Anachronism in Monty Python

By -
Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a pretty funny movie. But, in the tradition of dumping everything bad from the past in the Middle Ages, they show a trial for witchcraft as a stereotypical medieval happening. In fact, these were very rare in the Middle Ages, and only really got going in the Early Modern period. Interest in magic, alchemy, and astrology also all rose significantly at about that time.

The Middle Ages were largely an age of reason.

Comments

  1. Ken B5:30 PM

    YES. A misrepresented misjudged era.

    When I read Decameron in first year I learned all I thought I knew about the Middle Ages was wrong. One reason it became my favorite book.

    But the movie is hilarious.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Josiah Neeley10:43 AM

    The film crew is also probably an anachronism.

    ReplyDelete
  3. rob11:25 AM

    Were anarcho-syndicalist communes common in the middle ages or is that also an anachronism ?

    ReplyDelete
  4. gcallah11:50 AM

    Lads, I understand that there were anachronisms which they put in deliberately as a joke. I don't think the witch trials is one of those.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more