Untitled

“But it’s confusing!” If you take the time to educate yourself it’ll no longer be confusing. Otherwise you’re just gonna have to learn to be ok with being confused.

“But it’s weird!” You probably do weird things all the time. Everyone does weird things sometimes. Life goes on.

“But it scares me!” Is it hurting you? No? You’ll be fine. Being scared and being harmed are not always the same thing. Learn to tell the difference and then act accordingly.

“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced in him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”

Every time I feel the urge to get in a pointless internet argument, I instead go to Wikipedia and make a page for one of the Nancy Drew books that does not currently have its own page.

Though people associate it with very old science fiction, you won't see any occurrence of the term in its current meaning (a human inhabitant of the planet Earth, as opposed to an extraterrestrial) prior to 1949.

Actually, the term was first used by the Old Man himself, Robert E. Heinlein, in his 1949 novel "Red Planet" (a novel remembered for a weird digression where they explain the ethics of adults responsibly allowing children to carry loaded firearms). This all the way back when the Old Man was not quite so old yet, when RAH was actually a hotshot young lion looking to make a name for himself in the pages of the greatest scifi pulp of them all, Astounding Science Fiction under John W. Campbell, right at the dawn of the Golden Age of Science Fiction.

Heinlein created the term Earthling and used it in a lot of his work instead of human because it was very important to distinguish in his stories between humans from Earth and, say, colonists of human stock from Mars, like in Podkayne of Mars. Hello, Mars used another interesting term with the same origin, where humans born in space referred to humans that lived their entire life on earth (semi-derogatorily) as "groundhogs."

The term caught on because Heinlein used it in his juveniles (what today we'd call "young adult" books), and to every generation prior to the Millennials, Heinlein was THE science fiction writer, much like how Agatha Christie is THE mystery author. It's a strange irony that, now that young adult books run the world, the young adult scifi author has mostly vanished from prominence.

Prior to 1949, scifi writers used a lot of other variant terms for humans from Earth. E.E. Smith, who Heinlein admired and listed as his single biggest influence (and from who Heinlein got the idea of space marines in power armor, an idea the Old Man used in Starship Troopers), used the term Tellurian to refer to humans from Earth in the Lensman novels, as Earth in his future era was known as Tellus, an erudite term for a god of Earth in Greek Myth used in Hamlet. Humanoids in the Lensman series were known as "Tellus-type lifeforms."

(You know, I feel like Tellurian for human and Tellus for Planet Earth should make a comeback.)

on Augustine, undated, because the man's been dead 1,596 years and isn't getting any deader

So the thing nobody tells you about Augustine — and I mean this in the specific sense that the standard intro-to-Western-thought course will hand you the Confessions and the City of God and a vague gesture toward "the foundation of Christian theology" without ever situating the guy — is that he's writing from the absolute ass-end of the Roman world during the period where the lights are visibly going out, in a province (Numidia, roughly modern Algeria/Tunisia, one of the most thoroughly Romanized non-Italian regions and a major grain supplier to the Western Empire, which matters) that is about to get rolled by the Vandals while he's literally on his deathbed in 430. Hippo Regius is under siege as he's dying. This isn't incidental color. The City of God is being written in real time after Alaric sacks Rome in 410 and a generation of pagan aristocrats — the actual Roman senatorial class, who'd been quiet but never converted — start saying loudly that maybe abandoning the old gods who built the empire for this Galilean carpenter cult was a fucking mistake, and Augustine's job, his commission, the reason a working bishop in a provincial capital is producing a 22-book treatise, is to provide the theological framework that decouples Christian legitimacy from Roman temporal success, because if Christianity's truth claims depend on Rome winning wars then Christianity is in trouble.

That's the move. The two-cities framework — earthly city of self-love, heavenly city of God-love, running in parallel through history, never identical, the visible church not coextensive with the elect — is a response to a crisis. Specifically a PR crisis. The pagans are saying "you broke it," and Augustine is saying "it was never the thing you thought it was, the real city is invisible and indestructible, and Rome falling proves nothing about God because Rome was never the City of God in the first place." Which is genuinely brilliant theology and also, structurally, the kind of move you make when your team is losing and you need to redefine winning.

And then you've got the Confessions, which everybody reads as the first modern autobiography, the invention of interiority, Augustine alone with his soul and his pears and his conversion in the garden — and it's all of that, but it's also a North African provincial-elite kid (his mother Monica a devout Christian, his father Patricius a minor municipal official of pagan background) who got the imperial scholarship track, went to Carthage, taught rhetoric in Milan at the imperial court, was on the literal fast track to a governorship or a senatorial career, and then bailed and went home and became a bishop. The conversion narrative is a renunciation of imperial career. It only reads as pure spiritual interiority if you ignore that the thing being renounced is a specific institutional ladder — the rhetorical-bureaucratic complex that ran the Empire — and that Augustine spends the rest of his life running an alternative institutional ladder, the North African church, with all the same skills (administration, letter-writing, doctrinal politics, faction management against the Donatists) just pointed at a different target.

The Donatist thing is where it gets dark and where modern liberal Christians don't want to look. Donatism was a North African schism — popular, indigenous, with deep roots in the Berber and rural population, theologically obsessed with purity (priests who'd handed over scriptures during Diocletian's persecution had invalidated their own sacraments, the church should be the church of martyrs) — and Augustine wrote the brief for using imperial coercion against them. Compelle intrare, "compel them to enter," from the parable of the wedding feast, deployed as theological justification for state pressure against schismatics. He's the guy. The medieval Inquisition has its license from Augustine. The Protestant magistrates burning Anabaptists have their license from Augustine. The argument is sophisticated — coercion is medicine, the soul's true freedom is in conformity to truth, a father may discipline his child — and it's also exactly what an institutional operator in a contested religious market produces when his side has imperial backing and the other side has the countryside. Material conditions, doctrinal output, completely legible relationship.

What's wild is that the same guy is producing the most psychologically acute writing in the ancient world about the divided will, about wanting and not-wanting simultaneously, about the way desire works against itself — the famous "make me chaste, but not yet," the analysis of why he stole the pears (not because he wanted pears, he wanted the transgression, which is a genuinely modern insight about desire-as-such versus desire-for-objects that won't be properly recovered until Lacan) — while also writing the theological justification for beating heretics into orthodoxy. The interiority and the institutional violence are the same project. The reason he's so good on the divided will is that he's spent his life inside an institution trying to produce uniform outputs from non-uniform humans, and the reason he's willing to use force is that he's concluded the divided will needs external pressure to land on the right side of itself. The psychology and the politics are the same theory.

The afterlife of all this is that Augustine basically writes the operating system for Western Christianity for the next thousand years and arguably forever. Original sin as a hereditary condition transmitted through generation (a doctrine he essentially invents in its mature form, the Greek fathers don't have it the same way) — that's Augustine. Predestination, in the form that will get Calvin going twelve hundred years later — Augustine. The Just War framework — Augustine. The idea that pagan philosophy can be selectively absorbed into Christian thought ("plundering the Egyptians") — Augustine, providing the license for a millennium of scholastic appropriation. The relationship between secular and ecclesiastical authority, the seed of what becomes the two-swords doctrine — proto-Augustinian. The man is load-bearing for Western civilization in a way that's actually difficult to overstate, and the reason is partly that he's a genius and partly that he's writing exactly when the Western Empire is collapsing and the church needs a complete intellectual infrastructure to carry forward through the dark centuries, and he provides it. Right time, right place, right skillset. If Rome had held together for another two centuries Augustine is a regional bishop with some interesting writings and the actual foundational figure is somebody else, somebody we'd now be told is "the foundation of Western thought."

@snuggly-eve

Okay, let me try to take a stab at it:

Firstly, one thing I'd want to quickly go over as reference is what it actually means to say that a "stock fantasy setting" is more rooted in the late middle ages/renaissance than in earlier periods. Generally, the traits of these settings that are characteristic of this time are:

Aesthetics generally. Like, castles in a "stock fantasy setting" are usually these big ornamented things covered in towers and turrets (consider, say, Neuschwanstein Castle, which was itself an early modern nostalgia piece rather than a genuine Renaissance fortress), while armor leans more towards full heavy plate (like these 16th-17th century pieces, for instance). These are all classically late styles.

Likewise, your classic fantasy merchant city -- you know, your Ankh-Morporks, your Lankhmars, that sort of thing, with tangled crime-filled alleys, probably a network of scummy canals, a huge bustling port, a guild of thieves, all of it ruled over by dynastic merchants in fine brocade and velvet and heavy jewels -- that's very heavily inspired by the merchant cities of the Italian Renaissance like Venice or Genoa, or North Sea merchant cities like Amsterdam around that time or a little later, or, frankly, even early modern London.

Also, generally, urbanization. Roman civilization was very urban. Renaissance-era European civilization was very urban also, especially in places like Italy, the North Sea, and other areas rich in commerce. In fantasy, too, the notion that cities are major centers of life and politics remains -- merchant cities bustling with commerce, capital cities with the king's fancy castle, fortified cities with huge bloody walls, these are all recurring archetypes. Crack open, say, a D&D setting sourcebook, and that assumption that major cities or city-states are major focuses of culture and economy while rural areas are clearly in their orbits is fairly evident, I think.

Also, in my experience, medieval fantasy monarchies tend to be fairly centralized affairs, with powerful monarchic kings, the royal seat in the capital or the king's castle as the bustling focus of governance, and a tendency for the edicts from the king's person and the intrigues of court to be the driving focuses of political life. Also, a lot of intrigues in a classically corrupt court. This tracks fairly well for the late period, historically, where European kings put a lot of effort into centralizing and strengthening their authority, some more successfully (the Iberian kingdoms at the end of the Reconquista), some less so (Charles I of England). Absolute monarchy was less of a factor in earlier medieval Europe, which operate chiefly under a network of looser, less centralized feudal ties.

By contrast, what would these things equivalents in the earlier Middle Ages be like?

Castle-wise, the really early periods were the time of the motte-and-bailey, aka wooden palisades on top of earthen mounds. Later, you'd tend to see squatter, more fortified constructions for defensive purposes (take the Krak des Chevaliers as an example). Even well into the later middle ages, though, a typical rural keep or castle was often a fortified house or manor more than what we'd picture as a castle today.

Armor was usually dominated by chainmail, scale armor, and non-face-covering helmets (a knight of the Carolongian Empire, for example, might have worn something like a scale or mail shirt and a helm with earguards or a noseguard, but certainly not the "classic" knightly set of plate you usually see in fiction). In terms of helmet styles, for instance, compare this 11th-century nasal helm or these illustrations of 12th-century styles with later forms such as the classic "bucket helm" that was popular during and after the Crusades period. Helmets with more articulated shapes and visors came later. What's called a close or closed helm, for instance, like these ones, was mostly a 16th-17th century style, although antecedent forms were already common in the 15th. Even the barbute with its distinctive T- or Y-shaped visor slit was a distinctly Renaissance Italian thing.

(Like, as a practical example in terms of helmets, this reminded me of a passage in the first Dunk & Egg story where Duncan buys a great helm/bucket helmet, and it's described as coming across as a goofy-looking and antiquated choice when other knights all use visored and often very ornate close helmets. And this makes sense! Westeros is very explicitly based on England during the Wars of the Roses period, in the 15th century, by which point medieval armor and helmet styles had gone out of use and most armored troops wore jointed plate armor and visored helms.)

Religiously, monasteries were often the center of religious life and, for rural communities, often more important than distant bishopric seats. They were also centers of, among other things, record-keeping, writing, and brewing.

Cities. The middle ages proper were a very rural time -- cities existed, and exerted political and economic influence, but took a significant dip in both size and importance for a time. For a good few centuries the center of life for most people was the manorial system, where you had a local knight or lordling living in a fortified house or a small keep and providing protection to a town or two around this in exchange for material support. Self-sustaining religious communities like monasteries were also important. All of these, for a long time, would have basically self-supporting.

(Well, alright, that's also an oversimplification. In rural France-England-Germany, that'd be about right, sure. In northern Italy and in Flanders-Saxony, though, you start to see... not urbanization as such, but, let's say, townization early on in the system of the medieval communes, where farming and trading towns left isolated by the collapse of Roman-era state systems formed confederations for mutual defense. So the main form of urban culture in this timeframe isn't really centralized around a single big city but more along the lines of fifty towns who formed a loose alliance because they're afraid of bandits and robber knights.)

Government. Centralized states and nations weren't... really things for a long time. Feudal governance was based much more strictly on the notion of personal debts and obligation between rulers and those who administered portions of land for them. A feudal noble had obligations towards his king, but he also had a tremendous amount of freedom in running his own affairs and could have gone for the majority of his life without every showing up in the vicinity of his lord's castle -- the idea of, like, the royal court as the focus and center of political life wouldn't really crystallize for some time, and this degree of independence meant that negotiation and re-negotiation (read:testing how much you could ignore the king or going into outright revolt) were very common.

Also, the notion of national identity -- of saying "I am French, I am English, I am Italian" -- also didn't really exist (I'd recommend Liah Greenfield's Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity for a discussion of how this mode of thinking about group-and-land identity formed in the 16th-17th centuries). Before then, concepts of identity were either strictly local ("I am from this village"), based on loyalty systems ("I am from a village defended by Knight Whatshisname, who gives his tithe to Lord Whatshisface, who gives his tithe to King Whatshisproblem"), or based on religion ("I am Christian", "I am Jewish", "I am Muslim").

So, broadly, there weren't really "countries" the way that we think of them today, with clearly delineated cultures and borders and directed from a central capital. The most granular political units were the rural manorial keep and the free town, which gave their fealty to a larger lord or a grouping of peers, and the span and size of a kingdom or an empire was determined in large part by how many of these tiny units or groupings of tiny units you could claim tithe-right and allegiance from. And that's feudalism!

Event-wise, the Big Things in the medieval period proper were the Crusades, a series of primarily religion-motivated wars (or, well, religion-land-and-luchre-motivated wars, granted) and the Black Death. It really cannot be overemphasized how the terror of being struck by this mysterious dying dominated medieval thought for large spans of time.

Saint Joachim and Saint Anne with the Child Mary

Feast Day: July 26

Patronage: Grandparents, Holy Families, and Marriages

Saint Joachim and Saint Anne are the parents of the Virgin Mary and grandparents of Jesus Christ. Saint Joachim, whose name means “Yahweh prepares”, was from Nazareth and probably rich. He married St. Anne from Bethlehem and Mary was promised to them by an Angel. They are honored as role models for parents.