I...honestly can't believe I didn't figure this out on my own, maybe it was because I read the book before I knew too much about psychology, but there's this one fairly well-known popular historian, Barbara Tuchman, who has this thesis that, at least in the 14th century and maybe in general, the past was such a terrible place because everybody was traumatized (think Black Death) all the time, and nobody was thinking clearly, and everybody was perpetuating trauma on everyone all the time, and it just makes *so much sense*. Because, like I keep saying, I would 100% have been perpetuating the cycle of trauma in their shoes. And in A Distant Mirror, she finds this one semi-obscure French nobleman, and goes, "Him! He acts like a sensible adult! Let's follow him as best we can through the limited documentary evidence."
ETA: Oh, and then he dies of the Black Death, according to Wikipedia. SEE?
Re: God save our Saxon cousins
I...honestly can't believe I didn't figure this out on my own, maybe it was because I read the book before I knew too much about psychology, but there's this one fairly well-known popular historian, Barbara Tuchman, who has this thesis that, at least in the 14th century and maybe in general, the past was such a terrible place because everybody was traumatized (think Black Death) all the time, and nobody was thinking clearly, and everybody was perpetuating trauma on everyone all the time, and it just makes *so much sense*. Because, like I keep saying, I would 100% have been perpetuating the cycle of trauma in their shoes. And in A Distant Mirror, she finds this one semi-obscure French nobleman, and goes, "Him! He acts like a sensible adult! Let's follow him as best we can through the limited documentary evidence."
ETA: Oh, and then he dies of the Black Death, according to Wikipedia. SEE?