<story><title>We Keep Telling the Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age and Bad Middle Ages (2020)</title><url>https://www.exurbe.com/black-death-covid-and-why-we-keep-telling-the-myth-of-a-renaissance-golden-age-and-bad-middle-ages/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>piokoch</author><text>Popular culture is full of historical myths, another popular one is about cruelties of Holy Inquisition. Inquisition is painted (&amp;quot;The Name of the Rose&amp;quot; by Umberto Eco and others) as some sadistic group of catholic priests who were chasing innocent woman, torture them and then burn.&lt;p&gt;The truth is that Inquisition aim was exactly opposite: to stop chasing and burning innocent woman (and man) by all kind of petty lords and civil &amp;quot;courts&amp;quot; who used witchcraft accusation to get rid of opponents. This was done in the name of Catholic Church so Rome decided to do something about this and stop that practice by introduction of pretty modern standards of court proceedings - this way Inquisition was born.&lt;p&gt;Inquisition was punishing heavily those who gave false testimony and that cut number of witchcraft cases significantly.&lt;p&gt;In addition the punishment for heresy was rarely death penalty (about 1,5% of cases), which is less than 5 thousand executions during several centuries of Inquisition activity. Typical punishment was fasting, scourging or pilgrimage.&lt;p&gt;Coming back to Umberto Eco writing, he described in &amp;quot;The Name of the Rose&amp;quot; Dominican friar Bernard Gui as some bloody, mindless, cruel madman, medieval version of Doctor Mengele. While the truth was exactly the opposite - he was a decent and educated man.&lt;p&gt;Obviously historical research and facts are much less interesting than Eco pop writing, but we live in the pop age and believe in the pop &amp;quot;truths&amp;quot; so this is not a big surprise.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>goto11</author><text>I suspect you are getting into some myth-making yourself here. The inquisition was not originally focused on witch-hunting, it was focused on heretics - people challenging or denying the the doctrines of the Church. Bernardo Gui and The Name of the Rose is 14th century, while the large scale witch-hunts only started in the 15th century with the publishing of &amp;quot;Malleus Maleficarum&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; The truth is that Inquisition aim was exactly opposite: to stop chasing and burning innocent woman (and man) by all kind of petty lords and civil &amp;quot;courts&amp;quot; who used witchcraft accusation to get rid of opponents.&lt;p&gt;I suspect you made that up, given the anachronisms in your account. Do you have any legitimate source which confirm this narrative?&lt;p&gt;Bernard Gui was certainly an educated man, and he is described as as such in Name of The Rose. He also was responsible for a lot of torture and death, persecution of Judaism and so on. You can consider this &amp;quot;decent&amp;quot; or not pending on your personal values. The Name of the Rose Eco actually has a reasonable good treatment of the philosophy behind the heretic movement and the inquisition, despite the book being fiction.</text></comment>
<story><title>We Keep Telling the Myth of a Renaissance Golden Age and Bad Middle Ages (2020)</title><url>https://www.exurbe.com/black-death-covid-and-why-we-keep-telling-the-myth-of-a-renaissance-golden-age-and-bad-middle-ages/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>piokoch</author><text>Popular culture is full of historical myths, another popular one is about cruelties of Holy Inquisition. Inquisition is painted (&amp;quot;The Name of the Rose&amp;quot; by Umberto Eco and others) as some sadistic group of catholic priests who were chasing innocent woman, torture them and then burn.&lt;p&gt;The truth is that Inquisition aim was exactly opposite: to stop chasing and burning innocent woman (and man) by all kind of petty lords and civil &amp;quot;courts&amp;quot; who used witchcraft accusation to get rid of opponents. This was done in the name of Catholic Church so Rome decided to do something about this and stop that practice by introduction of pretty modern standards of court proceedings - this way Inquisition was born.&lt;p&gt;Inquisition was punishing heavily those who gave false testimony and that cut number of witchcraft cases significantly.&lt;p&gt;In addition the punishment for heresy was rarely death penalty (about 1,5% of cases), which is less than 5 thousand executions during several centuries of Inquisition activity. Typical punishment was fasting, scourging or pilgrimage.&lt;p&gt;Coming back to Umberto Eco writing, he described in &amp;quot;The Name of the Rose&amp;quot; Dominican friar Bernard Gui as some bloody, mindless, cruel madman, medieval version of Doctor Mengele. While the truth was exactly the opposite - he was a decent and educated man.&lt;p&gt;Obviously historical research and facts are much less interesting than Eco pop writing, but we live in the pop age and believe in the pop &amp;quot;truths&amp;quot; so this is not a big surprise.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>collaborative</author><text>This part of pop culture is interesting in that it all started with vivid depictions of torture and murder mass printed by the protestant Dutch (the depictions were made up but taken as truth)&lt;p&gt;This cultural trait of the west has remained intact until today. Popular TV still reinforces these claims from time to time&lt;p&gt;Powerful propaganda, that was</text></comment>