[HN Gopher] On medieval cats
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On medieval cats
Author : pepys
Score : 51 points
Date : 2023-11-09 21:11 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (going-medieval.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (going-medieval.com)
| duxup wrote:
| I also have heard the stories of "the church thought cats were
| evil". It always seemed a little too weird and simple to believe
| it was a was a wide spread teaching.
| bombcar wrote:
| There may have been complaints here and there, but in general
| cats were an accepted facet of life, including religious life.
| Stories abound about monastery cats, and you can find them in
| illuminated manuscripts:
| https://www.bangor.ac.uk/news/2022-12-23-cats-in-the-middle-...
| TomK32 wrote:
| *facet if I may correct you.
|
| The self-domesticated cat had and have great use to reduce
| vermin and medieval monastery had plenty of that as
| monasteries were not just spiritual places but working farms.
| elzbardico wrote:
| The whole idea of medieval era as the dark ages is also
| profoundly uninformed.
| genman wrote:
| It was in many ways. There were of course more enlightened
| spaces, but the little they had was not very evenly
| distributed.
|
| Btw. nice trivia about cats and plague: Venetians caught cats
| from the mainland and took them to their islands to catch mice
| and rats that they knew were responsible for the plague.
| Therefore it was prohibited to feed the cats but there was a
| special rain water collector for the cats to have enough
| drinking water next to each Venetian rain water cistern.
| Sharlin wrote:
| > It was in many ways. There were of course more enlightened
| spaces, but the little they had was not very evenly
| distributed.
|
| Eh. The Middle Ages were hardly darker than the eras
| preceding them, and the contrast with the Renaissance is much
| less stark than what the Renaissance people would have you
| believe. And the era spanned _almost a millennium_ and most
| of Europe, and it 's incredibly simplistic to sum up such a
| big chunk of spacetime with any single adjective. There's
| very little similarity between, say, 7th century Scotland,
| 11th century Spain, and 15th century Venice.
|
| If anything, you could call "dark" the centuries after the
| fall of the Western Roman Empire until the early middle ages.
| And obviously only from a fairly narrow Western-Europe-
| centric viewpoint.
| genman wrote:
| Naturally. I didn't single out medieval era. And I didn't
| say that it was less or more dark than other historical
| eras, but if we compare it to what we have right now then
| you can't claim that it was a very enlightened age. To me
| the most important change over the time has been
| acceptance, development and distribution of science and
| civil rights. I personally see it more like a gradient, not
| an on/off switch, but the more we go back in time toward
| medieval era the less we have both of them.
| HEmanZ wrote:
| I thought that was what is meant by the "dark ages"?
| Basically from the fall of the western Roman Empire until
| about the carolingian empire. So 400-800 ish. And the name
| works because we have so much less written evidence about
| politics in Western Europe during that time, so it is in a
| sense "dark" to us now.
|
| I am not a historian tho
| quonn wrote:
| Maybe. But it is difficult to say to was _less_ dark than
| either the Roman empire before or the Renaissance and modern
| era later. So it certainly appears to be _more_ dark. And so it
| is, perhaps, not that uninformed an opinion after all.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| Absolutely. So many people believe that:
|
| 1) ius primae noctis was a thing (it wasn't)
|
| 2) witch hunting was a medieval thing (very late medieval
| thing, maybe, but mostly it was in 15-17th century)
|
| 3) flat earth as a widespread belief for wise men (it wasn't,
| and both Columbus and the Council of Salamanca knew that)
|
| We're willing to believe that for about 1000 years Europe
| collectively abandoned reason, while before and after it was
| there. Sure, sounds logic.
| simbolit wrote:
| (re1) while ipn wasn't a law, we have to keep in mind, the
| lord was also the judge. so if your lord raped you, good luck
| finding justice.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| There is no documentation of this period of it being "a
| thing" (while we have, for example, plenty of stories or
| fableaux talking about men and women cheating, priests and
| monks having sex, etc.), afaik.
|
| That is to say, it wasn't a law but not even an accepted
| custom. Raping is something else, unfortunately I'm sure
| that happend. So are power dynamics and sex, but it wasn't
| connected to the first night.
| bombcar wrote:
| The flat earth one is super annoying, because the argument
| against Columbus _was actually correct_ - they didn 't say
| he'd fall off the end of the world, they said _it was way
| further than he thought and he 'd run out of food_.
|
| They were right, he just happened to run _into a giant
| continent_ instead of dying.
| hammock wrote:
| >Ius primae noctis was a thing (it wasn't)
|
| Source? It's literally in the Talmud, and many other
| histories. https://www.sefaria.org/Ketubot.3b.1?lang=bi&with=
| all&lang2=...
| gattilorenz wrote:
| I think the consensus among contemporary historians is that
| it was not an accepted custom among Christians.
|
| Also, that one source mentions it (I have no idea what that
| says, when it is from, what is the context etc. - I'm also
| no historian myself so an English translation would not
| necessarily help) it doesn't mean it's true, otherwise we
| would have to believe that Pegasus existed... or the myth
| of Salamanca's council.
|
| Update: ah, I found the English translation. Indeed, by
| reading it like this I see what you mean, but I have no
| idea when, where and in what context it's been written,
| whether it talks about a widespread thing, etc.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Annoyingly, the term "dark ages" is so vague and bandied about
| that it's hard to rule this statement as true or false.
|
| The term originally refers to the idea that it's an age of
| ignorance by Renaissance scholars essentially having a massive
| Classical Antiquity appreciation binge. This gets amplified by
| Protestants as an attack on Catholicism. Some more modern
| people get even more zealously anti-religious and view it as
| something pushing back the industrial revolution and other
| things back by 1500 years or so. This especially gets
| intertwined with things like unilinear cultural evolution
| models [1], where the Middle Ages end up getting classified as
| going backwards in culture. Most of these beliefs are basically
| complete and total hogwash in terms of actual evidence.
|
| Archaeology can trace a rough outline of the economic history
| of Europe. We see a peak of economic activity in the first and
| second centuries AD, a decline in third century, which
| stabilizes somewhat in the fourth and fifth century, before
| plunging. It hits its nadir in the eighth century, and then
| starts recovering, surpassing its pre-collapse highs sometime
| between 1000-1300, depending on which metric you're looking at.
| If you want to refer to the time from ~500-1000 as a "Dark
| Ages" on the basis of poor document preservation and general
| economic collapse, that's actually a reasonable, grounded
| definition.
|
| But if you're trying to use the term to indicate a loss of
| knowledge somehow, well, it just doesn't work. Even during the
| absolute worst depths of the post-Roman collapse, you would
| still be speaking Roman, learning from Roman textbooks (if
| you're fortunate enough to be learning), practicing Roman
| religion, obeying Roman laws. And there's a decent chance you
| might be doing that despite your village never having once been
| part of the Roman Empire.
|
| [1] Or, more simply, Civilization-style tech trees.
| reactordev wrote:
| Oh how the writer was trapped by the TikTok trap. Nothing on
| there is real. If you heard it on TikTok, it's probably made up.
| Now comes the saddest part: an entire generation thinks it's
| real, it's true, and is being manipulated by made up sh&t like
| culling of cats caused the Black Death. The likes drive
| engagement, because it seems plausibly true, it must be right? So
| I'll like it too so I don't look dumb. (trick: you're dumb by
| liking it). So in the end, it's a giant echo chamber of bad
| advice and made up scenarios and dance videos (because a pole
| would be low class) for likes and money. There's some legit
| channels, like there are on YouTube or other platforms, but
| that's not what GenZ is watching. They are learning bogus
| history, bogus politics, bogus math, and bogus job skills,
| through TikTok. (Maybe even intentionally, to dumb us American's
| down). Who knows. I do know that more BS has come from "I heard
| it on TikTok" than ever in history. Even reporters are getting
| their "source" from "I heard it on TikTok". It's ridiculous. No
| wonder wars are raging, people are fighting, and all while making
| cute videos of cats while spreading 3rd grade history
| plausibilities.
|
| Kudos for calling them out that nowhere, in the histories, did
| any of that happen.
| reactordev wrote:
| Example of made up scenarios: You're a singer. You recorded a
| song. How do you get people to listen to your song? You make up
| a scenario where your S.O. is just some random person and you
| play the song while doing something that shows attraction.
| Whether it's hitting on the girl, or vice versa, or it's
| puppies or something that invokes primal responses. Meanwhile
| the audio plays or you say "This is my song" and you have a
| dozen of your friends also promote it. Sit back and watch. A
| few people I know did this to break into the country music
| scene.
|
| Guy in Truck: "Hey, you wanna hear something?"
|
| Girl running: _stops_ (pulls ear buds out like she couldn't
| hear) "Sure" (confirming it was BS the whole time).
|
| _Music plays_
|
| Girl: "wow this is really good!"
|
| Guy: "Thanks", can I get your number?"
|
| Girl: _blushes_ and gives him a blank piece of paper because
| they are actually secretly married.
| hammock wrote:
| It's a con as old as medieval cats. Not new.
|
| Other examples:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| I don't think we need the "China's doing it to us" conspiracy
| theories, humans have been doing this to themselves forever.
|
| I once got a good deal on a house because a significant number
| of people in the 21st century still believe in ghosts.
| ajb wrote:
| Interesting that the story of cats being persecuted in the middle
| ages is false. This article doesn't try to trace the origin of
| the story. This one :
| https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2019/11/05/were-cats-reall...
| Traces it to a book by Donald Engels, but that was only written
| in 2001 and I've definitely heard the story before that. I think
| I recall it being in 'Catwatching' by Desmond Morris which was
| published in 93 (but it may have been some other book from that
| time period). I doubt if Morris originated the story either, as
| he's a naturalist, not a historian. So I wonder where it came
| from.
| zolbrek wrote:
| I believe I have Catwatching somewhere. If I manage to dig it
| up I'll report back in.
| jibbit wrote:
| i wish i could understand how cats became so popular, given ->
| Fleas. As far as i can tell, anti-flea treatments have existed
| for about 50 years. I get that catching mice is a huge plus, but
| a house full of fleas also kinda sucks.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Rats, like cats, have fleas that bite humans, too, and while
| cats mostly don't kill rats the way they do mice, they do drive
| them away.
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| Cats kill rodents, protecting stored grain. And parasites were
| a fact of life.
| Hizonner wrote:
| It doesn't suck as much as starving to death, which could
| happen if the rodents went crazy on your food supplies.
|
| Anyway, if your house is loaded with mice and rats, you will
| also have fleas. Unlike the rodents, your cat will even let you
| comb it.
|
| Also people weren't necessarily clear on fleas or whatever
| being something you _caught_. They were more seen as things
| that just _showed up_ under certain circumstances.
| idlewords wrote:
| Two points:
|
| 1) I think you underestimate how bad a rodent problem can get,
| and how quickly.
|
| 2) Healthy cats are decent groomers, and also flea magnets.
| Fleas go to them preferentially. If the cat isn't a lap cat and
| doesn't sleep on your bed, it's going to be doing most of the
| interacting with fleas while you relax in your mouse-free
| study.
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