Hey y'all! I forgot to mention it, but there will not be a new video next week, but we'll be back on the 29th. Thanks for watching!

Fun fact: I have a condition where I have too much iron in my blood and I have to get some removed a few times a year. Donating it is fine (encouraged actually because if people lose a lot of blood the extra iron is helpful for them) but I literally have the medieval diagnosis of “your blood is weird have you tried having less of it”.

The fact that "flat earthers" today would still be ridiculed in medieval times is too much 😂😂😂

(shakes fist at the sky) VICTORIANS!

The big misconception for me is the idea that the mediaeval world was drab and primarily brown. In truth, they LOVED colour, and many interiors of houses would be brightly, even garishly, coloured.

I'm an archaeologist in the UK and it surprises me how complex and advanced many of their villages are. Thanks to a combination of the black death and the wool trade we have plenty of deserted villages to investigate.

Regarding the outro, a good analogy I think is that "pop culture medievalism" is a lot like pop culture ninjas or pirates: a set of stereotypes that is historically wrong but can still be fun to play with as a fictionalized and tropified version of the original. Like I'm sure the writers of Disenchanted knew the stereotypes they were playing with weren't all historically founded, but they still had fun with them because that's part of what we do.

as a medieval reenactor, thank you for this video. it's crazy how people claim the middle ages were all dark and painful, even when visiting vibrant medieval events (sure, the events are still designed to entertain, but they do show what's possible and how colorful the times actually were). the simple truth is that humans don't change, and while we may set up our reenactment camps with some modern perspective or additional creature comforts in mind, at the end of the day we're still sitting together, playing games, having fun, eating good food (glory to the camp cook) or working on hobby projects, like knitting or leatherwork. people like to have fun and be happy and while technology and society may change, even millenia ago we found plenty of ways to achieve just those goals.

34:33 Ironically, the wearing of severed weasel testicles would act as a form of contraception, though probably not in the way the medieval text suggests.

On the topic of medieval recipes seeming odd because of how they mix sweet and savory elements, or the heavy use of spices, some of these recipes are much closer to modern food than you might think. I mean, if you see a historical recipe for a pork roast with a sauce of honey, vinegar, and mixed spices, that's basically just barbecue by a different name.

When I was twenty I had surgery that required my wearing a plaster body cast for six months.  There was no way I could take a shower or tub bath.  Instead, I used soap, a washcloth, and a basin of warm water.  Although it was not as psychologically fulfilling as showering or bathing, it definitely did the trick.  My grandmother suggested that I fill a dishpan full of water and soak my feet occasionally to give me a sense of bathing, and that did help.  BTW the areas of skin under a plaster cast stop producing oil and sweat so my experience was not as gross as imagined.

11:02 even today, a popular type of German beer is radler, which is basically half beer and half lemonade. It’s how you can get the stereotypical day full of constant drinking without excessive drunkenness and hangovers - even as someone unaccustomed with the practice, it is quite easy to not only stay relatively sober, but even hydrated during the height of summer.

By the sound of it, every single viewer was expecting a Ground News advert. We all need to log off.

Chronological snobbery, a term coined by CS Lewis, is what what kept popping into my head. What a great video! Thank you for the work you put into it.

It’s a bit reductive, but I find it useful to think of the Middle Ages as running from the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476 to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. A thousand years of history can never be monolithic.

Also, hello to Jess. I discovered your channel a couple of days ago and am thoroughly enjoying your work.

People in Medieval Europe cared quite a lot about not smelling bad. The prevailing theory of disease in Ancient, Medieval, and even Early Modern Europe was miasma theory, the belief that disease was transmitted by bad air and stench was a sign of bad air. It wouldn't be until the mid 19th century that germ theory was accepted.

A surprising number of things that are thought of as medieval were actually early modern. Witch hunts were much more common in the Early Modern period than they were in the Medieval period. The full plate armor which is associated with "medieval knights" only came about near the end of the Medieval period; it was used for longer in the Early Modern period, into the 17th century.

brilliant video! so much of the way we think of the Middle Ages, I think, stems from what Tolkien's bestie C.S. Lewis described as "historical snobbery", where we automatically presume ourselves as modern living folks to be smarter, cleaner, generally better than people of the past - a dangerous & frankly silly kind of prejudice to hold.

So many stereotypes about Medieval Europe are in fact, things that either happened in the Early Modern Period or made up by the Victorians in the UK

11:06 "I hope you like Guinness, sir. I find it a refreshing substitute for... food." - Col Jack O'Neill

52:15 - you make a very valid point here that shouldn't be overlooked.  In all the many thousands of years of human development, we are SO CLOSE to our medieval forebearers that there's not really a discernible difference in our level of intelligence or 'advancement'.  We just have better tools these days to spread knowledge much more quickly and broadly.