Medieval society in imagination and reality

One of my sisters went to a Convent school and the nuns there decided to have each girl provide a write up about their best friend for graduation. This had a funny unintended consequence because an awful lot of girls praised their friends not for qualities they had but for qualities they wished they had. The wallflower was described as social and outgoing and so on.

A lot of the images of medieval society tend to do something like that. Paintings and stories of cloistered life, for example, belie the fact that such peace and security was virtually non-existent in the medieval world. Stories of tightly knit communities where everyone had a place likewise don't match up with Peter the Hermit managing to collect thousands of transients together in very short order for an ill-fated crusade.

I have always liked the way Alasdair MacIntyre put it:

Of all the mythological ways of thinking which have disguised the middle ages for us none is more misleading than that which portrays a unified and monolithic Christian culture ....

For a thinker like Aquinas, MacIntyre tells us the problem was

... how to educate and civilize human nature in a culture in which human life was in danger of being torn apart by the conflict of too many ideals, too many ways of life.

For Gothic literature, on the other hand, medieval society was a unified mass where there was all too much unity.

And this illusion carries on today. Look at Goth culture and you see nothing that even remotely connects with well, anything at all, besides a desperate-to-the-point-of being-pathetic need to be noticed as "individual" on the part of members of the subculture. A need which, in the typical fashion of youth efforts to be different, Goth kids seek to meet by joining a narrow and close-minded culture where everyone dresses alike, talks alike, reads the same literature and listens to the same music.

But, even though based on illusions, Gothic literature produced some really great stuff and even today's Goth culture has produced some music and art that is pretty good as greasy kids' stuff goes.

(The desperate need to be noticed and recognized that typifies Goth culture is also typical of rampage killers. Goth culture does not, of course, cause people to become killers but the fact that a kid is suddenly attracted to it is a fairly reliable marker that something has gone wrong.)