Customer Reviews

Strange Histories: The Trial of the Pig, the Walking Dead, and Other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book explains clearly and convincingly why the people of the medieval and early modern periods believed in things that seem to us biazarre and irrational. If you want to understand why people believed in witchcraft,werewolves, the persecution of heretics, the trying of animals for crimes against humans etc, this book explains it all. It clearly shows that the beliefs of past times were no more irrational than our own, given the way people knew the world to be. If you read this book you can understand why, for instance,in 1545 it seemed reasonable to the townsfolk of Saint-Julien-de-Maurienne in France to sue a plague of flies for destroying a vinyard.

More disconcertingly, the book also shows that our own modern beliefs are often no more rational than the beliefs of the past, and that for instance the same reasons that led people to accept the truth of confessions of witchcraft, led people in modern times to accept the reality of Satanic abuse. If you pride yourself on being more rational than folk in past times, your opinion may be shaken by this book. The book is written in a lucid, witty style that makes it pleasantly easy to read for the unscholarly (like me), and should be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in history and why people believe what they do.

Here we have a fun, fascinating, and insightful book which starts out strong -- but which REALLY hits its stride and makes its point in the final two chapters. From witches and werewolves to demons and walking corpses, this is an illuminating romp into the medieval worldview.

So what exactly is Oldridge's point in writing this book? Simply this: The people of the medieval and Renaissance worlds were not ignorant, superstitious, irrational, bestial, or stupid. They had the same brains and intelligence that we have. Their actions and beliefs, far from being irrational, were perfectly sensible given their worldview. Furthermore, we are no better: The modern West has plenty of irrational beliefs and habits of our own!

Thought-provoking, honest, and exceedingly readable, Oldridge has produced a work which educates, entertains, and gently rattles about our assumptions of our own superiority. I highly recommend this book.

This book puts into perspective the way we modern humans think about the world. In pre-modern times, educated people thought very seriously about such things that today most of us would consider absurd, e.g.., werewolves, witches, walking dead, etc. Also, in those olden times, people thought rather differently about God, angels, saints, demons, demonic possessions and the devil than most of us do today. Intelligent, educated thinkers of pre-modern times had a way of looking at things that may seem strange to us yet were perfectly in line with their times. The logical arguments that they used to address their contemporary problems had common sense structure - only their starting assumptions were vastly different from those we would use today. One can only guess at what humans living, say, a thousand years from now will think about our own ways of viewing the world. Through discussing specific cases and quoting contemporary writers, the author of this excellent book does a commendable job of illustrating the above. This book is hard to put down and I heartily recommend it.

In 1438 a pig was hanged for murder in Burgundy, an apple was judged possessed by demons in 1602, and werewolves and flying witches were part of the belief system of everyday man. Strange Histories: The Trial Of The Pig, The Walking Dead, And Motehr Matters Of Fact From The Medieval And Renaissance Worlds is packed with intriguing beliefs and accounts of Middle Ages ideas, explaining how and why these beliefs were widely accepted and showing how assumptions about witches and demons affected social and political systems and ideas of rational enforcement. An intriguing worldview of the past is analyzed.

Only one good piece of advice; don't buy this book if you expect a collection of horror stories. It's a history of human intellectual behaviour and a study of the different ways we look at our surroundings, from the late 15th century until the 1700's.
In 1438 a pig was hanged for murder in Burgundy. The French judge Henri Boguet described an apple possessed by demons in 1602. A few years later, Italian Jesuits tried to calculate the physical dimensions of hell.

These and many other ideas from the late Middle Ages and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem absurd today, but they made good sense to people at the time. This book explains how beliefs that are strange to us were once widely accepted. It sets out the intellectual world of men and women in the distant past, and shows how their assumptions and expectations allowed them to believe things that we cannot: that heresy and witchcraft posed a threat to society, that demons carried people through the air and that the dead occasionally walked away from their graves.

None of these ideas were mad. They simply reflected the belief system of the medieval and Renaissance world. In fact an understanding of the rational basis of beliefs that now seem absurd suggests that modern ideas may one day seem equally ridiculous.

The reason why I like this book so much is because it compels you to study your own way of thinking but you won't be able to do that without a sense of humor

I assigned Oldridge's book for my students' summer reading this year and I am looking forward to applying it to our class. The book is entertaining, interesting, and informative. It provides terrific insight into early modern Europe's mentalite, which for AP Euro, is a great launching point. Oldridge takes witchcraft, pig trials, walking dead, and other phenomenon and puts them into accurate historical context, explaining why those made perfect sense to a European of the 15th century. The author uses modern examples that put "ridiculous" medieval beliefs in perspective and challenge the reader to examine our own modern beliefs. A good read for teachers and students alike!

*** NON SPECIFIC SPOILERS ***

This book is very interesting to read, primarily because it is the combining of the subjects of history and sociology. Understanding the "why" of history is very important, since the alternative is to say that the pre-modern population lacked intelligent, rational persons at the highest levels of society. This, of course, is easily disproven and it is this recurring train of though that is the subtext of this book.

The focus, of this book, as indicated by the title, is the stories, which include animal trials, witch hunts, werewolves, revanants, angels, demons, heretics, possesions, sabbats, vampires, and much more. Most of this was a little more "church-centric" than I expected, based solely on the title, but after I finished the book, I understood why. Basically, most European medieval episodes used the Bible as the basis for both law and science, and therefore all scholarly & legal writings had this as a subtext. The resulting discussions by subject resulted in a condensate of thew views of the protestant/catholic churches over history and by various scholars. It turned out to be fascinating.

I personally found the trial concerning fruit flies stranger than the one concerning the pig, but overall, the strangeness of the stories did not disappoint. Suprisingly, what did disappoint me was subject of some of the "modern correlations" which I felt did not belong in the book. While the author of the book found killing a pig found guilty of killing a child to be strange, today's society has animal control officers willing to dispose on site of any dangerous animal. While the trial, of course, would not be done, animal control officers must first ascertain the guilt of the animal in question, rather than just killing an animal without evidence. The author ascerted time and again how we would find killing an animal for harming someone inhumane, and that the death of the people involved was simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, this is certainly not a universal. Many animals have "rogue" behaviors, as even television series point out, and I think this weakened his point.

Another weak point was the view on heroin. He pointed out that in the past that people did not consider it's use life threatening, and that the modern view was that it is. The empircal facts dictate that heroin can cause the heart and respiration to diminish to the point that a patient will die with overdosage. That seems empirical enough for me to say that this isn't societal "self evident" statement, but an actual fact. The reason for the difference in views is the fact that we have things called toxicological screenings which were non-existant a couple of centuries ago.

Overall, I laud the book, and the case to thoroughly examine anything we consider to be "self evident."

Recommended.

How can you beat a title like this? It offers a wide range of opportunities to explore the highways and byways of Medieval & Renaissance worldviews. Oldridge offers a unique insight into the how & why our ancestors viewed such transgressions to the social contract of the time, and the complete normalcy of those views. What I found off putting was the rather superficial coverage that is offered to the topics the author selects. I have found other books that explore similar topics with more depth and penache. A welcome addition for the beginning student of historical oddities library. The style of this book is scholarly in a Master's thesis sort of way with an odd forced sense of humor that is unwelcomed. It lacks the immediacy needed to communicate why we did & do the things we do as human beings. In the final analysis- we are still creatures of absurd superstitions & prejudices. One is left to wonder if evolution goes beyond mere biology?