Ab - pronounced Abbie

me, approximately age 9:

Sarcasm alert. Everything I've heard about this movie sounds like it was created specifically to annoy me, so I'm going to try to ignore it and just talk about my pet peeve, which is this pop culture myth that the medieval period was particularly filthy, brutal, misogynistic and lawless. 

Which is simply not the truth, and here's a true story from 1348 that shows the real Middle Ages.

We know this story because it's a very important moment in the development of common law - that is, the facts and the conclusion of the story were written down and became the basis for how similar cases would be decided long into the future. This 1348 judicial decision (citation: I de S et Uxor v W de S (1348) yb 22 edw iii f 99) is still read by law students today when studying the tort (or wrong) of assault. That's nearly seven hundred years of judges and lawyers looking back at a medieval judicial decision and saying, "Yes! That was a good and just decision!"

To set the stage, it's the 1300s - a century famous for the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, the Peasants' Revolt, and the Babylonian Captivity of the Church that saw the papacy moved to the French town of Avignon as puppets of the French monarchcy. But that's not the only thing that happens in the 1300s. This century also sees the publication of Dante's Divine Comedy; the Clockwork Revolution in which intricately designed clocks tracked everything from the hours of the day (which were measured in variable lengths) to the phases of the moon and the Sun's path through the zodiac; the creation of gorgeous books of hours and tapestries; the career of Christine de Pizan, the first woman known to have made a living from her pen; the writing of Geoffrey Chaucer and the radical social and religious reforms proposed by John Wyclif and his followers.

About the middle of this century a man known to history as W de S came in the night to the house of I de S and M, his wife, looking to buy some wine. The door to the taven was closed, so W pounded on the door with a hatchet, which he had in his hand. At this, M, the tavern-keeper's wife, put her head out the window and told him to stop. W responded by throwing the hatchet at M, narrowly missing her.

The tavern-keeper and his wife, contrary to what pop culture will tell you, responded exactly the way a couple of pub owners might respond today: they took the offender to court and argued that W had made an assault on M. W argued, in response, that he had committed no crime because the hatchet had not in fact struck M.

You might now be thinking that of course W would have won the case, since no actual physical harm was done to the woman he'd attacked. But you would be wrong! The judge in the case declared that the assault itself was harmful, and that W was liable to pay compensation for the fright he had caused M. 

"Ever since then," states my old Torts textbook, "the tort of assault has extended protection to a person's right to be free of emotional disturbance brought about by intentional threats of physical violence."

Law did exist in the middle ages. Women, as well as men, could expect to be protected by the law from assault. And not only physical, but even emotional damages could be awarded for assault...all the way back in 1348.

In the sunfish’s defense!!!!!

The beauty of it is that you could place that exact same dialogue into any time and place in human history and it would make just as much sense, you could have it as a conversation between sailors in a 1600s ship, a group of bronze-age warriors cleaning their weapons, stone age hunters walking home from a hunt, or a bunch of 21st century redditors on the internet, and it would hit just as splendidly.

There was this conversation about if you could have sex with any specific person from any time through human history, which one would you choose? Famous legendary lovers were brought up, queens, emperors and such were popular, might as well fuck Rasputin just to see what the hype was all about, the kind of answers one would expect.

Then some guy said he would choose his own late wife. He went on to talk about how brutal it is, that you might find the love of your life, but there's no promise that this life couldn't be suddenly cut short. That his body aches for hers and how there isn't much he wouldn't do for one more opportunity to make love to her one last time.

Now, I'd like you to imagine a pause in the conversation. A solemn, contemplative moment of silence, with several of the people present nodding in agreement that this is indeed the finest answer - it wasn't a competition, but there's no doing better than that.

And then someone breaks this solemn silence and says: