The Death Penalty:
Law at the time was very harsh, and one cannot simply sum up the whole of middle age trials in a short paragraph. The fact being, the judicial system at the time was mostly local, being comprized of nobles and members of the clergy. These men could have easilly bent a trial into a certian favor (as in the case of Joan of Arc), depending on the said person on trial, making it far from fair. Men could have been hung for a small thing such as theivery or for worse crimes like murder.

Starvation:
Peasants relied completley on their lands; one bad hervest could wipe out a village, with no means of releif. When people did have plentiful fields, then maybe things would be as this list says, but starvation was a harsh reality, and wasn’t all that uncommon. Hunting was only a meager source of sustinance.

Smelly People:
I beieive that the author of this isn’t putting into account that there was a very VERY small percentage of nobility in the middle ages. Most people were farmers, peasants and specialized workers, and did not have the privliges of hot bathes. Although I agree that bathing once a year is completley bogus, counter arguments…well…suck. For one, people did not normally take hot baths. Heating up water would have been an expensive buisness, because a peasant would have needed a lot of fire wood to get a tub of water warm. It’s much more plausible that a noble or high ranking man of the clergy could have had a hot bath. Peasants would have more than likley bathed in a river, or a lake. And on the basis that people smelled…well of course they did. The majority of people worked out in fields all day and toiled around smelly animals, and quite honestly it was a really dirty enviornment (The Black plague originated from rats and fleas…and nearly a third of the population of Western Europe died from it…what does this tell you?). But people were just used to the smell, they were around it every day, so they would never have really noticed it.

Peasant Life:
This one really didnt make much sense. Is the myth implying that people work 24/7, 360 days a year? They normally always has Sundays off, because it was a day of rest, and they occasional festivals, but other than that, 95% of their life was work. Don’t forget that these people had to work to survive.

Violence:
The Inquistion? Oh, please. What about the Crucades, the 100 Years War, the Invasions? There were no police, and only a few criminal records still remaining from that time, so we cannot really see the whole span of ‘violence’ at the time. On a larger scale, the place was completley war torn.

The Women:
Seriously? Joan of Arc? You forget to mention that Joan was aided by voices from heaven. The myth, in truth, is wrong, though not in the way that the author describes. Women were not opressed, but they were barely ‘equal in dignity’. And chivarly? That is nearlty a myth in itself.

Flat Earth:
Oh please. Some people today in modern times still beleive that the sun revolves around the earth. The majority of people that were educated were the nobles and clergy. The regular people were not well educated, for their lives revolved around their work.

The Ignorance:
People at the time were extremely supersitious, and religion was a huge and monumentous part of their life. Church life centered their world. All of the examples and people listed were Late Mideval or Rennicance era. Basicall, the author is using a few people to justify something that can never really be pinned down so quickly.

All in all, this list is a load of crap. Where are the sources? The author is trying to disprove these myths by going in the complete opposite direction, whereas there are always small rings of truth around every myth and legend. I feel bad for anyone who reads this and beleives withouth thinking.

Re women if yo get the chance there’s a nice documentary called ‘Christina: A Medieval Life’, which might clear up some lingering misconceptions about women in this period. They often enjoyed quite a bit of autonomy.

SMD, the US has invaded or bombed more countries than that, all by itself, in the last 70 years.

No, this is likely not true. The Church showed very little interest in Copernicanism until the Counter-Reformation was in full swing.

“Let’s remember that Giordorno Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy, for instance, for simply asserting certain truths about the nature of the heavens.”

And this one is completely false. Almost all of the charges against him concerned completely religious topics (such as the nature of the trinity).

Well, no, jfrater, as I’ve just pointed out, the second half of #2 is almost entirely false. (The fact that Middle Agers didn’t think the earth is flat is true.) Even placing Copernicus in “the Middle Ages” is kind of a lie in itself — almost everyone considers the Renaissance to have been underway for 150 years or so by the time of Copernicus. (And placing Elizabeth I in the Middle Ages is, of course, even more ridiculous.)

This is totally false. I studied the history of science at a graduate level, and at the time Galileo began writing (50 years after the death of Copernicus) my teacher estimated that there were 5 or 6 Copernicans in the whole world. It was not until the mid-seventeenth century that heliocentrism won over most scientists.