[LINK] "Only a mediaevalist can understand the present"

[rfmcdonald]

The May 16th issue of The Spectator has a jokey but still interesting article, "Only a mediaevalist can understand the present", wherein Dan Jones, author of Summer of Blood: The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 compares the ongoing tumult with that of the Middle Ages, particularly concentrating on the G20 London protests and the aforementioned events of 1381.

'It was an age of apocalypse. People across the world lived in fear of a new pandemic disease that leapt with ease from animals to humans, which spread on the breath and moved across borders with alarming freedom. Howls of protest carried through the smashed streets of Europe's cities as they fell to popular rioting, the citizens and rabble alike provoked to violence by economic catastrophe and widespread political disenchantment. Long and wearisome wars weakened the finances of the world's most powerful countries, their societies already threatened by global climate change and an unstable food supply. If people did not quite think they were living in the Last Days, there was at least a common feeling that the end of the world was not ever so far beyond the horizon.'

That's my fantasy blurb for a book about the popular worldview in the 14th century. I know, I know: writing fantasy blurbs for the back of unwritten history books is weird and possibly a bit sad. It smacks a little of John Kennedy Toole's character Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces sitting in his squalid bedroom, picking his toes and dreaming of a time before the ghastly machinery of the modern world. But I'm doing it here to illustrate a valuable historical lesson. For the paragraph above could, with just a pinch of melodrama, be describing the early 21st century.