Mar 13, 2023·edited Mar 13, 2023Liked by Rhyd Wildermuth
Just realized something: the transition to a money economy must have penalized women heavily. In studies of horticultural societies, estimates of women’s contributions to daily caloric requirements run around 60%. Meaning that women provide the majority of the food in pre-industrial societies. So a society in which rent payments or trade is done in kind favors women’s labor, since women produce more and are generally in charge of producing tradeable, tangible goods like butter or finished cloth. (Compared to male labor such as plowing or building repair, which resulted in less discrete objects of value. It’s easier even in the modern day to talk someone into paying double for better butter when the extra cost is a few bucks than it is to talk someone into paying double to replace their roof for $10k more.) Under almost all wage labor systems, women’s wages are lower than men’s. So it likely that women went from having higher compensation in terms of the value they could produce to less compensation in the form of wages.
This has an interesting corollary in the modern day. In the US, cottage food industries are heavily regulated in the name of food safety. It is technically illegal (although mostly the law is ignored) to sell eggs without a license in my state. Compare this to how Heifer International prioritizes chickens for women in some parts of Africa because male relatives interfering with a woman’s egg money is culturally taboo and unmanly. I see (from a small farmer’s perspective) a huge hole in feminist analysis of America pre-1950. America changed from a nation where small farms were common and where farm wives had the opportunity to make their own money and to be a major part of the family’s economic viability to a nation where women were expected to spend their husbands’ paychecks and written out of the culture as producers of anything of economic value. The desire of women to enter the wages workforce after 1950 I think in many ways parallels the invention of the waged workforce among European peasants. Wages seem like liberation but must be earned by alienating the self from the body and using the body as a tool for someone else. Where the production of foodstuffs or clothing for home use or barter involves participating in keeping oneself (and the pride which comes from that) or from doing basic self-maintenance activities on a slightly larger scale in order to have goods to trade/ establish prestige. Home production also generally allows for the supervision of children at the same time, and even makes an asset of older children. A feminist recently remarked to me that women began to retain custody of children in the event of divorce right about the time that society shifted away from child labor and children began to be seen as a liability rather than an asset. Obviously that’s a gross oversimplification but still a way of thinking about the historical position of women and children in a way that tickles my brain.
The over regulation of the cottage industry is a continuation of the control of women, the diminishment of community resilience and an effective deterrance for many young women who equate freedom with money. As a small farmer and homeschooling mother in Australia, it is not only illegal for me to sell my raw milk and meat raised and slaughtered with love and prayers, but it is also illegal to collectively homeschool, to sell anything I ferment, preserve or cook in my home, and for my children to participate in farmwork (defined as child slave labour). I am also required to spray glyphosate on any plant the government declares a 'noxious weed' (blackberry, for example, that provides food for the humans and animals on this farm, as well as habitat for native creatures). Of course I don't follow these rules, but as long as they exist, we are in a precarious position. Enforcement and policing of regulations can increase rapidly, as have witnessed in recent history.
The beurocracy is so afraid that we might reproduce the proverbial 'village' that is required to raise a child and perhaps even raise intelligent, resilient, free thinking children with practical skills, who are engaged in their local community and care deeply about each other and the land they inhabit.
I’m so glad you “get” it! People look at me like I’m nutso when I slip up and bemoan the fact that I can’t keep a heifer calf from my cow and turn her into a part-time job from home. I’ve run the numbers and the pay per hour would be comparable to any of the entry-level jobs in my area, and realistically much higher given that it would not require gas, daycare, commute time, or a wardrobe. In the US there is also this tie-in to our private healthcare system, because selling an product or service brings the risk that someone will be injured- even if it’s just that they tripped and fell when picking up product- and sue you and take your house. Because even an uncomplicated hospital visit is so expensive people are often forced to recoup the losses through a lawsuit (or their health insurance company may sue on their behalf without their permission sometimes). So any home business with the slightest risk is far riskier. I’m starting up a horse-riding business and I pay way more for insurance than for horse care, but it’s necessary since a kid could get tens of thousands in medical bills over a simple injury like a broken arm. Of course, this also ties into the education of children. When I was a kid, “barn rats” were common. Kids would muck out stalls and train the ponies the adult trainers were to big for and clean tack and all sorts of other odd jobs just to be around horses. Now, liability concerns have shut most of that down and the kids are inside staring at their smart phones except for maybe getting a hour riding lesson if their parents can afford it. I don’t know how Australia is, but in the US you can poison kids or make them get suicidally depressed with social media and boredom and there’s no liability because it’s hard to prove it was that one factor that killed them. But man, if they might break a toe getting stepped on it’s litigation city.
At least here in the US farm work for children is still legal. I’m hardly a slave driver but I don’t see why a healthy teen can’t feed the chickens or keep their own garden plot. I think it was Buckminister Fuller who said “There are no passengers on spaceship Earth.” That’s where I’m at. No one should be working long hours in the sun to make someone else money but everyone has some obligation to at least symbolically pull their weight.
Yes, this is often a blindspot in Western feminism which theorists and activists from the Global South points out. Vandana Shiva is a great example of someone who foregrounds the relationship between women and this kind of work. She's been sidelined lately because her ideas don't fit into the idea that "liberation" for a woman means working full time in an office rather than being honored and respected for her relationship to the land.
I love Vandana Shiva’s work. I think there are a lot of disconnects between Western feminism and feminism in the Global South. A huge part of it is the degree of distance between the current culture and a land-based culture. Within European (and later American) cultures women got wholly severed from input and ownership in communal decisions and property. Where in a lot of other cultures they would have male chiefs who could be fired by female elders or some other form of checks and balances on gendered power. So the only route to a decent life for a woman from European cultures was to become the chief domestic servant for a man. There is also a whole thing here with women as conspicuous consumption and women having skill or creating value brought a loss of prestige to their male relatives who were seen as not able to support their female relatives as useless ornaments. So European definitions of femininity became heavily weighed towards ornamental pursuits and the deliberate wasting of female talent (women becoming accomplished pianists but not allowed to play in public, or women wearing clothing and shoes that made them helpless, or the fetishization of super white skin that shows a woman wasn’t out working in the fields). I think this still skews the Western conversations around femininity and feminism, because the culture assumes that women working in any sort of physical labor is low prestige. And this has a lovely little perfect storm baby with the low prestige assigned to manual labor in Western culture generally, so women really only get respected for having management roles that can be accomplished in heels. I don’t think we have a healthy idea of femininity that is based on women’s contributions in terms of reproductive labor and connection to the land and inventiveness in developing stuff like clothes and beer. Our idea of femininity seems to be lipstick and submissiveness. Which is a huge bone I have to pick with trans rights activists. I’m frankly insulted by defining women and femininity as being those suckered into buying beauty products designed to raise one’s social status by attracting a greater range of suitors (or job offers, in the modern day). I think Western feminism needs a definition of femininity that recognizes women’s contributions to the world, but that comes into conflict with the naked in Western ideals of the high-status woman as being useless. So, I suspect I have done an absolutely crap job explaining any of this, for which I apologize, but I can’t fuck with it anymore because I have to go do the laundry. Irony, eh?
The suggestion that womanhood can be defined by the materialistic, hyper sexualised characature of femininity presented by many trans activists is insulting. It is a continuation of the destruction of sacred feminity that Silvia Federici discusses. The Western feminist movement has been highjacked by capitalism and patriarchy, so that a woman is seen as powerful only if she pursues traditionally "masculine," materialistic objectives, such as promiscuity and money making, or "lipstick and submissiveness" as Anne points out.
Vandana Shiva's work is a reminder of where women's true power lies, in our ability to create and nurture life, within us, around us, with our hands and our hearts.
Unfortunately, Australia is going down the same route as America in regards to litigation. Public liability insurance has made it cost prohibitive to run a home business and to train youngsters. We have a national skills shortage and are importing migrant workers because our children have had no opportunity to learn practical skills, and their attention span is non existent due to screens replacing childcare.
As Vandana Shiva emphasizes, "We want freedoms for people, not corporations. We want governments to regulate corporations that cause harm, not police citizens through undemocratic seed laws and food laws whose only objective is to criminalize citizen freedoms in order to establish corporate totalitarianism over our seed and food."
This can be applied to all aspects of home economy and family life.
Even when I was at school and being taught about how great the Feudal System was I did have my doubts. It was all supposed to have been so good for everyone but all one tended to see of it were the 'motte and bailey' castles and lots of poorer people working on the land. That might not have been so bad in some ways if they hadn't been working on someone else's land and for someone else, who was probably keeping an eye on them from the nearest motte and bailey castle rather like a prototype Panopticon.
Reading this chapter I was amazed at the long struggles and resistance of the European peasants and it seems to make capitalism's 'triumph' even more tragic. I'm always amazed by the Church's accumulation of wealth considering the founder of their religion preached the exact opposite. Did they just not read those bits?
A few years ago I was wondering just why the Church got so het up about homosexuality. If it's between consenting adults, it's not hurting anyone. Then I realised that, of course, no children are produced, and more men pairing up with men means less children produced; less recruits to the religion, and less workers for the capitalists. This makes it clear why childless women are frowned upon. How interesting that 'proletariat' was a group mostly valued for producing children! That's pretty blatant; more workers for the capitalist, rather like more 'cannon-fodder' in warfare. Perhaps they'd call it 'co-lateral damage' nowadays in an attempt to make it a bit less obvious.
How interesting that the word 'slave' comes from 'Slav' as they were the most often enslaved at one period! The history and continuing story of slavery is much more complex than the way it is spoken about today but it seems impossible to explore that nowadays.
In many ways, the peasants/serfs with land were in a much better position than many people today. They could independently support themselves whereas many of us nowadays can't; we don't even have a garden but are stacked up on top of each other many feet from the ground. People sometimes say to try growing things oneself but there's a big limit on how much can be grown on three small easterly-facing window ledges, especially when your landlord doesn't like you having window boxes! It does feel like a very precarious position that most of us have ended up in, especially in towns and cities.
Following along with great interest and really getting a lot from your analysis and all the commenters. I’ve been delayed in getting restarted in reading the book because I’m still in the middle of Julia Skinners Our Fermented Lives which serendipitously seems appropriate since she talks much about ferments from these times and also about women’s role in fermenting. Reading your essay makes me more excited to delve back into the book. I find this all very relevant as here in the Philippines we have an enormous amount of landless farmers. I have “farmer” friends (who own land through inheritance but never touch the soil except for instagram selfies) complain that they can’t find good workers and I silently wonder if they would work for minimum wage in the tropical sun all day with no contract or health insurance or social security. Many rural families here used to have small food forests where they could gather a lot of their calories but I imagine this is quickly disappearing as progress eats up all the land to “develop” land into cookie cutter housing that mostly sits empty. And now the country imports most of its food from overseas....
Thank you so much for hosting this open bookclub Rhyd. Everyone should read this book. I am only up to chapter two and already it has dramatically altered my view of the history of feudalism, the 'dark' ages, capitalism and feminism. As a recovering 'leftist' (I don't know where I belong on the political spectrum now. There seems to be few places available for retrospective, nature based, collectivist and localised politics), and someone who's identity has always been based on a non-conformist ideology, I was completely unaware how thoroughly I had absorbed the propaganda and distorted 'history' of the period of transition to capitalism. Thank you for bringing this to all of us.
I found the beginning of the book very informative on the social relations that obtained during the feudal period. I'm especially intrigued by the access to the commons which people had, using the wild areas to supplement their horticultural efforts, and how that gave women more independence than capitalism was to offer.
Clearly there was still a vital connection to the land, both through their direct farming and their view of the wild land providing for them in harder times.
Interested to see where the book goes. My knowledge of feminist theory is mostly about 'the male gaze' etc, gleaned from typing-up my wife's art theory essays for her while in college, so I'm enjoying learning about a different perspective, particularly one that doesn't disregard the reality of the body.
Have been a bit intimidated to jump into this conversation about Silvia Federici’s “Caliban and the Witch, as I am no political scientist. Her book really impacted me intellectually and especially emotionally as I have long been dealing with feelings of inherited body shame, the need to remain small and voiceless, etc. I was also quite rattled to read about the history of such horrific abuse of heretics and witches, although I had a vague inkling of its origins.
Also what Federici wrote about “the schoolbook portrayal of feudal society as a static world” is found everywhere in the course I teach on Arthurian Romance. Authors like Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, Robert de Boron, and Chretien de Troyes, for example, were only writing for and about the nobility and to show them in a positive light. Perhaps one exception can be found in the 3rd Branch of “The Mabinogi,” where the dethroned protagonist Manawydan son of Llyr becomes a land worker and performs sympathetic magic on a neolithic mound as a farmer might. These examples are quite rare….
Thank you too for your mention of the root meaning of “proletariat.” I had never thought of it that way. Also the light touch of your ending was appreciated after such a somber look at medieval life: “So popular was homosexuality in Florence that prostitutes used to wear males clothes to attract customers.” 😊
Just realized something: the transition to a money economy must have penalized women heavily. In studies of horticultural societies, estimates of women’s contributions to daily caloric requirements run around 60%. Meaning that women provide the majority of the food in pre-industrial societies. So a society in which rent payments or trade is done in kind favors women’s labor, since women produce more and are generally in charge of producing tradeable, tangible goods like butter or finished cloth. (Compared to male labor such as plowing or building repair, which resulted in less discrete objects of value. It’s easier even in the modern day to talk someone into paying double for better butter when the extra cost is a few bucks than it is to talk someone into paying double to replace their roof for $10k more.) Under almost all wage labor systems, women’s wages are lower than men’s. So it likely that women went from having higher compensation in terms of the value they could produce to less compensation in the form of wages.
This has an interesting corollary in the modern day. In the US, cottage food industries are heavily regulated in the name of food safety. It is technically illegal (although mostly the law is ignored) to sell eggs without a license in my state. Compare this to how Heifer International prioritizes chickens for women in some parts of Africa because male relatives interfering with a woman’s egg money is culturally taboo and unmanly. I see (from a small farmer’s perspective) a huge hole in feminist analysis of America pre-1950. America changed from a nation where small farms were common and where farm wives had the opportunity to make their own money and to be a major part of the family’s economic viability to a nation where women were expected to spend their husbands’ paychecks and written out of the culture as producers of anything of economic value. The desire of women to enter the wages workforce after 1950 I think in many ways parallels the invention of the waged workforce among European peasants. Wages seem like liberation but must be earned by alienating the self from the body and using the body as a tool for someone else. Where the production of foodstuffs or clothing for home use or barter involves participating in keeping oneself (and the pride which comes from that) or from doing basic self-maintenance activities on a slightly larger scale in order to have goods to trade/ establish prestige. Home production also generally allows for the supervision of children at the same time, and even makes an asset of older children. A feminist recently remarked to me that women began to retain custody of children in the event of divorce right about the time that society shifted away from child labor and children began to be seen as a liability rather than an asset. Obviously that’s a gross oversimplification but still a way of thinking about the historical position of women and children in a way that tickles my brain.
The over regulation of the cottage industry is a continuation of the control of women, the diminishment of community resilience and an effective deterrance for many young women who equate freedom with money. As a small farmer and homeschooling mother in Australia, it is not only illegal for me to sell my raw milk and meat raised and slaughtered with love and prayers, but it is also illegal to collectively homeschool, to sell anything I ferment, preserve or cook in my home, and for my children to participate in farmwork (defined as child slave labour). I am also required to spray glyphosate on any plant the government declares a 'noxious weed' (blackberry, for example, that provides food for the humans and animals on this farm, as well as habitat for native creatures). Of course I don't follow these rules, but as long as they exist, we are in a precarious position. Enforcement and policing of regulations can increase rapidly, as have witnessed in recent history.
The beurocracy is so afraid that we might reproduce the proverbial 'village' that is required to raise a child and perhaps even raise intelligent, resilient, free thinking children with practical skills, who are engaged in their local community and care deeply about each other and the land they inhabit.
I’m so glad you “get” it! People look at me like I’m nutso when I slip up and bemoan the fact that I can’t keep a heifer calf from my cow and turn her into a part-time job from home. I’ve run the numbers and the pay per hour would be comparable to any of the entry-level jobs in my area, and realistically much higher given that it would not require gas, daycare, commute time, or a wardrobe. In the US there is also this tie-in to our private healthcare system, because selling an product or service brings the risk that someone will be injured- even if it’s just that they tripped and fell when picking up product- and sue you and take your house. Because even an uncomplicated hospital visit is so expensive people are often forced to recoup the losses through a lawsuit (or their health insurance company may sue on their behalf without their permission sometimes). So any home business with the slightest risk is far riskier. I’m starting up a horse-riding business and I pay way more for insurance than for horse care, but it’s necessary since a kid could get tens of thousands in medical bills over a simple injury like a broken arm. Of course, this also ties into the education of children. When I was a kid, “barn rats” were common. Kids would muck out stalls and train the ponies the adult trainers were to big for and clean tack and all sorts of other odd jobs just to be around horses. Now, liability concerns have shut most of that down and the kids are inside staring at their smart phones except for maybe getting a hour riding lesson if their parents can afford it. I don’t know how Australia is, but in the US you can poison kids or make them get suicidally depressed with social media and boredom and there’s no liability because it’s hard to prove it was that one factor that killed them. But man, if they might break a toe getting stepped on it’s litigation city.
At least here in the US farm work for children is still legal. I’m hardly a slave driver but I don’t see why a healthy teen can’t feed the chickens or keep their own garden plot. I think it was Buckminister Fuller who said “There are no passengers on spaceship Earth.” That’s where I’m at. No one should be working long hours in the sun to make someone else money but everyone has some obligation to at least symbolically pull their weight.
Yes, this is often a blindspot in Western feminism which theorists and activists from the Global South points out. Vandana Shiva is a great example of someone who foregrounds the relationship between women and this kind of work. She's been sidelined lately because her ideas don't fit into the idea that "liberation" for a woman means working full time in an office rather than being honored and respected for her relationship to the land.
I love Vandana Shiva’s work. I think there are a lot of disconnects between Western feminism and feminism in the Global South. A huge part of it is the degree of distance between the current culture and a land-based culture. Within European (and later American) cultures women got wholly severed from input and ownership in communal decisions and property. Where in a lot of other cultures they would have male chiefs who could be fired by female elders or some other form of checks and balances on gendered power. So the only route to a decent life for a woman from European cultures was to become the chief domestic servant for a man. There is also a whole thing here with women as conspicuous consumption and women having skill or creating value brought a loss of prestige to their male relatives who were seen as not able to support their female relatives as useless ornaments. So European definitions of femininity became heavily weighed towards ornamental pursuits and the deliberate wasting of female talent (women becoming accomplished pianists but not allowed to play in public, or women wearing clothing and shoes that made them helpless, or the fetishization of super white skin that shows a woman wasn’t out working in the fields). I think this still skews the Western conversations around femininity and feminism, because the culture assumes that women working in any sort of physical labor is low prestige. And this has a lovely little perfect storm baby with the low prestige assigned to manual labor in Western culture generally, so women really only get respected for having management roles that can be accomplished in heels. I don’t think we have a healthy idea of femininity that is based on women’s contributions in terms of reproductive labor and connection to the land and inventiveness in developing stuff like clothes and beer. Our idea of femininity seems to be lipstick and submissiveness. Which is a huge bone I have to pick with trans rights activists. I’m frankly insulted by defining women and femininity as being those suckered into buying beauty products designed to raise one’s social status by attracting a greater range of suitors (or job offers, in the modern day). I think Western feminism needs a definition of femininity that recognizes women’s contributions to the world, but that comes into conflict with the naked in Western ideals of the high-status woman as being useless. So, I suspect I have done an absolutely crap job explaining any of this, for which I apologize, but I can’t fuck with it anymore because I have to go do the laundry. Irony, eh?
The suggestion that womanhood can be defined by the materialistic, hyper sexualised characature of femininity presented by many trans activists is insulting. It is a continuation of the destruction of sacred feminity that Silvia Federici discusses. The Western feminist movement has been highjacked by capitalism and patriarchy, so that a woman is seen as powerful only if she pursues traditionally "masculine," materialistic objectives, such as promiscuity and money making, or "lipstick and submissiveness" as Anne points out.
Vandana Shiva's work is a reminder of where women's true power lies, in our ability to create and nurture life, within us, around us, with our hands and our hearts.
Unfortunately, Australia is going down the same route as America in regards to litigation. Public liability insurance has made it cost prohibitive to run a home business and to train youngsters. We have a national skills shortage and are importing migrant workers because our children have had no opportunity to learn practical skills, and their attention span is non existent due to screens replacing childcare.
As Vandana Shiva emphasizes, "We want freedoms for people, not corporations. We want governments to regulate corporations that cause harm, not police citizens through undemocratic seed laws and food laws whose only objective is to criminalize citizen freedoms in order to establish corporate totalitarianism over our seed and food."
This can be applied to all aspects of home economy and family life.
No, you did a great job of explaining this and my head just exploded some more, thank you!
Even when I was at school and being taught about how great the Feudal System was I did have my doubts. It was all supposed to have been so good for everyone but all one tended to see of it were the 'motte and bailey' castles and lots of poorer people working on the land. That might not have been so bad in some ways if they hadn't been working on someone else's land and for someone else, who was probably keeping an eye on them from the nearest motte and bailey castle rather like a prototype Panopticon.
Reading this chapter I was amazed at the long struggles and resistance of the European peasants and it seems to make capitalism's 'triumph' even more tragic. I'm always amazed by the Church's accumulation of wealth considering the founder of their religion preached the exact opposite. Did they just not read those bits?
A few years ago I was wondering just why the Church got so het up about homosexuality. If it's between consenting adults, it's not hurting anyone. Then I realised that, of course, no children are produced, and more men pairing up with men means less children produced; less recruits to the religion, and less workers for the capitalists. This makes it clear why childless women are frowned upon. How interesting that 'proletariat' was a group mostly valued for producing children! That's pretty blatant; more workers for the capitalist, rather like more 'cannon-fodder' in warfare. Perhaps they'd call it 'co-lateral damage' nowadays in an attempt to make it a bit less obvious.
How interesting that the word 'slave' comes from 'Slav' as they were the most often enslaved at one period! The history and continuing story of slavery is much more complex than the way it is spoken about today but it seems impossible to explore that nowadays.
In many ways, the peasants/serfs with land were in a much better position than many people today. They could independently support themselves whereas many of us nowadays can't; we don't even have a garden but are stacked up on top of each other many feet from the ground. People sometimes say to try growing things oneself but there's a big limit on how much can be grown on three small easterly-facing window ledges, especially when your landlord doesn't like you having window boxes! It does feel like a very precarious position that most of us have ended up in, especially in towns and cities.
Following along with great interest and really getting a lot from your analysis and all the commenters. I’ve been delayed in getting restarted in reading the book because I’m still in the middle of Julia Skinners Our Fermented Lives which serendipitously seems appropriate since she talks much about ferments from these times and also about women’s role in fermenting. Reading your essay makes me more excited to delve back into the book. I find this all very relevant as here in the Philippines we have an enormous amount of landless farmers. I have “farmer” friends (who own land through inheritance but never touch the soil except for instagram selfies) complain that they can’t find good workers and I silently wonder if they would work for minimum wage in the tropical sun all day with no contract or health insurance or social security. Many rural families here used to have small food forests where they could gather a lot of their calories but I imagine this is quickly disappearing as progress eats up all the land to “develop” land into cookie cutter housing that mostly sits empty. And now the country imports most of its food from overseas....
Thank you so much for hosting this open bookclub Rhyd. Everyone should read this book. I am only up to chapter two and already it has dramatically altered my view of the history of feudalism, the 'dark' ages, capitalism and feminism. As a recovering 'leftist' (I don't know where I belong on the political spectrum now. There seems to be few places available for retrospective, nature based, collectivist and localised politics), and someone who's identity has always been based on a non-conformist ideology, I was completely unaware how thoroughly I had absorbed the propaganda and distorted 'history' of the period of transition to capitalism. Thank you for bringing this to all of us.
I found the beginning of the book very informative on the social relations that obtained during the feudal period. I'm especially intrigued by the access to the commons which people had, using the wild areas to supplement their horticultural efforts, and how that gave women more independence than capitalism was to offer.
Clearly there was still a vital connection to the land, both through their direct farming and their view of the wild land providing for them in harder times.
Interested to see where the book goes. My knowledge of feminist theory is mostly about 'the male gaze' etc, gleaned from typing-up my wife's art theory essays for her while in college, so I'm enjoying learning about a different perspective, particularly one that doesn't disregard the reality of the body.
Have been a bit intimidated to jump into this conversation about Silvia Federici’s “Caliban and the Witch, as I am no political scientist. Her book really impacted me intellectually and especially emotionally as I have long been dealing with feelings of inherited body shame, the need to remain small and voiceless, etc. I was also quite rattled to read about the history of such horrific abuse of heretics and witches, although I had a vague inkling of its origins.
Also what Federici wrote about “the schoolbook portrayal of feudal society as a static world” is found everywhere in the course I teach on Arthurian Romance. Authors like Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, Robert de Boron, and Chretien de Troyes, for example, were only writing for and about the nobility and to show them in a positive light. Perhaps one exception can be found in the 3rd Branch of “The Mabinogi,” where the dethroned protagonist Manawydan son of Llyr becomes a land worker and performs sympathetic magic on a neolithic mound as a farmer might. These examples are quite rare….
Thank you too for your mention of the root meaning of “proletariat.” I had never thought of it that way. Also the light touch of your ending was appreciated after such a somber look at medieval life: “So popular was homosexuality in Florence that prostitutes used to wear males clothes to attract customers.” 😊
Thank you so much for putting this together. I have to say learning about the legalization of rape is terrifying and sobering