The Starlight Raven

 A lot of readers like series.  They get to know and like the characters, they enjoy the world in which the characters function, and they are eager to see what happens next.  This is why some authors keep a series going for dozens of books (mysteries are especially wont to do this), and why both TV shows and movies keep bringing out the same people to have new adventures.

I like a good series myself!  And I write them.  When I first wrote and published A Bad Spell in Yurt, I assumed it was a stand-alone.  At first I resisted suggestions that it become a series.  I'd seen too many series in which the problem solved in the first book turns out not to have been solved after all in the second book, thus undercutting what had been the first book's happy ending, or the same problems being presented repeatedly and unoriginally (as in the classic, Defeat the Dark Lord in book 1, defeat the Purple Lord in book 2, and in book 3, look, there's the Plaid Lord), or the author becoming so fond of his characters that he won't let anything exciting or dangerous happen to them.  But my husband persuaded me that my characters could mature and grow and face entirely different challenges, so "Yurt" ended up being a series, with 6 novels (and 3 shorter novellas).

But the series wrapped up well in the sixth novel, all the long-term plot lines resolved, our hero in a very different place than he had been at the beginning.  I didn't want to continue the series with lame adventures.

So instead I went with "Yurt, the Next Generation."  This series focuses on the hero's daughter, offspring of a witch and a wizard with the skills of both.  The Starlight Raven, the title of the first book about Antonia, has become a series in itself, with three books published and a fourth on the way.  It will probably be five or maybe six books in all.

These are quite different, I've found, than the original Yurt series, even if set in the same world.  A teenage girl (Antonia) is quite different from a perhaps overly-confident young adult male (her father when his series begins).  She has to worry about sex discrimination and unwanted attention from the opposite sex, things which never bothered him in the slightest.  I've added the dimension that witchcraft, female magic, is quite different from male wizardry, and Antonia has to try to find her way in both, while still being a girl.  Although the wizards' school gets mentioned a lot in the original Yurt series, Antonia's stories are actually set there, at least in part.  I've also done a lot more with inter-generational issues.

The result of introducing real teen-girl issues into fantasy is that a lot of people think of "The Starlight Raven" series as darker and for more mature audiences than the original Yurt, even though Antonia begins the series at age 14, whereas her father began his own series in his late 20s and has been killed at least once, although she's never been killed a bit.

 

Anyway, I hope that both "Yurt" fans and people who just enjoy teen fantasy will like "The Starlight Raven."  A sample is given below to whet your appetite.  Here's the link to the book on Amazon.

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Of course I knew my mother was a witch.
She never needed a match to light the fire.  She knew immediately if someone new had come to town, even if she had spent the entire day at home, sewing.  Sometimes in the evening, after she had finished tailoring a new ballgown for the mayor’s daughter or embroidering a new altar-cloth for the church, women would knock quietly on our door, giving quick glances up and down the cobbled street, and Mother would tell them if they were going to have a baby boy or a girl.
But I had no intention of living an uneventful life as a small-town witch.  I was going to study to be a real wizard.
That would be easy, I thought.  My father was head of the wizards’ school in the great City, a much more interesting place than our little town of Caelrhon.  He’d said himself that I could come and study there when I became fourteen, the first girl the wizards’ school had ever admitted.  Already I knew how to turn someone into a frog, something even my mother couldn’t do.
But on my fourteenth birthday it all became much less easy.

It started two weeks earlier.  A gentle hand on my shoulder interrupted my dreams.  “Antonia, wake up.”
“It’s too early to get up for school,” I mumbled into the pillow.
The hand remained on my shoulder.  “It’s not a school day.”
Then I remembered.  “We’re going to the City!”
I was out of bed with a bound, and then, with another bound, right back under the covers.  The air from my casement window was cold.  “It’s not even morning yet!”
Mother flicked a flame into life on my candlestick.  She was already dressed, her brown braids neatly wrapped around her head.  I loved her hair, smooth where mine was always tangled, darker than mine but showing golden highlights in the glow of the candle.
“I want to go there and be home again before it gets late,” she said firmly.  “After all, tomorrow is a school day.  In fact I hear,” she added with a smile, tugging the quilt off me, “that at the wizards’ school they give the new students only one warning.  Then, if they aren’t on time for the first early-morning class, they set the dragons on them.”
I swung my legs out of bed and kept them out.  “Sometimes I think everyone’s seen dragons except for me.  Father even killed one once when he was young, even though he won’t talk about it.  And there was the time we arrived in the City just too late to see a whole flock of them.”
“I’ve never seen a dragon either,” said Mother.  She had the brush and was working the snarls out of my hair.  “I think it would be more terrifying than exciting.  And I’m not at all sure they come in ‘flocks.’”
I let her work on my braids, thinking that once I was a wizard I would go visit dragons myself, rather than waiting for them to come to me.  A herd of dragons?  A pack?  A clutch?  I was fairly certain it wouldn’t be a gaggle.
“Besides,” I said after a minute, “I know they don’t punish students for sleeping late.  Father told me that when he was a student at the wizards’ school, he hardly ever made any of his morning classes.”
There was a chuckle behind me.  “Antonia, your father is an admirable man in many ways, and he’s made himself an excellent wizard over the years, but I would not recommend using him as your model when you become a wizardry student.”
I shrugged and laughed myself.  Having my hair braided was very pleasant.  I glanced toward my window, still nearly dark, and was hit by a sudden memory.  “I had the strangest dream,” I said slowly.  “It was about a bat.  He tapped at my window and squeaked this really high squeak, but when I sat up he flew off.  And for some reason I wasn’t frightened at all.”
“Of course not,” Mother muttered through hairpins.  “Bats won’t hurt you.  I’m glad you knew that, even in a dream.”
“And the strangest thing of all,” I went on, “was that he had a little cylinder tied to his leg—you know, like the carrier pigeons wear.”
“Who would send messages by a bat?” said Mother abruptly.  The last pin went sharply into my hair.  “Really, Antonia, you’re old enough to know that nobody finds someone else’s dreams very interesting.  Get dressed and come downstairs.”
She slammed my door behind her, leaving me wondering why she could possibly be so irritated by a dream.
No time to worry about it.  I splashed cold water on my face from the washbasin, pulled on a school dress, and laced up my boots.  In front of the mirror I smoothed out the hairs disarranged in getting dressed.  I grinned at my reflection and blew out the candle.  I was the daughter of a witch and a wizard, almost fourteen years old, and I didn’t think there was anything I couldn’t do.
When I clattered down the stairs into the kitchen, Mother was frying bacon and smiling again.
But then I saw it, lying on the table amid dressmaking scraps:  a tiny piece of parchment, half unrolled.  It looked like the kind of message usually brought by a carrier pigeon.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015, 2022

Medieval Slavery

 The ancient Mediterranean region had been a society of slavery.  Slaves then were usually people who had been captured in battle, or the children/descendants of such people.  Slavery is distinguished from other sorts of subservience by the fact that slaves are treated as having no will of their own.  They cannot say No to any command, no matter how arbitrary or foolish, and they can be bought and sold like animals.  Ancient slavery did not have the racial component of later slavery in the Americas, because slaves might be the captured citizens of a different city located only a few dozen miles away, who had (until captured) shared language, religion, and culture with their captors.

The Roman Empire was built on slavery.  Rather than just raiding their neighbors, they captured hundreds of people from all over their vast territory.  Successful generals would have big parades, with captured slaves in chains walking along with the carts piled high with loot.  Some slaves were well treated, but there was no penalty for maltreating one's slaves, and even well treated slaves had nothing that we would call rights.  Runaway slaves would be captured and brought back.  In the city of Rome itself, slaves probably outnumbered the free people, and the Senate periodically worried that the slaves would figure this out and revolt (which they sometimes did anyway).

Mediterranean-region slaves might be given responsibility as school teachers, or those who ran shops, or those who ran a household, even as the equivalent of policemen in ancient Athens.  Certainly not every family had slaves, but all well-to-do ones did.  The gladiators who fought for the entertainment of the Roman masses were slaves.  The Romans used slaves for agriculture, working them very hard, even to death on big plantations.  Many Roman citizens in the countryside worked their own fields, and indeed it was from such yeomen farmers that the Roman legions were recruited, but with a lot of the young men off fighting, slaves made up the difference.

All of this changed in late antiquity.  Once the Roman legions stopped winning and bringing home new captured slaves, an economy built on the labor of slaves considered disposable become unsustainable.  With the breakdown of many of the structures of the Empire, due in part to changing climate, disease, and the rise of Islam, slaves could just run away.  In addition, freeing one's slaves became considered a Christian duty once the Empire became Christian, and it was clear that one was not supposed to enslave someone already a Christian.

Agricultural slavery was replaced during the sixth and seventh centuries by serfdom, as I have discussed earlier.  Serfs were not really free (and the term servus was the same Latin word used for slaves), but serfs could not be bought and sold or treated horribly without repercussions.  Most importantly, serfs had their own houses and own families and own plots of lands on which they raised their own food, rather than just being worked in gangs until they dropped, to be replaced by new slaves.

Household slavery continued until the eighth or ninth century in some cases, and one would never have wanted to be a serf, but for much of the Middle Ages slavery was not found in the West.  Slavs (in the Balkans and further east), who were not yet Christian, might be captured and sold as slaves (Slav is the root of the word slave), and Muslims and Christians might sometimes have engaged in the slave trade with each other around the Mediterranean, but this was rare.

But slavery returned at the end of the Middle Ages.  Both legal scholars at the universities and town councils in Renaissance Italy studied Roman law, where there was a great deal said about slavery.  North of the Mediterranean, there were attempts to reimpose serfdom, which had been dying out since the twelfth century. as I have discussed earlier.  In Italy, which considered itself the heir to Rome, slavery was once again considered appropriate.

And then Europeans started exploring the rest of the world in the late fifteenth century, discovering all sorts of people, especially in Africa and the Americas, who seemed very strange by their standards, thus perhaps to be treated as a lesser race, and who were not Christians.  With Roman law as their guide, people of the early modern period re-embraced slavery.

Today, one hopes, almost everyone would agree that slavery, treating humans like animals, is wrong.  But it has only been gone in the West (including North America) for about 150 years, and its legacy deplorably still lingers.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

Stonehenge

Stonehenge is not medieval.  It was built somewhere around 2500 BC.  But medieval people of course knew it was there, it's hard to miss a circle of huge standing stones, and they had their own theories about it.

 Modern archaeologists of course have had plenty of theories as well.  The current thinking is that it was built during a (relatively) short period at the end of the Stone Age (the Neolithic) which also saw most of the other great stone circles and standing stones erected across Britain, Ireland, and Brittany.  During a period that may have been as short as a century, Neolithic men across the region dragged huge stones many miles and heaved them up into position without machines, horses, or even the wheel.  (One assumes Neolithic women were wondering when the guys would do something useful, like raise some food.)  (Am I sexist in assuming the women had something better to do than create huge erections? of course not.)

And it certainly is a remarkable achievement.  Stonehenge's big stones weigh several tons each. The bluestones, those making a smaller circle in the center of the monument, came from Wales, 175 miles away.  (Stonehenge is unique in this; all the other stone circles in Britain just were built from local stone.)  There is even a site near the original Welsh quarry that has pits spaced the same as the stones at Stonehenge, but with no stones in them (maybe a test run?)  There is also some evidence that the cremated human remains found at Stonehenge are from people who had been living in Wales, perhaps those who had accompanied the bluestones to their final destination.

The biggest Stonehenge stones were all quarried locally, but they still would have needed to be dragged several miles.  And think about trying to heave the lintel stones up on top of the standing stones.  It's no wonder that Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing King Arthur stories in the twelfth century, said that Merlin had magically erected Stonehenge, having brought the stones from Ireland (some millennia-old legend of bluestones coming from Wales?).

In modern popular belief, Stonehenge is often attributed to the Druids and the Celtic peoples, and self-styled pagans like to hold special ceremonies there at the summer and winter solstice (the longest and shortest days of the year).  Stonehenge is indeed lined up with the sunrise of the summer solstice and the sunset of the winter solstice, but we know nothing of what this may have meant for the builders' religion.  We know a little about the Druids, but they came along some 2000 years later, making it pointless to assume similarities.

Whatever it meant to the people who built it, Stonehenge has generated lots of meanings in the last thousand years.  It has been taken as King Arthur's "real" round table, as proof that giants used to exist, as a sign of alien visitors from outer space, and of course as an excuse to wear green and do "pagan" dances.  The chronicler William of Huntington, writing in England in the 1130s, was probably more honest than most when he said he had no idea when or why it was built.  He still named it a "wonder of England."

The megalith builders (as they are called) did not only erect stone structures.  They also built huge circles of wood, sometimes made of very old, very tall oaks that would have weighed even more than the stones.  Archaeologists have found the remains of such "wood henges," though they are not visible now as the stone circles are; millennia ago, however, they would have stood as impressive monuments for centuries.

Although we can only guess at what the megalith builders were trying to do, it is interesting to note that they had agriculture, and thus a (fairly) reliable source of food, not needing to wander around hunting and gathering.  Some 4000 years after Stonehenge was built, the Inca emperors in what is now Peru had great stone structures built to honor their gods (and themselves), again using stone-age technology (this was not long before Columbus) and having well-established agriculture.  (They concentrated on walls, rather than standing stones, and smoothed the stones so that they would fit together so tightly you couldn't even slide a piece of paper between them.)

There is a good article on the current scientific understanding of Stonehenge's construction in the August 2022 National Geographic.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

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

500 Posts

So this is a milestone.  This marks the 500th post on my blog, "Life in the Middle Ages."

I started the blog back in 2014, over eight years ago, because I knew there was a lot of interest in medieval social history but not necessarily a lot of places to actually learn about it.  Sure, there were little "fun fact" things that might mention something from the Middle Ages, such as, "Medieval kings often received visitors while in the bathtub," complete with a drawing of someone lying in a clawfoot tub, wearing a crown, greeting someone dressed like the Vatican's Swiss guard.  (Ultimate source for this highly unlikely image is a comment by a contemporary biographer of Charlemagne, saying the king invited his courtiers to join him in the hot spring baths of Aachen, which would have been more like a small swimming pool.)  But I wanted to provide a look at how medieval people lived their lives, in an informal but scholarly accurate way.

The blog has been a success.  It routinely gets hundreds of hits a day.  I think some home-school curricula include links to it.  My post on "medieval farm animals" is especially popular, being viewed multiple times a day.  I try to post new material fairly regularly, but there's a whole lot out there already, everything from what medieval marriage was like, to latrines, to war horses, to medieval diet, to the origins of universities, to the history of the Bible, and so much more.  Scroll through, and I'm sure you'll find something interesting.

Along the way I also discuss, at least in passing, some of the things that modern western society takes for granted, like electricity and clean running water (and chocolate), to draw a contrast between our lives and those of our ancestors.  On the other hand, a constant effort has been not to draw too sharp a contrast between us and medieval people.  They really are like us in everything besides the material objects that surround us.  Looking down at people of the past as somehow defective because they didn't have cell phones doesn't help anything.

I also blog intermittently about my own fiction.  I write fantasy, set in a semi-medieval world.  It helps that in knowing a lot of real medieval history I can add texture and detail to the background.  And when I'm anachronistic, I'm doing it on purpose.

So if you've just stumbled across my blog, or if you've been following it for a long time, I hope you continue to find it enjoyable.  And are there topics I've never covered that you'd like to know about?  If so, let me know in the comments section, or email me (link in my profile).

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For much of the material from the first half dozen years of the blog, organized into handy chapters, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback, on Amazon and other on-line retailers, or for sale from your local bookstore.

Burgundy

 Medieval and early modern France was divided into counties and duchies, held by powerful lords.  These divisions were all done away with in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789, replaced by the départements, administrative units (originally there were 89, but more have been added around Paris).

But the old regional divisions persisted in people's minds, even if there were no more dukes or counts.  In recent years, there has been a new interest in regions, so it isn't only the Michelin guides anymore but also the local administrators who will tell you proudly that you have entered Anjou or Normandy or Alsace or whatever.

One of the most important medieval duchies was Burgundy.  Interestingly, the name Burgundy has been applied over the years to a great variety of different geographic locations, a lot of which don't even overlap.  Originally the Burgundians were centered in the Jura, the region where modern France and Switzerland meet.  They had their own kingdom in the early Middle Ages, and the end of their line of kings was preserved in legends that became attached to the story of Siegfried.

In the ninth century, the kingdom of Burgundy extended from there down the Rhône valley to the Mediterranean, with its capital at Vienne (near Lyon).  It included Provence and was part of what had been the Lotharingian "middle kingdom" between France and Germany (another part of this middle kingdom lingered on further north, in the region that became known as Lorraine, from "Lotharingia").  This kingdom did not however last more than a generation or two.

From the tenth century on, Burgundy became defined as the duchy centered on Dijon, stretching from the Loire on the west to Lorraine on the east, from the region of Sens in the north to the Mâconnais in the south.  Borders varied over time, and in the early modern period part of the northwest section of Burgundy, the regions of Nevers and Auxerre, were no longer under the dukes, but they are considered Burgundian by medievalists.

Medieval Burgundy was a great center of monasticism.  The great medieval monasteries of Cluny and Cîteaux, both soon heads of orders, were both founded in Burgundy (in 910 and 1098 respectively).  The region is still dotted with medieval churches, both Cluniac and Cistercian.  (That's part of the ruins of the abbey church of Cluny, below.)  Burgundian Romanesque architecture from the eleventh and especially twelfth centuries may be found throughout the region.

 Burgundy was in the Middle Ages, as it is now, also a great wine growing region.  It was conveniently located on rivers that ran downstream to Paris, making it easy to move wine to market.  One tends to think of Burgundy as red wine, but the region has plenty of white wine too, including Chablis; the valley of Chablis is entirely lined with vineyards.  The standard local white wine is called Bourgogne aligoté.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on medieval politics and religion, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Siegfried the Dragon-Slayer

 The story of Siegfried the Dragon-Slayer is a very old Germanic story that, in the Middle Ages, got attached to several other old stories, and in the nineteenth century was picked up by Richard Wagner for his massive "Ring" opera cycle (that's Wagner down below, click here for more on nineteenth-century efforts to reimagine medieval culture).  Literary scholars have a field day figuring out how all the parts of the Siegfried story might fit together.

 

The core of the story is that the hero Siegfried killed a dragon (also called a worm or a serpent), tasted the dragon's blood, and now was able to understand the language of birds.  A bird warned him that the dragon's friends and/or relatives were seeking revenge.  The dragon's horde of gold entered into it too.  There are many medieval images of someone with a sword in one hand licking the fingers of the other hand, with a bird perched in the tree above him.  These are Siegfried images.

But what happened to the story then?  One has to do some sort of mental archaeology to follow all its twists and turns.   The fullest medieval account is in the thirteenth-century Icelandic "Saga of the Volsungs."  Here Siegfried (Sigurd in Norse) enters the story well along, as a descendant of the (pagan) Norse god Odin.  It turns out that the dragon is the brother of Siegfried's foster father, who first encourages Siegfried to kill his brother, then wants to kill Siegfried to get revenge for the brother he himself wanted dead, but Siegfried kills him first.  Nice family interaction.  You will note that this saga was written long after Iceland had become Christian, and a constant theme is the horror of family feuds (conveniently set in long-ago pagan times).

Then we have historical events getting drawn into the Siegfried story, including Attila the Hun, the Merovingian-era kings of Burgundy, the Merovingian queen Brunhild (originally from Visigothic Spain), and the Carolingian-era Burgundian lords named Nibelung (Volsung in Icelandic).  There were also some ninth- and tenth-century epic tales that survive now only in fragments, whose heroes got attached to the Siegfried story,  These varied historical and fictional accounts seem to have circulated all during the early Middle Ages, different authors playing mix-and-match with pieces of them, until they emerged in the two great thirteenth-century epic tales, the "Saga of the Volsungs" in Norse and the "Nibelungenlied" in German.  Although Wagner tried to combine them (working in some material from the Norse Eddas while he was at it), the two versions were very deliberately written to reject parts of the story found in the other.

In the "Saga," as already noted, Siegfried enters the story rather late.  He kills the dragon and has a hot affair with Odin's daughter Brunhilda (who is actually his aunt, but we won't go into that), well before he marries.  In the "Nibelungenlied," however, the story starts with Siegfried, a rather reckless but Christian prince, who had killed a dragon and gotten its gold sometime in the past and had never met Brunhilda in his life.  In this version everyone is wealthy, courteous, and courtly--though soon it will all change.

Both versions have Siegfried marry a princess, then be killed by his brothers-in-law, because they have been stirred up against him by his oldest brother-in-law's wife, Brunhilda.  Having left the story, he plays no further role except as a reason for long-term revenge plots, which lead to just about everyone being dead.  Both the Norse and the German versions have this central plot, but it's handled very differently.

In the Norse version, Brunhilda wanted Siegfried dead because he had forgotten her, and she was wildly jealous.  She laughs to learn he's dead, but then commits suicide.  In the German version, she's very irritated with Siegfried's princess, who mocks Brunhilda by saying she (Brundhilda) had had sex with Siegfried thinking he was her own husband (she hadn't), and Brunhilda decides to get revenge by having Siegfried killed.  (She herself stays alive.)

In both versions, Siegfried's widow (Gudrun in the Norse version, Kriemhild in the German) is married off to Attila the Hun to get her out of the way.  When her brothers come to visit, there is a great battle with great slaughter, and Gudrun sides with her brothers in the Norse version.  In the German version, Kriemhild instead helps kill them.  The courtliness of the early parts of this story is long gone.

The brave young warrior who kills a dragon and gets the gold has shown up in various stories for 1500 years, and he seems to have started with Siegfried.  In the hands of two great thirteenth-century poets, he became the starting point about the horrors of betrayal and revenge.

There are various translations of both versions.  I like Jesse L. Byock's translation of the "Saga" and A. T. Hatto's translation of the "Nibelungenlied," both available from Penguin Books.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on medieval epics, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

Whose Middle Ages?

 Memory studies teach us that those who control the past control the present (and future).  That is, if one can create a particular version of history, and have it accepted, one can seek to have the present (and future) shaped to be more like the Good Old Days.

Historians are always acutely aware of this.  We try to present a history that matches the records and do our best not to portray a past that was like what we would have preferred it to be like.  (This can of course work both ways:  the past could be a Golden Age to which we need to return, or the past can be a horrible, savage time, and we need to do the exact opposite of everything they used to do.)

Every generation thinks it's finally gotten it right, only to have the next generation raise their eyebrows at such evident bias.  But I do think that, over the two-plus generations that I've been a medievalist, we may be getting closer.  At least historians tend to focus on medieval records rather than some romantic vision.

Though here one has to be aware that "the records," things written down in the Middle Ages, supplemented with archaeology, do not give a unitary result.  When you have millions of people doing various things, it's always possible to find someone in the past who said something about their period that matches what you wanted them to say.  One of the great challenges for any historian is approaching the archives with an open mind, not going in determined to find only certain things, because if you do, that's all you'll find.

There's been a recent surge of interest in the general population in the Middle Ages, due in part to the fantasy versions found in the wildly popular Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones.  Although medievalists are delighted to have people interested in our period, it does give us pause when people create their own version of the Middle Ages, trying to shape the medieval past to match what they'd like to be the situation now.

Specifically, there has been a strong effort to portray medieval Europe as completely white and completely Christian, where lower-class people "knew their place," so that the wealthy could dominate them, and where women were "properly" subservient to men.  The Crusades are sometimes portrayed as a wonderful time when Christians beat the heck out of Muslims (leaving out the tidbit that all Crusades after the first were disastrous for the West).  Now historians know that none of this is true.  As I have discussed before, there were certainly people of color in medieval Europe, there were significant minority populations of Jews and Muslims, and both women and peasants were entirely capable of resisting any effort by powerful men to dominate them.

And yet the Middle Ages have such a hold on the population that it is often invoked as informing the present.  A great many white, male organizations call their members "knights."  This needn't mean they are white supremacists, but it does indicate an effort to invoke a period believed to be one of honor, strength, and willingness to sacrifice for a higher goal.  (In a period today where such things seem to be in short supply, one can appreciate their approach, though I continue to find men in nice suits, glasses, and a comb-over calling themselves knights somewhat, shall I say, droll.)

Now, as in LotR and GoT, one can create fantasy imbued with at least some medieval aspects.  Part of fantasy's appeal is that honor and glory can find a home.  Just make it clear this is not historical fiction.  After all, medieval people wrote such fantasy themselves, creating larger-than-life versions of their own world for their heroes and heroines to run around in.  But it seems mean-spirited at best (not to say a-historical) to make up a fantasy Middle Ages in which everyone is white and Christian, except for the bad guys, and where women and lower-status people can safely be ignored.

(Interestingly, the "Indiana Jones" movies, deliberately using the language of Crusade as the heroes rampage around the Middle East, did not have Muslims as bad guys.  Rather, the bad guys were Nazis.  Nazis make a convenient all-purpose villainous enemy, though it's disturbing to see Nazi flags show up at some rallies.  Guys, we beat them.  They were not only evil, they were losers.)

There is a new book out, called Whose Middle Ages?, by Andrew Albin et al. (Fordham University Press, 2019), full of ideas for those teaching the Middle Ages, to avoid modern prejudices and stereotypes.

 © C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on medieval society and religion, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.