6 myths about the Middle Ages that everyone believes
In the land of Medieval Europe, the popular image of unbathed, sword-wielding knights eating rotten meat and defending chastity-belt wearing maidens while torturing their foes with grisly gadgets is actually more fiction than fact.
The term "Middle Ages" refers to a 1,000-year timespan, stretching from the fall of Rome in the 5th century to the Italian renaissance in the 15th, although it has been applied to other parts of the world, the term traditionally refers specifically to Europe.
One misconception about medieval people is that they were all ignorant and uneducated. However, many medieval scholars describe the Earth as the center of the universe, and there wasn't much debate as to its shape. In fact, literacy rates gradually increased during the Middle Ages alongside the establishment of monasteries, convents, and universities.
Ancient knowledge was not lost, as Greek and Roman texts continued to be studied. The idea that medieval people ate rotten meat and used spices to cover the taste was popularized in the 1930s by a British book, but this was a misinterpretation of one medieval recipe. Medieval Europeans avoided rancid foods and had methods for safely preserving meats, like curing them with salt. Spices were popular, but they were often pricier than meat itself. So if someone could afford them, they could also buy unspoiled food.
Meanwhile, the 19th-century French historian Jules Michelet referred to the Middle Ages as "a thousand years without a bath." But even small towns boasted well-used public bathhouses, where people lathered up with soaps made of things like animal fat, ash, and scented herbs. They also used mouthwash, teeth-scrubbing cloths with pastes and powders, and spices and herbs for fresh-smelling breath.
What about medieval torture devices? In the 1890s, a collection of allegedly "terrible relics of a semi-barbarous age" went on tour. Among them: the Iron Maiden, which fascinated viewers with its spiked doors, but it was fabricated, possibly just decades before. And there’s no indication Iron Maidens actually existed in the Middle Ages.
The "Pear of Anguish," meanwhile, did exist, but probably later on, and it couldn’t have been used for torture. It may have just been a shoe-stretcher. Many ostensibly medieval torture devices are far more recent inventions. Medieval legal proceedings were overall less gruesome than these gadgets suggest, including fines, imprisonment, public humiliation, and certain forms of corporal punishment. Torture and executions did happen, but especially violent punishments, like drawing and quartering, were generally reserved for crimes like high treason.
Surely chastity belts were real, though, right? Probably not. They were first mentioned by a 15th-century German engineer, likely in jest, alongside fart jokes and a device for invisibility. From there, they became popular subjects of satire that were later mistaken for medieval reality.
Ideas about the Middle Ages have varied depending on the interest of those in later times. The term—along with the pejorative "Dark Ages"—was popularized during the 15th and 16th centuries by scholars biased toward the Classical and Modern periods that came before and after.
As Enlightenment thinkers celebrated their dedication to reason, they depicted medieval people as superstitious and irrational. In the 19th century, some Romantic European nationalist thinkers romanticized the Middle Ages. They described isolated, white, Christian societies, emphasizing narratives of chivalry and wonder. But knights played minimal roles in medieval warfare, and the Middle Ages saw large-scale interactions.
Ideas flowed into Europe along Byzantine, Muslim, and Mongol trade routes. Merchants, intellectuals, and diplomats of diverse origins visited medieval European cities. The biggest myth may be that the millennium of the Middle Ages amounts to one distinct, cohesive period of European history at all. Originally defined less by what they were than what they weren’t, the Middle Ages became a ground for dueling ideas— fueling more fantasy than fact.
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