The Middle Ages teach us something surprising

Geeknifer
7 min readAug 7, 2024

Today, we are alive. Maybe tomorrow, we won’t be. The Middle Ages, beyond scientific knowledge, had an ace up their sleeve that suits us, as contemporary people, well.

When I was younger, the Middle Ages was my favourite historical period because it’s far enough back in time to be half mythological. Unfortunately, because of our Western heritage, we denigrate it too much. In reality, not everyone believed that the Earth was flat or that it was the centre of the universe at that time.

I mean, I wouldn’t have liked to live in a time without baths, vaccines or penicillin either. But I do love to think about medieval rebels: breaking Christian rules and beginning to discover the world on the sly.

To discuss this topic, today’s menu includes a series 📺, a video game 🎮, a story 🖋️ and a reflection 💭 on a certain beautiful medieval teaching.

A series 📺

As a child, I also loved to bite my hair.

A good friend from college put it this way: “I don’t know why no one had made a comedy series of The Decameron.”

The Decameron is a book with a hundred stories written by Giovanni Boccaccio around the thirteen hundred. It is one of the most popular volumes of secular texts; in…

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Geeknifer

Text worker | UX Writer | Culture & tech enthusiast | Bad-ideas lover