Personally, I blame it all on Bentham and the Utilitarians - among others -
who were only interested in "useful knowledge". There does seem to be a
need for several books - technology, religion, science, even the body and
sexuality - to do what Peter Gay's series "The Bourgeois Experience" did
for the Victorians. As one of my supervisors Nancy Partner says repeatedly,
"medieval people may have been highly moral, but they were never priggish."
For that matter, popular misconceptions from students seem to apply to
nearly every era except the one in which they are living. You ought to
hear the howlers on Shakespeare. Terry
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