Tag: Unauthorized

Medieval History 101 Episode V

You have heard me talk about how “nation” means a people related by blood, history, language, and religion. But what if a people related by blood, history, and language change their religion? What would induce you to change your ancestral worship for a God you had never heard of until some strangers arrived?

Prof. Rachel Fulton Brown considers these questions on Unauthorized in Medieval History 101 Episode V: “Getting Medieval on the Song of Creation”. The episode study guide is here.

I didn’t laugh out loud

But I did just spray temperanillo all over my keyboard and monitor. Dammit, Owen!

By the way, if you want hats like this, unbearablesmerchandise.com. All proceeds go to me and my buddy Ryan, who has a fucked-up back. And I’ve been kicked off Paypal. So, it’s a really good foundation. A lot better foundation than the Clinton Foundation, because instead of focusing on the rape of kids, we focus on keeping it going.

Medieval History 101 Episode 3

Prof. Rachel Fulton Brown presents Medieval History 101 Episode 3: Getting Medieval on the Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories on Unauthorized.TV. For subscribers only. The episode guide, complete with reference texts and Infogalactic links, is available here.

“The literal sense teaches what happened, the allegorical sense what you should believe, the moral sense what you should do, and the anagogical sense where you are going.”

Unauthorized medieval history

Unauthorized.tv is pleased to present Episode I in Prof. Rachel Fulton Brown’s Medieval History 101 series, entitled Getting Medieval on Medieval History. The history series is for subscribers, but the first episode is free for everyone. The course guide and a recommended reading list is available here. This should further demonstrate Unauthorized’s commitment to continuously raising the intellectual bar in the service of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. In my experience, one of the best ways to avoid being deceived is to know history. There is, as we are told, very little that is new under the sun, and the deceptions that are being put into practice today have often been utilized in the past.

And if you’re not a subscriber yet, but you want to support more of these video projects, you can get on board here.

UPDATE: The supporting blog post, with references.

The problem of sources

Unauthorized historian RFB points out that the problem of whom to believe is as old as history:

Last week I broke my sabbatical seclusion to attend a panel that my colleagues in the Department of History had organized on “Understanding the Trump Phenomenon.” The panelists covered a range of themes: climate change denialism, white nationalism, the global failure of capitalism, the latent illiberalism of American culture, and world-wide yearnings towards totalitarianism—all the usual -isms. And then they opened the floor to questions. Like a good fencer, I got my hand up first and said something about the need to think of American culture in more regional and long-range terms, particularly the differences in conceptions of liberty that David Hackett Fisher has shown to be in play, but it was already too late. The room was primed to descend into pessimism and despair, although since we’re talking academics here—fellow professors and graduate students in History for the most part—it was subtle and came out mainly in the kinds of questions asked.

One question in particular had my colleagues on the panel stumped. “How,” one of our graduate students asked, after the conversation had ranged round the many ways in which the progressive liberal experiment in America seemed doomed, “do we know what news sources we can trust anymore?” Her voice rose as she spoke, in that way that I have regularly heard my friends’ voices rise over the past few weeks; even men’s voices go up as their anxieties kick in and they start pleading with the universe to make the results of the election go away. “How do we know what news sources we can trust anymore?” My colleagues made a stab at it: “Go with sources that you have to pay a subscription for.” But mainly they sat and shook their heads, clearly at a loss. They wanted to give the students an answer, but were distressed that they couldn’t name news sources that they themselves trusted fully, not even The New York Times. “It is a wild wild world out there,” they seemed to be saying. “Even we aren’t sure whom we can believe.”

Read the whole thing there. It’s intriguing, particularly as concerns the intellectual rivalry between William, a canon of the Augustinian house of Newburgh, and Geoffrey of Monmouth.

Book review: Killing Commendatore

Unauthorized subscribers of a literary bent may be interested in watching my first Unauthorized book review, which is of Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore. It’s very good, and very much indicative of the great Japanese novelist’s return to form.

If you’re interested in picking up a copy after watching this, we have the hardcover available on the Castalia Direct store at a discount or you can preorder the paperback for $12.99.

When the Middle Ages were Dark

Unauthorized professor Rachel Fulton Brown laments the colorization of what used to be known as the Dark Ages:

You remember, right? What it was like when the Middle Ages were Dark? The Roman Catholic Church made slaves of everyone, stripped them of their sense of dignity and independence and made social status a matter not of achievement, but birth. The Church hated science and industry and did everything in its power to keep people in chains. It guarded its authority with the sword and the stake, stifled all innovation, and fed the common people lies.

And why were these Ages so Dark? There were no universities, no towns, only castles with dungeons. Monks huddled in their cells thinking dark thoughts about sin, while Vikings stormed across the countryside, raping and pillaging and capturing Christians to sell as slaves. The Church refused to let anybody learn to read in case they got hold of the Bible and threatened its power.

Meanwhile, in the convents, women went mad, hysterically imagining themselves beloved by God, some even going so far as to have visions of being married to Christ. They were encouraged in these “absurd and puerile” delusions by their priests, themselves driven mad by their unnatural celibacy, who, when they were not seducing nuns, were inventing lies about witches having sex with the Devil, all the while blaming the women for inflaming their lust.

There was no commerce, no learning, no art. All was drab and colorless because the Church hated beauty. The kings were barbarians who knew nothing of law. The Church encouraged the worst superstitions so as to keep the laity bewitched and in fear of God. The barons thought nothing of torturing their own laborers, while the Church was ever on the lookout for heretics to burn at the stake.

Even the high culture was infected with superstition, as the Church coerced the laity into building great cathedrals simply in order to assert its power. Whereas the ancient Romans had build a great civilization (never mind the conquest and slaves), the Middle Ages knew only decadence and decline, thanks to the Church. There was no great literature or philosophy, only the demented ravings of the scholastics, who wasted their lives arguing such stupidities as how many angels could dance on the head of a pin and insisting that the world was flat.

And then along came Charles Homer Haskins (1870-1937) and ruined everything.

Prof. Brown’s first Unauthorized video will be available on Unauthorized.TV later this month.