind of like a lap of an overlap there, and obviously, you know, like a lot of Palestinians are Christian, uh duh. So, Like the story here is that he was born in Palestine and then like he ends up becoming a Roman soldier like under Diocletian blah blah blah blah, and that's why he gets martyred

something something dragon. So my point here being that there is a deep urge in all of our souls to tell a story about someone killing a dragon or a crocodile or whatever. And one hundred percent, and our good friends, the Palestinians revere him because he's a local boy. He's got this this local thing going on. However, he's a

Egyptian before that, you know. But he's also huge in the Orthodox Church, right, like that is incredibly important, and like you have lots of places in Palestine named after him, so like like it's he's a very important figure for Palestinians obviously, because everybody loves a local boy, right, so yeah, yeah.

one from a dog spotter. What were medieval pregnancy tropes? Was there a food craving that was tell in the same way as pickles or a stereotype in sitcoms? What was the typical pregnancy like in terms of what women were expected to do at various stages. Did they have an equivalent categorization to trimesters? And how would their workload change throughout pregnancy.

Having said that, from a medical standpoint, we've got rather a lot And yes, they do definitely think in trimesters. And one of the big reasons we know about this is, you know, up until the first trimester, abortions are chill, right, so they're kind of like there's a kind of a lot of talking about that, and then after the first trimester they refer to the quickening, and the idea is that like the soul's kind of like a little bit

more in there than otherwise would be. In terms of diet stuff, because it's like we're not hearing from people so much. We're hearing from physicians. What they tend to do is they tend to say that you should eat particular things that will be good for your humors. So like if you want to give birth to his son, you're supposed to eat like things that are going to

increase your heat and things like that. So we tend to see more like diet strictures than we hear from people themselves in terms of like pregnancy itself and the experience of it. The letter on Virginity or I think it's holly mean fed or whatever in Middle English, it talks about how much pregnancy sucks and his shit and how you shouldn't get married and have kids and you should actually stay a woman who is dedicated to God.

And now, to be fair, obviously this is a hostile witness, but it does talk about like how much pain you're going to be and how incredibly heavy it is, how you feel like you're gonna puke all the time, and blah blah blah blah, and how difficult it is to undertake all of your work while you're doing this, which kind of is an indicator that you're still expected to

do things for quite some time now. Obviously, as pregnancy kicks in, that's going to go down more and more in terms of just like your ability to be mobile. So like towards the end of pregnancy, it is understood that you're just going to be like everyone's kind of keeping an eye on you to make sure that you know, you don't like go into labor at any moment, and and also like it's going to be very difficult just

to bend down to milk the cows. Yeah, so there is there is a very much that you can do, so you know, they're much more matter of fact about what is possible, yeah, as a result of pregnancy, But they're also much more matter of fact about like the fact that so much work needs to get done that you still need to like do it up until it's no longer possible. So it tends to be kind of much more inbuilt in that way in terms of about

after care. If you're rich, you might have what they call confinement, so you might like hang out in a dark room that is overheated for quite some time to try to like keep you safe or whatever. That tends to ramp up in the in the early modern period, but there is rather a lot of like laying around, and we see cute pictures of this, like oftentimes if it's like the Virgin Mary in Jesus, where it's like he's all swaddled up and she's just laying in bed

like Jesus fucking Christ. Right, So you know, it is expected that you're going to have a week or so just kind of like laying around, you know, and like if there are any complications, then that's gonna like delay it. And there is an understanding that there are going to be complications as well. But you know, most of us live next door to our families or in the same villages, so what happens then is just like the whole extended family swings into action to help you out right, and that.

like absolutely not. But having said that, yeah, if you have an incredibly rare virulent skin disease, you're probably gonna get called a leper, right, you know, like because there there's only so many words to go around, you know. It's kind of like how now people aren't necessarily clear sometimes on whether you've got like eczema or yeah, what's the other.

real problems with leprosy. It's wild you know.

have been such a dirty slut. It's same thing, like it seemed kind of as vaguely STI like, and usually there's all these ideas that lepers kind of like are particularly quarrelsome and slutty and gluttness, which I think is just kind of like the Agel thing of like telling stories about people who are begging in order to get yourself out of like giving the money. Yeah, yeah, exactly, Yeah, yeah.

the question. Next, I would whack five hundred moles says if you were a courtier, could you just quit, like say fuck all that jazz, I'm off to my estate in Schwine sarsh Schwine Sarsdorfurstorf, Yeah, which I'm sure was put in there to try and trip me up. I don't care. It's German. I speak English, my language. The language you hear me butcher all the time. It's base on you Germany, so watching it. I learned it from watching you Germany. Uh. Anyway, God, yeah.

the king. And that's usually okay. When you see people kind of go back to the court, though it's usually less about the king calling them there, although certainly that happens, and kind of like more about fit people's families being like, you get back in there. How are we supposed to like social climb if you don't fucking like get in at court? Right, So, I.

fourteenth thing, right, which is like very modern. So, I mean, most people aren't at court most of the time, but you know, certain huge landoverers will be obviously, and certainly you send your kids in order to try to like make good marriages and good negotiations and stuff like that. But like quite often if you have a larger estate and you're married in things, you're gonna be back there and then you send your kids in to do the wheeling and dealing and then you just kind of like

come in once in a while. But yeah, you can, you absolutely can sort of quit, but you've got to make sure that you do it in a way that doesn't offend the king.

for the question. Enjoy your estate in Schweinsharstorf anyway. Next up, I got one from Rolf who says the Galileo episode maybe look up the Catholic Church's stance on abortion, and Wikipedia says Pope sixties banned all abortions as homicide in fifteen eighty eight, but the bull was rescinded by his successor, Pope Gregory in fifteen ninety one, and they returned to the rule that abortion before forty days was not homicide,

which lasted until eighteen sixty nine. What was up with that and why did Gregory step back from the madness?

Then right, it's going to be like less of a huge medical issue for you to do that, And the major ways that you do that is with abort efficiency, so you just like ingest a lot of Penny Royal and Tansy is the major way else.

there's going to be fucking infanticide. Yeah, And the medieval church is really clear that a fetus is not the same fucking thing as a baby, right, and they're like, and in fact, to side is really high like in basically through up through. It obviously gets a lot worse in the early modern period because it's like when you're forced at birth and it's like, yeah, well we'll just kill this baby now, I guess. And so it's really

really sad. So you know, this is in keeping with the general thing of everything getting worse in the early modern period, because the early modern period is fucking worse and that just is the case. And so Gregory, I think, was just trying to be like, yo, I'm really not trying to have all these baby that's on my hands.

the deaths of you know, dozens hundreds of infants, you know, every few weeks, a few you know, a few months, and that's just like good God, your society would crumble,

and you know, so, so they did that. But then as it became an ideological backbone of you know, the Christian population, the Church and the Protestant churches as well, they move in that direction and they gobble it up and it becomes a it becomes becomes a huge thing that everybody has to that that is now like a huge talking point instead of something where like, look, we don't really you know, they if you could be if you could administer true serum to the pope or what

medieval pope. He'd be like, Look, we really don't like abortion at all, but you know this is necessary to prevent chaos, these stables, you know, like it just to prevent like a horror, like an even greater real, you know, manifest horror. Yeah, anyway, a great question, Ralph, Thank you so much. Next we got one from Loaf, who says, I'm fascinated by the idea of language comprehension in the

Middle Ages. I've seen complex maps of languages or dialects spoken in continental European countries like France and Spain, and I'm given to understanding. I'm given to understand that for a long period, the English ruling class spoke a different language from the people they ruled. And China little has U has official languages because of how many languages were spoken in the empire. This makes me wonder how communication worked across the kingdoms. Did most kingdoms such empires have

a state language? Are the various regional languages similar enough that people got by or was it common for people to have at least some level of understanding of multiple languages to get along with their neighbors.

written down, it's done in Latin. And as a result, everyone's got really fucking good Latin if they're literate, and so it's super super common if you get engaged, if you are English and you marry someone from Spain, you will speak Latin to each other until you know you one or the other, like learn the language. Yeah, so that's the this is sorted out through Latin because hu

that's just how it works. And you could show up in any place in medieval Europe and be like, hey, what's up, I got Latin and everyone will be like, oh, yeah, word, that's fine. Right, So there is it's one of the real shames of us, like losing Latin as something where because this was a language that was like nobody's and so therefore it was everybody's. It was just an official language, and it was everybody's official language. And that's how it worked.

I mean, like other than obviously Constantinople, where they're doing everything in Greek and that's very nice for them. But basically, when in doubt, you just switched to Latin and that would be fine. And this ends up being important to because like certain things like you know, you're probably mutually intelligible in I don't know, Milan in Florence, but you are certainly fucking not mutually intelligble if you are in Milan and Naples, right, Like that is not like.

Spanish becomes its own thing. But like in Italy because there's no unification, because they're so like and there's this like tension and even hatred between just like cities next door to each other. It's like, you know, I think even like the dialects the Southern Italians and Northern Italians

speak today are kind of different. They're not different different, but they're kind of like they have they have different they have differences in how they're done, and it's like it took forever for like that stuff to homogenize into like a language that.

royal isn't a shithead. But like, you know, merchants speak multiple things all the goddamn time, Like people who travel a lot speak multiple goddamn things, and so yeah, it's not that it's not that confusing, but it's likely that you're gonna be mutually intelligible to neighbors. But you know, famously there are outliers, so that like my good friends, the checks where like fuck you.

families killing families. It was absolutely families killing absolutely, yeah, five hundred year old slights or murders or two kids from families eloping, like it's just like I'm I'm not. It's it's not that there's anything wrong with Italians, but like all of those states are set up to hate each other. They they didn't like each other for the

longest time. There was not a unifying force in a lot of ways because of the geography of Italy, because of the Appennines running up the spine of it and cutting off parts of it in the land in the south being so different from the land in the north.

But like, I don't know, I think I think, I honestly think it might could have destabilized the HRE far earlier because when they're when part of the hr went to war with itself, it would usually go through like it would usually have some like serious issues that it had to work out, and it would destabilize the you know, the emperors, and I mean the Thirty Years War is

the perfect culmination of that. It's just, you know, it completely destabilizes the emperor, the position of emperor permanently, and stuff like that had happened before, and it was just you know, if you got Italy and they fight, you know what do you.

are not going to take that well at all. And so it's just kind of like there are such deep seated issues between the city states that if you, I think, if you put one of them in control, like I mean, God forbid, what if like the Venetians get control, like all hell will break?

like Pisa as some sort of like uh subverbal sub mental like freak they keep in a basement, and it's like these towns are fifty miles apart, like you like you're all descended from the same like weird mix up of like uh Byzantine Greeks, uh Islamic nations, Normans and you know Native Latins. Like I don't know, how, how how are you so much better than someone from another city state that may or may not be doing better at that very moment, I.

civil war right now? Like didn't you just like have a fake like heptarchy And then like you know, like they're like, sorry, the triarchy not heptarchy, like you know, so those kind of overtures don't make a whole lot of sense when you also consider the history of Rome and like how it's like basically like the Orsinis, like trying to throttle like everybody. I's so, you know, there's so much noble infighting that I just think it would

be well, it would be interesting. Oh yeah, But I just think that those hoes don't like each other, so I don't think that they should be in control of an empire. That's all I mean, like a granted death to all empires, you know, munda sen as cesarebus is all I have to say about it.

go dig things up. And it's the German Lands, so obviously you have to apply for a treasure hunting license. But if you go in and you say, oh, I'm doing this because ghosts told me where to dig, They're not going to give it to you because you're not allowed. But people were going around being like, oh, I'm a medium and I'm in contact with a ghost and like he'll tell you where, He'll tell you where to dig for treasure if you give me money. And I think that's a really good scam. I think that.

curious to know what you think of his claims. I don't know if you've read it, but if you'd like, I can try to summarize these claims for ease of analysis. I don't want to drown y'all in even more work. So eleanor what do you think about about the claims about the medieval city?

think probably this. Oh things are just like coming together in my head and I'm like, oh, and it's like, maybe this explains how I ended up being a medieval historian who specialized in the cities. Is like early exposure to kerpopkin. It's like Eleanor figures out herself live on the like call the therapist. But anyway, yeah, I do think that that it is true. And one of the big things that they're able to do in cities together is kind of like advocate for more autonomy. They're able

to kind of like club together. Obviously, they are downsides to the medieval city, you know, like turf wars and noble families and blah blah blah. But certainly it's true that you have like a lot of mutual aid groups, like having a dense snare network of parishes allows you to take more direct control over poverty in your areas. They are big sites of places also where the wealthy like to invest because they like to be seen to be investing, So you have like a lot of work there.

You know, you can definitely say that there are there are always kind of programs going on, both at a civic level and also at a religious level that aim to alleviate poverty. And I think that it's it's absolutely true.

And I do think that it is specifically because you know, people have more freedom in cities, so you you muddle together, and you know that that's how you become a free person is by living in a city, whereas when you're unfree and in the countryside, these things are available to you. So I think that he's really onto something. I think he was cooking. And in this house, we love for Hopkins, So.

that is true. They did they they did have to, you know, be fed by these things from usually outside the city or something like that. But you know, people outside the cities also took in the goods that they made that were necessary for uh, you know, keeping things going. And you know, I think, uh, I think, I think there's a lot to be said uh for the medieval city, the medieval way of life in general. They both I think the city and country life both have uh far

more communal aspects than we have. And you know, good for them, uh, because that's cool, absolutely, Evelyn, thank you

very much for the question. Last one we got is from K. R. Wilson, who says, question, given the pods general presumption that monarchs are bad, who would you say are some of the least worst and before we go on eleanor I would like to ask, like, if you're thinking about like, you know, not as a moral judgment, but just like what makes a good ruler, Like if you're going to call one of them, you know, good or at least not you know, just abysmal dog shit?

What what are the qualities that you're looking for?

building bridges? Are you maintaining the roads? Do you maintain watches on the roads. That's a really big one. And also I want to know if you go fuck bad members of the nobility up, like if people are mistreating their their small folk, do you get involved or do you let it slide? And you know, my boy Charles the Fourth has all this shit off. You know, he's

got it on Lock Lukee, right. So yeah, that's why that's why I like him is because you know, obviously like abolish abolish all Emperor's slash kings obviously, but if you're gonna do it, you could at least just be dumping a lot of money into your community, is all I'm saying. I want to see you establish a hospital, yeah, you know, I want I want to see you do things like that.

like the perfect ruler. He's got this huge lantern. They set up these like administrative things. They finally like clear a path through like central e the Central Corridor of Asia, like to you know, it's not just a bunch of feuding tribes anymore for the first time and I mean maybe ever, but a long time, and you know, it's

just you know, you get stuff like that. So and I mean I think that you know, there are people who do like a lot for their realm, who you know, who do things like you know, they stabilize stuff, like you know, Charlemagne being you know, another example of a

guy who is just like he does a lot. I mean, I of course don't agree with a lot of it, and I think some of it is you know, stupid, and his sons were all morons, but like you know, for what he did, what he did during his life, you know, building up literacy and education, programs and stuff like that, is like those things are good. So I mean I think it really just depends on stuff like that. So I mean I would but like, yeah, like most of these people aren't doing a lot of that stuff.

They might do some of it here and there, and it might be balanced out, you know with like all right, I mean it is going to be balanced out with like the horrors that they did, because you know, Charles the fourth to gingis Khan to you know, whoever the worst medieval ruler possibly is. They're all, you know, that whole thing's going to be built on a mountain of skulls to some degree. So you know, it's like it encompasses,

you know, horrors beyond our imagination. But you know there are a lot of them who are you know, very good competent. We talked to just any of the first just forty years of rule, just stabilize the whole thing. He and Belisarius and Theodora, and you know, they just they kind of set the they set the Byzantines up for for a long time. And you know, Basil the second, just the quintessential one of the quintidential medieval rulers did so much I mean, he fucking massacred the Bulgars, like

killing women and children and stuff like that. But like for Constantinople, he did like, you know, incredible things. So I think you just kind of got to kind of balance that, and in the end, I just go with the ones that I think are the most interesting and be like, yeah, they're morally reprehensible, but I think they're neat. Yeah what if we just thought they were cool? You know? Yeah.

You know, he's a candidate for Holy Roman Emperor and he's like, no, I don't I don't want that, and like, you know, there's a big famine that strikes Flanders, and so he like plants a bunch of like legumes on his own land, get gets gives them out to the poor, like taxes the rich more and says like we can't let poor people die of starvation, like distributes like bread to the poor, blah blah blah. Like that's all great, right, So like attempts to specifically stop his people dying of starvation.

We love it. He's also a massive fucking anti Semite who expelled all of the Jewish people from his land. So it's like, you know, it's really wild how like people can be so good on one hand and so bad on the other, and like, yeah, it's you know, they're a really different bunch of people. We're gonna say that, and so you have to just you just have to kind of be critical.

that is just the truth. Because like these systems, as bad as things are right now, these systems were like even more oppressive to more people, you know, and just yeah, it's you know, or you can't be good. I'm talking about the overall system. Like there are the medieval life that that are appealing in some ways, but like, yeah, it, you know, you just you just got to kind of keep pick the ones you think are neat and then be like, yeah, they did some bad stuff. I don't

know what to tell you. I'm not uh you know, I'm not. I'm not here to count up to like do do you know the victims of communism? Body count on? Uh on all these guys. It's like, yeah, they did some evil stuff. Let's see, let's see what else they did, you know exactly? You know Timure, uh he had he had a mountain of skulls. But you know what, like was it a nice mountain? I don't know, we don't know. Oh, everybody's like, oh the mountainous schools is so bad?

to keep catching up a little bit. Another mailbag episode. Uh, and then yeah, we've got some other stuff in the pipeline and also, uh, we'll have a bonus episode. I don't know if I'm well, it's probably probably not released today on Thursday, so probably coming out tomorrow. Two episodes and.