Positively Medieval

Modern men, at least according to a recent TikTok meme, spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the ancient Roman Empire. Far fewer, however, stop to consider the Holy Roman Empire, the vast kingdom that covered much of Europe beginning in the early Middle Ages. Eleanor Janega, who teaches medieval history at the London School of Economics, wants to change that. In books like The Middle Ages: A Graphic History and her most recent, The Once and Future Sex, Janega makes the case that what we think we know about the Middle Ages is often wrong and that taking the time to learn about this complex, colorful, and consequential era might teach us more than we expect.

What do people get wrong about the Middle Ages?
We tell some really weird myths about it. I often hear, “You know they didn’t bathe, right?” That’s completely incorrect—but imagining that these people were just rolling around in filth, afraid of God, lets us maintain the belief that no one was doing anything of value. In reality, what they were doing was quite similar to what we do now, with a few weird differences.

One major difference you note between the medieval period and today is the cultural view of women’s sexuality. What’s changed?
Today, there’s a widespread stereotype that women don’t really like sex; we put up with it in order to have relationships. And men hate relationships; they put up with them in order to have sex. But for the great majority of Western history, it was the complete opposite: Women are insatiably horny, they can’t stop having sex with anything they see, and men just want a nice wife. Medieval people were both very Christian and very obsessed with the Romans and the Greeks—and whether it’s Plato or Augustine or Thomas Aquinas, one thing they all agreed on was that sex is bad. And because men were seen as the default, ideal human, if sex was bad, that must mean that women liked it.

When did that start to change?
Post-scientific revolution, people developed a desire to biologize everything. Once they started to think of sex as something natural and harmless, they started to accept that men might like it. We do this over and over throughout history: The minute we start to consider something good, natural, or intellectually challenging, it becomes the realm of the masculine.

What’s an example of a newly masculine realm?
In the Middle Ages, accountancy was “women’s work.” It was just crunching numbers, after all; how hard could it be? Men were busy reading Plato’s Republic. But once computing started to be seen as valuable, then it was for boys. We see something similar today in the devaluing and the defunding of the humanities, where now a lot of women are involved. But we can learn from that: If we can recognize that our justifications for the way we treat women change constantly, that tells us that we can change course at any moment.

The “ideal” medieval woman had a pot belly, small breasts, and an incredibly high forehead. How does that square with today’s beauty standards?
We still have the same desire they did, which is to say that when it comes to beauty, there’s a right answer and a wrong answer—and the “right” answer is whatever is most difficult for poor people to achieve. The difference is they didn’t feel as much need to explain themselves. Today, we have this desire to prove that whatever we’re doing culturally stands up to scientific rigor—except maybe it doesn’t, because no one thought Instagram Face was hot in the 14th century.

You argue that medieval people weren’t uniquely dumb, but that humans have always been idiots. Why?
The Early Middle Ages used to be called the Dark Ages simply because we didn’t have a lot of sources. But historians stopped using the term because in the public imagination, “Dark Ages” became pejorative, meaning “a bunch of idiots who are stupid.” The Black Death—although it happened hundreds of years after the “Dark Ages”—is often held up as an example of this supposed stupidity. But their ways of dealing with the plague were incredibly complex and they tried really hard—they just didn’t understand germ theory. Now, we’ve been taught about germs since birth; yet when COVID hit, many still refused to believe in it. We’re still stupid, except now it feels almost willful. A lot of people want history to be a story about how we’re always getting better and learning more. But we still fall for pseudo-scientific hokum. We still love essential oils, and we still like a little bit of magical thinking when the world feels out of control.

What medieval notions could improve our lives today?
Their emphasis on communality. They had interconnected relationships with their village or extended family, and they truly took care of each other. Sure, the wealthy were off in their chateaux and there was massive inequality, much like now, but on the ground, ordinary people could still appreciate art, have festivals, and come together to help those around them. Even amidst true horror, like the Black Death, life was still considered a privilege. If we want a better world now, collectivity is a powerful tool that medieval people understood quite well.