medieval bodies life and death in the middle ages

We understandably focus on the 'blood' in that sentence but what of the roses? The rest of that same paragraph explains. Take for example the quotation above by Huizinga - 'so violent and motley was life, that it bore the mixed smell of blood and roses.' It paints a vivid picture. ' So, does this confound our expectations or do we choose another similarly-sized city that confirms a higher medieval murder rate?Īnd before answering that questions, we should realize that how we answer it depends less on what we want to prove about the past and more about what we want to prove about our own time. hile much of the US or EU experiences far less violence than much of thirteenth-century England, some city dwellers. thirteenth-century England as a whole was not significantly more violent than the US or EU around the turn of the twenty-first century. He concluded that 'counterintuitive as it might seem. Warren Brown in his book Violence in Medieval Europeanalyzed a trove of historical data on violence across England, but then compared them with similar statistics from the US and EU. According to the US Department of Justice, homicides in Roanoke, VA, a city of comparable size to London in 1300 CE, were higher (306 total) across a shorter time-span (30 years, 1985-2014). In the case of this 'murder map,' we should think about what 142 documented murders in a city of about 80,000 people over a 40-year period really means.

Sometimes the same data set can both confirm and refute our assumptions about a problem. But let's think for a moment about the data set presented by this mapping project. We, of course, realize that data matters mostly in how it's understood. Look at all the murders, plotted all at once on the map. In some ways, the 'medieval murder map' seems to confirm those suspicions. And academics can be as guilty as anyone else when making sweeping generalizations about violence over time. Historian Johan Huizinga famously wrote in 1921 that 'so violent and motley was life, that it bore the mixed smell of blood and roses.' Much more recently, psychologist Steven Pinker charted a decline in violence from pre-modernity to today (though that book has now been rightly critiqued as deeply problematic). It's now such a commonplace that it's almost a cultural norm. Fantasy video games such as The Witcher, TV shows like Game of Thrones, movies like Braveheart, and books such as the Broken Empireseries promote the myth of rampant violence, using a background of knights and castles to link their fictional worlds in our minds to the Middle Ages.

The idea that the Middle Ages was a spectacularly violent time might seem like a fair conclusion to draw, given what most people know about the time period. We tend to think of the European Middle Ages as a particularly violent time and place.

Medieval bodies life and death in the middle ages