Medieval people and psychology

 Medieval people were a whole lot like us.  This shouldn't be a big surprise.  One can talk to grandparents or other relatives who grew up in another country or another time, without the technology and popular culture we have now, and yet they have the same emotions and sense of humor the young folks do.  Medieval people didn't have phones or TVs or Taylor Swift, but they loved their children and got upset over unfair treatment and enjoyed doing things with their friends just as we do.

A lot of medieval literature does as good a job as modern literature (once you accept the different assumptions about how literature should be written) in showing psychological complexity.  In the tale of Tristan and Isolde, for example, King Mark, Isolde's husband, spends much of the book eaten up with a desire to "know for sure" if Isolde is unfaithful to him, even while he also knows that revealing the betrayal of the woman he loves would destroy him.

(Shameless plug. I've rewritten the Tristan and Isolde story to make it more accessible for modern readers, titled "Ashes of Heaven."  Available as an ebook or paperback, on all major ebook platforms or in your favorite book store.  Here's the Amazon link.) 

 But can we do psychoanalysis on medieval people?  For example, can we figure out that a particular count or duke was cruel because he was raised by a wet-nurse until he was two and then taken from her?  Can we postulate that someone decided to become a monk because his father died when he was very small and he needed an abbot as a replacement father figure?

Well, as soon as you put it that way it sounds rightly absurd.  After all, it's hard to make sweeping statements about an individual's development based on them experiencing the same thing everyone else experienced.  If being taken from a wet-nurse when very young would necessarily warp someone, we'd expect all members of the elite to be cruel and vindictive, which they certainly were not. Plenty of young men who converted to monasticism when they reached adulthood had fathers at home the whole time.

To know whether a particular experience was what made someone behave a certain way, and to help that person deal with that experience if they needed to change their behavior, you'd need to repeatedly have long, personal discussions with them.  There's a reason why one hears references to years of counseling.  The tricky part of doing counseling with a medieval person is that they've been dead for centuries.

This didn't necessarily stop historians.  For a while, back in the 1970s, there was a major interest in so-called psycho-history, analyzing people of the past through the lens of psychoanalysis.  It appealed even more if the historian didn't know much about psychoanalysis other than having read a couple books by Freud and maybe one other psychologist.

This didn't work out very well, and historians quickly moved on, trying to suggest they'd never dipped into psycho-history.  I myself consider historians trying to grab a few tidbits of some social science (sociology, psychology, anthropology, geography) as lusting after false gods.  Those are perfectly good fields in their own right, and we historians cannot just grab a few tidbits and pretend we're a "scientific" field and not a form of the humanities (which is what we are).  We'd be rightly upset after all if an anthropologist read some medieval social history book and announced he now understood our "primitive ancestors" to compare to people in modern-day third-world countries.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on various aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback! 

 

Buttons

 We take buttons for granted.  They fasten our shirts, our coats, our waistbands.  They're now most commonly made of plastic, but they can also be made of metal or bone or wood or shell.  The image below shows buttons made of shell on a sweater.  

 Buttons can also be a fashion statement; the buttons on a suit jacket sleeve really have no practical purpose, and a double-breasted jacket has lots of buttons that don't do anything.

 For much of the Middle Ages, clothes were not fastened with buttons.  Whereas the modern standard for buttoned openings is to overlap two pieces of cloth, with the lower level having a button that goes through a buttonhole on the upper one, medieval clothing typically butted two pieces of cloth together, side by side  They were held together by stitches, by toggles, or by a clasp.

Interestingly, early medieval people did have buttons, or things that look like buttons, little knobs sewn onto clothes as decorative features, the way today we might put souvenir pins on a hat or campaign "buttons" on a jacket.  Some buttons were even jeweled. They just weren't used to fasten the clothes together. 

The basic item of clothing then for both men and women was a tunic, basically a long T-shirt.  It would have to be loose enough to wiggle one's way into without zippers or buttons or any sort of opening, though fancy women's dresses were cut on the bias, giving the fabric enough stretch that it could be cut closer to the body.  Fancy tight sleeves would have to be stitched on once someone pulled on their sleeveless tunic; at night the stitches would be cut and the sleeves removed.  One sleeveless tunic could be paired with several sets of sleeves for different looks.

This changed in the thirteenth century. It's not clear if other parts of the hemisphere (which too had long had decorative buttons) had earlier invented closing openings with buttons paired with loops or buttonholes, or if Europeans invented the idea. But at any rate this use of buttons reached Europe. The aristocracy loved them.

A tight fitting jacket or vest (known as a doublet) could be cut to follow your upper body's shape without worrying about how you'd wiggle into something so tight.  Instead, it was open down the front until buttoned right up with a couple dozen buttons. Funerary carvings of the deceased often showed them with all their buttons.

The military of the post-medieval period adopted buttons with a vengeance, lots of brass buttons, both for buttoning and for show.  As a result, when the Amish appeared in the seventeenth century, with one their central tenets non-violence, they rejected the use of buttons as too associated with the military.

As I have discussed previously, the modern Amish are not living in some version of the Middle Ages, but like medieval people before the thirteenth century they do not use buttons. Small children may, but adults use hooks and eyes (Velcro counts as hooks and eyes) and pins.  It is apparently quite a move toward adulthood when an Amish girl can graduate to the use of all straight pins, rather than buttons, to hold her outfit together.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on clothing and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback! 

 

 

Linen

Linen was the standard cloth for any medieval clothing not made of wool.  Linen is still in use today but has become far less popular, mostly because it wrinkles easily (unlike most cotton-polyester blends).   It's still found in handkerchiefs, bedding, and some shirts, but many people may own no linen clothing at all (interestingly, underwear, now universally made from cotton and maybe nylon, is often referred to collectively as "linen").

But when silk was extremely expensive, polyester and nylon and rayon were unknown, and cotton was rare (it really only reached western Europe in the thirteenth century), linen was the cloth you wanted next to your skin.  (It was also the cloth from which sails were made.)

Linen even now has advantages over a lot of other kinds of cloth.  It is never itchy, as wool can be if not processed properly.  It is strong, stronger than cotton, and is never munched on by clothes moths, as is wool. It is cool and thus good to wear in hot weather.  It also takes up dye readily. 

Linen is made from flax, a kind of grass that can, when treated, be spun as one spins wool and then woven.   It has been in use since ancient times; the semi-diaphanous outfits people were wearing in Egyptian wall paintings were made of linen.  Scraps of linen fabric have been found in central Asia that are believed to be tens of thousands of years old.  Below is an image of the flax plant's details; note that blue flowers.

 Going from the grass-like linen plant to fibers ready to be spun and woven into cloth was a complicated process.  First the plants were "retted," soaked in pond water, where both the water and the bacteria in it would loosen the fibers from each other (medieval people didn't know about bacteria eating pectin, but they knew soaking in the right water got rid of the sticky stuff holding the fibers together).  Then the plants were "scutched," crushed to break down the stalks so that the fibers were freed of them.  Then the fibers were "heckled," combed to get rid of short bits, leaving only the longer fibers, ready for spinning.

In the Middle Ages, linen production, like wool production, could take place anywhere but was especially common in northern Germany and what are now the Benelux countries.  One might call it an industry, but there were no factories, rather villages in which a number of the houses contained spinning and weaving operations.  Women especially produced the cloth on small-scale hand looms.

Linen's natural color is a creamy white, but medieval people liked it even whiter and would bleach it in the sun. A sign of refinement was to wear very lightweight, very white linen.  All the heroines in the stories wore white linen.  It would of course need to be ironed, with a flat iron heated up in the fire.

 

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on clothing and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback! 

 

The Earth is a Globe

 Since the "flat earth" delusion seems to be making a comeback on social media, it's time to reiterate:  people in the Middle Ages knew the earth was a globe.

Okay, most of the population probably never thought much at all about the shape of the planet. But the learned certainly thought about it and knew it was a globe.  It was in fact obvious.  During a lunar eclipse, the shadow of the earth falls on the moon, and it is certainly round.

It couldn't just be a flat circle, because the earth's curvature is clear on both land and sea.  If you watch a ship sail out of harbor into the open ocean, it goes "hull down," disappearing from the bottom up as the ship goes over the earth's curve.  On land, as you travel toward distant mountains they appear to grow, at first you just see the top peaks, then more and more as you get closer, as less is hidden by the earth's curve.

The earth in medieval thinking also had to be a sphere because the heavens were a sphere.  Look at the sky on a clear day. It's a sphere (actually a hemisphere), and we're standing looking up at the inside of a globe.

Ancient people had also known the earth was a globe.  Aristotle in fact set out to calculate the size of the earth.  He underestimated, but it was a good effort.  Unfortunately for Columbus, he not only used Aristotle's estimate, but figured that because he would be sailing west well north of the equator, the distance around the earth was smaller yet, plus he seems to have forgotten to carry the 2... (or the equivalent).  But he and the Spanish court certainly  knew the earth was a globe, just thought the distance from Spain to the East Indies was thousands of miles shorter than it actually is.

(The idea that the Spanish court expected Columbus to fall off the edge of the earth is a complete canard, dating not from 1492 but from the nineteenth century and a "hilarious" anti-Spanish fictional story, written by Washington Irving, better known to us for the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow.)

Where medieval people had their astrophysics messed up was the shape of the solar system.  Rather than seeing the earth and the rest of the planets rotating around the sun, they had the sun and all the planets (all of them globes) rotate around the earth.  Explaining their orbits was really tricky, as they seemed to go backwards sometimes as well as forward.  But they tried.

In addition, they generally assumed that as one went further south one would get progressively hotter, so that as the North Pole was cold, the South Pole was assumed to be hot.  There was also concern about how the people who were thought to live in the southern hemisphere could stay attached to the planet, given that they were (from the point of view of the northern hemisphere) upside down.

Sometimes these southerners were depicted with giant feet and toes, to grip the earth so they wouldn't fly off.  They were also bent 180 degrees at the waist, so that their head was still "up."  Yet other medieval thinkers had it right, that "down" was not an absolute direction but rather toward the center of the planet, wherever one was on it.  Dante, in describing a descent into Hell, said that once you got into the center, where Satan sat frozen in ice, you had to turn around, head where your feet had been, to continue up to the other side of the planet.

 Flat earth folks today have major problems explaining things like, if there's an edge to this flat earth, why has no one ever seen it?  How can planes fly around the world just as if it's a globe, if they argue everything is actually laid flat in two dimensional space?  If you go west from California, how do you suddenly end up on the east side of the planet, next to Japan?

One of the sillier arguments I've seen recently is that we must be a flat, unmoving space, with sun and moon and everything else rotating around us, because if we were actually on a swiftly rotating planet we'd fly off into space.  (Try this analogy: how can we drive along at 60 mpg in a car without being thrown from the front seat into the back seat and out the back hatch by the speed?)

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on medieval understanding of the world, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback.

 

Too Many Clothes

 Pretty much all of us have too many clothes.  (Yes, I'm looking at me here.). It's hard to avoid. We needed something for a special event and got it.  We have a favorite outfit that's gotten stained and threadbare, but we can't bear to get rid of it.  We saw something really nice on sale.  We have work responsibilities where it seems appropriate not to wear the same outfit too many times close together.

We have some perfectly good clothes we might wear again if we ever lost a few pounds or they came back into style.  We have clothes we would certainly wear if we ever went to a dude ranch/went on a fancy cruise/took up tennis/needed to clear brush (gotta be prepared!).  We have clothes that we don't really like, but they were a gift, so it seems we ought to wear them sometime.  We have clothes we forgot we have.

 Needless to say, this was not a problem in the Middle Ages.  The only people who had what might be considered "too many" clothes were the extremely wealthy, and even they would be put to shame by the number of outfits in a modern teenager's closet.  Party this was because clothes were a lot more expensive and slow to produce than the "fast fashion" one sees today.

(Fast fashion is called that both because it's like "fast food," relatively inexpensive and ultimately unsatisfying, and because new styles are constantly being introduced to keep customers constantly buying the latest fashion.)

Today clothes are sewn by machine, usually in the southern hemisphere, rather than sewn by hand (even home sewers use sewing machines—even the Amish use foot-pedal-driven machines).  And the cloth is all machine-woven today, not woven by hand.  All that hand labor drives up the cost and means one cannot pop up to the mall and come home a couple hours later with several new outfits

 Probably the majority of the medieval population had two everyday outfits, one to wear and one to wash. They might also have a third special-occasions outfit.  (The well-to-do might have two special-occasions outfits.)  These clothes would be worn until they were pretty thoroughly worn out, extensively patched and sewn back together.

The wealthy would pass a worn cloak or tunic down to a servant or someone of lower social status, as an act of generosity, so even a poor person might get to wear silk or velvet at some point, even if stained and threadbare.

At some point clothes just couldn't be worn any more.  At this point they would become rags.  Rags were useful.  They were used for scrubbing.  They were used for diapers.  They were used in the latrine.  They were used for feminine hygiene.  They were used to stuff comforters.  They were used for patches to make another outfit last a few months longer. Rags would get dirty, so just wash and use again until they literally fell apart.

As all this suggests, disposing of old clothing was not a concern.  It is however in the modern West.  Some clothing is just tossed into the garbage.  Other unwanted clothing may be dropped off at Goodwill, but Goodwill will toss anything too stained and threadbare to attract a buyer.  In the US something like a quarter of everything in the landfill is clothing that's been thrown away.

Some worn-out clothing can have its fabric recycled, especially pure cotton and pure wool.  It is however difficult to recycle the strands of a cotton-poly mix fabric, because the different kinds of strands require different processes, and it's nearly impossible to separate them.  This is why the amount of used clothing in the landfill continues to grow, in spite of recycling efforts. (Medieval people, with no polyester, did not have this problem.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on clothing and other aspects of life in the Middle Ages, see my ebook, Positively Medieval, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback! 

 

Bethlehem

 It's Christmas-time!  No it isn't really, the beginning of Advent on December 1 is really the beginning of Christmas, though some would wait for December 6, the feast of Saint Nicholas, and, okay, Christmas season can start with Thanksgiving.  But lately Christmas starts with Hallowe'en, even earlier according to department stores. Today I saw two lit Christmas trees in peoples' windows, so I figured I'd blog about what is known in the carols as "little town of Bethlehem."

Actually Bethlehem wasn't that little. It was a city, about five miles from Jerusalem, a couple hours' walk, and quite prosperous around the year 1.  It was located on a ridge, originally well fortified, and had a Roman aqueduct to bring in water for its thriving population.  However, during the second century AD the Romans laid waste to much of Judea, putting down rebellions, and Bethlehem did not really recover for centuries.

In the nineteenth century, when there was an interest in creating a historical and archaeological context for events in the Bible, those who visited Bethlehem found what could only be called a village, not a city (much less a fortified city), and it was easy to go from there to the hamlet with shepherds' huts and one inn as seen in today's Christmas cards.

Bethlehem was important to the Gospel writers because it was remembered as the hometown of King David, a millennium earlier.  The prophecies about the Messiah had always said that he would be of the House of David, so it was important that Jesus be born there.  On the other hand, he clearly reached adulthood in Nazareth, according to all four Gospels.

The Gospel of Matthew has his family living in their house in Bethlehem, where they welcomed the Magi a year or so later, before fleeing from the murderous King Herod to Egypt as refugees and only settling in Nazareth after their return.  The Gospel of Luke on the other hand has Mary and Joseph owning a house n Nazareth the whole time and only going to Bethlehem to pay their taxes.  Shepherds visited them at the stable where they stayed.  Then they went home again, not worried a bit about Herod.  (The Gospels of Mark and John do not mention Jesus's birth,)

 In the Middle Ages, the church of the Nativity was an important shrine in the Holy Land, where pilgrims would visit.  It was supposedly built over the famous stable of Bethlehem (Gospel of Luke).  At the base is a cave or grotto, believed to be the original stable, though Luke doesn't actually mention a cave.  The church's origins are in the fourth century, under Emperor Constantine, though it was rebuilt and added to numerous times over the centuries.  It is still there, with Byzantine and Crusader elements the most prominent.  There is an attached monastery of Armenian Christians, dating to the twelfth century, as well as smaller communities of Catholic and Greek Orthodox monks.  Bethlehem itself has now become a major town, with a primarily Palestinian population, that is happy to welcome Christian tourists.

 There is an article about Bethlehem, focusing especially on its aqueduct, in the Winter 2025 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review. 

 © C. Dale Brittain 2025

Six Hundred Posts

 So I started this blog over eleven years ago, and as of today I'm making my 600th post.  In honor of this milestone, I'd like to make a few comments about medieval social history and fantasy literature, the blog's two (related) topics.

Most fantasy these days is set in some version of a society like that of Europe in the Middle Ages.  Exactly where in that thousand-year period is not always particularly clear, but hey, this is an imaginary past, with magic and wonders, set in an imaginary landscape, so we don't need to get all technical.  Do we?

How did fantasy and the Middle Ages get associated?  Part of it is fantasy's roots in fairy tales and folk tales, which get bawdlerized into sweet pictures of princesses in tall, pointed caps from which a veil is suspended.  Some of these tales (like "Puss in Boots") were written in the early modern period, which from a modern perspective doesn't look that different from the medieval period.  Some (like those of the Brothers Grimm), though written later, depict a country life not wildly different from that of half a millennium earlier.  In some ways the Middle Ages persisted until the railroad and the telegraph transformed transportation and communication in the nineteenth century.

More specifically, all modern fantasy has been inspired by JRR Tolkien, who was a medievalist who specialized in medieval literature.  He was able to keep much of the ethos of that literature while creating characters modern readers could identify with.  Readers loved it and wanted more.

Modern industrialization has taken all the glory out of most work, and with most household objects made by strangers on the other side of the globe, we have lost connection to our own possessions.  The Middle Ages (or at least an imagined version of that time) is seen as a period in which we made our own excellent objects, grew our own food, were close to the natural world, and didn't get stuck in highway traffic.  Plus glory!

 Medieval literature was full of glorious wars and celebrations of bravery.  Right up through WW I a lot of people still believed in this, at least in Europe, though the American Civil War, with its deaths and maimings and friends turned against each other, had reduced American enthusiasm for wars with cannons and rifles.  Strikingly, fantasy battles never have cannons and rifles.  It's mostly swords, where if you kill someone it's an up-close-and-personal event, where you could get killed yourself just as easily.

Cannons reached the real Middle Ages in the fourteenth century, transforming warfare, as foot soldiers became valuable as cannon fodder (the enemy cannons shoot, kill the foot soldiers, and then you quick charge before they can reload).  Castles also changed.  But no one wants to read about this.

Instead most fantasy today is set in a society that looks a lot like Tudor-Stuart or Elizabethan England (sixteenth century), but with twelfth- and thirteenth-century weaponry.  Our heroes wander through a world with few peasants (Tolkien didn't have peasants either, though the hobbits were sturdy yeomen).  There are castles and kingdoms, lots of kingdoms, often just a few weeks' walk apart.  In fact, medieval kingdoms were a lot larger than that, and the division of Germany into multiple little principalities was a later phenomenon.

While I'm on the topic of things that bug me about modern fantasy, every crossroads village in these stories has a tavern, serving brown stew (with meat, probably savory, but certainly brown), and full of ruffians and ne'er do wells (that is, the tavern is full of them, not the stew).  In fact a medieval tavern or brew house was there for the locals, so everyone didn't have to brew their own beer, and was connected with the village bakery, which served a similar purpose.  It might provide food, but it was almost certainly vegetarian.

Then there's fantasy religion.  Some stories have no religion at all, which seems wildly unlikely.  All societies have some version of religion.  More likely, there's some organized religion that appears to be a weird mashup of the modern evangelical movement and stereotypes of the Spanish Inquisition.  Priests tend to be scheming hypocrites who don't actually believe what they preach, or fanatics.  Sorry, I know too much about the history of medieval religion to be able to reconcile this with what is supposed to be (fictional) events taking place in a historically-based medieval society.

But it's fantasy! Yes, I know.  My main "Yurt" fantasy series is set in something that's like what the nineteenth century would have been like if there had been no Protestant Reformation, no American hemisphere to be discovered, no French Revolution, no Industrial Revolution (with magic filling the latter gap).  But with religion.  And magic.  And no gunpowder.  When one is making up a society, one can make up all sorts of things (my sister and I once made up an island society where the people were marsupials).  But if you want readers to think you're inspired by the Middle Ages, change things around on purpose, not because you don't know better.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025