Yup. It's like the condemnations of the Spanish Inquisition. No one really talks about the fact that they were using better standards for investigation and evidence than the vast majority of law enforcement institutions of the same time and place.
There was once a SJW troll whom I banned from KiA2, who was screaming about the Spanish Inquisition. I told him he could return once he read Henry Kamen's work on it, which is generally accepted as the definitive account of the Spanish Inquisition.
He (of course) had never heard of Kamen, so he REEEEE'ed at me for recommending the work of "a historical revisionist", because the title included the word 'revision' (which it was).
Correct. If anything, basically everything got worse between the end of the Middle Ages and the mid-19th century (which was when things really started to pick up for the human race again with the Belle Epoque, massive advances in medical technology & such). Just a few things off the top of my head...
Living standards in general declined. For example, in Britain enclosure further squished the agrarian poor by taking what little common land they had free access to and handing it off to landlords, while the Dissolution of the Monasteries turned those monasteries' dependents into hordes of 'sturdy beggars' who contributed to growing social instability. More generally, this was the period in which public hygiene became noticeably far worse as bathing fell out of fashion following the Black Death - Polish plaits were not known to be a problem in the Middle Ages, after all.
Wars got way bigger and more destructive. Contrary to popular imagination, medieval armies weren't mobs of peasant draftees with pitchforks around a chivalric core but instead quite small and professional, comprised of knights & men-at-arms who fought while their serfs tilled the fields; for example Bouvines, one of the most famous and decisive battles of medieval Europe, saw fewer than 10k combatants on both sides. Mass conscription only became a thing in early modernity, resulting in armies that acted like locust hordes on the countryside & any civilian unlucky enough to be living in their way in-between slaughtering each other in battles whose scale dwarfed medieval engagements.
Societal disruption on a mass scale. You had the Reformation, the Thirty Years' War, the fall of the English monarchy and consequent rise of Whig parliamentarism in Great Britain, continental monarchs going in the other direction and becoming absolutists, the Enlightenment and the age of revolutions, and that's just in Europe. Obviously, many indigenous societies in the Americas were utterly mangled or completely wiped out as the age of colonialism got going. China got pretty thoroughly wrecked by the Manchu conquest, and so on.
At this point, when anyone argues that the Middle Ages were the worst period in human history, my eyes roll into the back of my head and my default assumption is that they're either a Romeboo (as Petrarch and Edward Gibbon were) or indoctrinated into the cult of modernism/postmodernism, and thus unlikely to have a view of pre-1900 history that isn't deeply rooted in (and goes deeper than) what pop-culture has to say about it.
As far as I can tell, the condemnation of the middle ages has been an active effort by the enlightenment types with no basis in reality.
Yup. It's like the condemnations of the Spanish Inquisition. No one really talks about the fact that they were using better standards for investigation and evidence than the vast majority of law enforcement institutions of the same time and place.
Also compared to universities today.
There was once a SJW troll whom I banned from KiA2, who was screaming about the Spanish Inquisition. I told him he could return once he read Henry Kamen's work on it, which is generally accepted as the definitive account of the Spanish Inquisition.
He (of course) had never heard of Kamen, so he REEEEE'ed at me for recommending the work of "a historical revisionist", because the title included the word 'revision' (which it was).
That fag probably used Howard Zinn as textbooks.
Correct. If anything, basically everything got worse between the end of the Middle Ages and the mid-19th century (which was when things really started to pick up for the human race again with the Belle Epoque, massive advances in medical technology & such). Just a few things off the top of my head...
Living standards in general declined. For example, in Britain enclosure further squished the agrarian poor by taking what little common land they had free access to and handing it off to landlords, while the Dissolution of the Monasteries turned those monasteries' dependents into hordes of 'sturdy beggars' who contributed to growing social instability. More generally, this was the period in which public hygiene became noticeably far worse as bathing fell out of fashion following the Black Death - Polish plaits were not known to be a problem in the Middle Ages, after all.
Wars got way bigger and more destructive. Contrary to popular imagination, medieval armies weren't mobs of peasant draftees with pitchforks around a chivalric core but instead quite small and professional, comprised of knights & men-at-arms who fought while their serfs tilled the fields; for example Bouvines, one of the most famous and decisive battles of medieval Europe, saw fewer than 10k combatants on both sides. Mass conscription only became a thing in early modernity, resulting in armies that acted like locust hordes on the countryside & any civilian unlucky enough to be living in their way in-between slaughtering each other in battles whose scale dwarfed medieval engagements.
Societal disruption on a mass scale. You had the Reformation, the Thirty Years' War, the fall of the English monarchy and consequent rise of Whig parliamentarism in Great Britain, continental monarchs going in the other direction and becoming absolutists, the Enlightenment and the age of revolutions, and that's just in Europe. Obviously, many indigenous societies in the Americas were utterly mangled or completely wiped out as the age of colonialism got going. China got pretty thoroughly wrecked by the Manchu conquest, and so on.
At this point, when anyone argues that the Middle Ages were the worst period in human history, my eyes roll into the back of my head and my default assumption is that they're either a Romeboo (as Petrarch and Edward Gibbon were) or indoctrinated into the cult of modernism/postmodernism, and thus unlikely to have a view of pre-1900 history that isn't deeply rooted in (and goes deeper than) what pop-culture has to say about it.