Miscellanea
Things I need to remember:
• Asking for help is not, as it turns out, fatal.
• Laughing is easier than pulling your hair out, and doesn't have the unfortunate side effect of making you look like a plague victim.
• Even the biggest tasks can be defeated if taken a bit at a time.
• I can write a paper the night before it's due, but the results are not all they could be.
• Be thorough, but focused.
• Trust yourself.
• Honesty, always.
Historians are the Cassandras of the Humanities
no subject
Date: July 23rd, 2011 04:41 pm (UTC)Secondly, without defending the idea of trying and executing anyone over religion, it is the case that even the Spanish Inquisition accounted for far fewer deaths than is commonly thought. Much or our 'popular' idea of the inquisition is based first on the protestant anti-Catholic rhetoric of the Reformation era (whose own records on dealing with dissenters is far from sterling) and Enlightenment historiographical tradition which was (laudably, if at times inaccurately) anti-religion. All of this was then picked up by the Romantic and Gothic literary traditions, which gave us many a fictional account of the virginal girl being subjected to unspeakable and lurid depravity at the hands of the cowled inquisitor....
So while it was by no means a good thing, it was never quite the bloodbath is has been supposed to be, and contextually speaking, was not at all outside the normal level of brutality or repressiveness of the time period. I tend to be pretty passionate about this point, because I think we are heading into a new sort of 'neo-medievalism' at the hands of the GOP/RR, and unless we know how these things really happened, and what they were and were not, they could happen again....