{"id":5879,"date":"2005-07-02T22:14:53","date_gmt":"2005-07-02T22:14:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/useful-myths.html"},"modified":"2005-07-02T22:14:53","modified_gmt":"2005-07-02T22:14:53","slug":"useful-myths","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/useful-myths.html","title":{"rendered":"Useful Myths?"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the way down, I read Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths<\/a>, written by a French historian, and originally published in 1977. <\/p>\n

If you go to the Amazon link and read the reviews, especially the one written by Carl Olsen, you get the gist of the book. It’s quite interesting: the author’s contention is that what we call the Middle Ages was, in fact, a particularly creative era in the history of the West, and that the Renaissance, in contrast, was not so much as creative as imitative and hidebound by the newly-discovered standards of (some aspects of) Classical Greece and Rome.  The introduction of Roman law, she maintains, is also responsible for causing great harm to human beings, in particular those in servitude – chattel slavery, she says, was practically unknown to European practice until well after the medieval period and was substantially different from serfdom, and was harmful, in addition to women. <\/p>\n

I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who read the book, particularly anyone who disagrees with Pernoud’s analysis. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the way down, I read Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths, written by a French historian, and originally published in 1977. If you go to the Amazon link and read the reviews, especially the one written by Carl Olsen, you get the gist of the book. It’s quite interesting: the author’s contention is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nUseful Myths? - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/07\/useful-myths.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Useful Myths? - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"On the way down, I read Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths, written by a French historian, and originally published in 1977. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5879"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5879\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}