I
'm apparently on something of a high medieval kick these days. I just read Between Two Fires, a horror story in fourteenth-century France; then shifted to the Brother Cadfael Mysteries, about a thirteenth-century monk who solves crimes. Now I've picked up Barbara Hanawalt's The Ties That Bound, an academic work on English peasant family structure in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. History is always so much more interesting than the vapid images that we receive as hand-me-down knowledge. The real peasants that cultivated the land and raised their children were so much richer and more complex than the stereotype of tradition-mired, dirty, semi-slaves that we tend to imagine them as. They were flexible opportunists, dealt a difficult hand which they tried to play as well as they could. They worked with the law, the church, the social structures of their day, their families, their land and communities, and exhibited great creativity with the tools that they had at hand. I don't think I'd exactly take up the opportunity to live a peasant's life, but I suspect we have a lot to learn from them. In particular, I'm impressed by their willingness to innovate on an individual scale in order to fit their needs. In a lot of ways, we are far more conformist than the our peasant ancestors, who approached their world with a great deal of courage and tenacity.