Greetings--
Probably the widest-held misconception I've run across is the idea of a
super-organized Church who could *literally* police all behaviour amongst
its flock. Things that go with this is the idea that the Church "banned
reading of the Bible by layfolk", and with it the idea that the Church tried
to keep laypeople as ignorant about the faith as humanly possible.
Related is the whole "age of faith" idea, which seems to have an underlying
tone of poo-pooing those "superstitious medievals-" this in the age of
psychic hotlines and astrologers to the celebrities, no less!
A few quick ones:
Medieval food was heavily spiced because the meat was rotten. Or, its
cousin--medieval food was ground to a pulp and was terribly bland. (I ran
across *both* of these assertions in the same article which appeared in a
special interest group publication from Mensa some years ago.)
Ring around the Rosie is about the Plague.
The whole raison d'etre of the Dominican Order was the Inquisition.
One day everyone woke up and it was the Renaissance and life was glorious.
Medieval kings were invariably absolutist rulers in the Louis XIV sense.
(This tends to go hand in hand with the idea that since society has
"progressed" since the Middle Ages that things must have been "worse" back
then.)
Susan Carroll-Clark
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