Medieval coin experts needed...

Thats Ben Franklin

 

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Nope. Ben Franklin

 

Nope. Thems glasses

 

No straglers huh.

 

Sounds like double talk. You lost me

 

Yes. And @Alegandron is right too. When did medieval Chinese coinage finish? About 1910. But then - when did Western countries take up the paper and base metal sort of money - that the Chinese had established around 1300 - that would be about 1947....

Personally, this year I am celebrating the 400 anniversary of the end of the Medieval thought in England (with the publication of Novum Organum) in 1620.

But at the same time - am dismayed at the rise of the New Dark Age - from about 1970.

Its all really rather complicated, as you imply

Rob T

 

Be patient. Someday all of our present day coinage will be somebody else's medieval coins and after that they will become somebody else's ancient coinage.

 

1616 happens to be the year Shakespeare died. (His birth and death years were drummed into me for life by an 8th grade teacher.) This is the first time I've heard anyone imply that he should be classified as a medieval writer, in the same category as, say, William Langland or the Gawain Poet. Even Malory, who died more than 45 years before Shakespeare was born, is usually thought of as late medieval at best, given that, after all, he wrote in Modern English, easily readable if not for the spelling.

I guess my mindset on the subject was also formed by reading (most of!) Johan Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages (first published in Dutch in 1919) -- about France and the Netherlands in the 14th and 15th centuries -- back in college, more decades ago than I care to admit.

 

Heeeeyyyyy... stop that! I am still 21 ! Or...is that 12...

 

Eh? The guy was a blatant witch-ist

Macbeth, 1606................Pendle, 1612

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendle_witches

 

The last person to be executed for witchcraft in Great Britain was Janet Horne in 1727 in Scotland. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Horne. In Europe as a whole, it was Anna Göldi in 1782 in Switzerland. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Göldi. Witch-ism was not confined to the European Middle Ages!

 

The Göldi case is a grey area, but I notice Switzerland did not ban serfdom until 1798.

But anyhow – if you want to hold up 18th century Switzerland as a paradigm of “modern” thought, that is your prerogative.

As I already said my own different position is: “its all very complicated”

I add for my part that I am pleased to notice just a few of people around here who seem to share that understanding.

Rob T

 

Maybe 20 years back I had a very interesting conversation with a Czech archaeologist. His idea was that I did not understand the history of Eastern Europe at all (he was right). That while in England, the 17th century was the period when the last vestiges of serfdom were disappearing - but to the East - it was when the first vestiges of serfdom were appearing. I guess he maybe had in mind another 1620 event - The Battle of the White Mountain?

Rob T

 

Hungary established legal equality among all classes of (free) people (men). Whereas elsewhere in Europe, the nobility had a fine gradation from squires and knights to baronets and barons, counts, marquesses, dukes, princes,... Hungary had those, also, but they all had the same rights and obligations. It was the only way to get everyone to agree to actually being a nation. They only forgot to check with the Hapsburgs on that.