Life in the Middle Ages

In the last lesson we talked about Middle Age and life in Europe. When we compare with these days' Europe and Middle Age, everything was so weird.

 Firstly, people who lived in Europe was not equal. Feodality dominated in Europe because there was class distinction. Aristocrats and reverends together governed the bourgeois and villagers. Almost all of the people was uneducated. Just reverends could read so they determines everything. Reverends could lead on villagers by using religion and they could easily exploit them. There was scolastic thought. Whatever the church said, everybody thought it was true. When we compare the East and West in the Middle Ages, scolastic thought exploited the West. However, in the East there were important scientists such as Farabi, Avecenna, Averroes etc. While the East was trainig important scientists, the West was living with scolastic thought without experiment and observation. The West lived like this until Crusades in which they faced to Muslims and they took some knowledge like paper, compass etc. With the help of them, they started to develop themselves. 

Do you know where the phrase of ''God Bless you'' comes from? The Middle Ages' Europe struggled with Blachdeath. One of the symptoms was sneeze. If somebody sneezed, everybody was afraid of Blackdeath and said ''God bless you.'' People who lived in Middle Ages' Europe did not take a shower because they thought that microorganism of Blackdeath spread with water. Most of the Europens took shower once or twice in their life. 

I want to talk about literature. One of the most important works of Middle Ages was Canterbury Tales. These tales was created by Geoffrey Chaucer. Cantercury Tales occurs some stories. They are about pilgrims who went London to see St. Thomas Backet's grave. While they were going, they told some stories to enjoy along their travel. These stories was irony. They were created to critisize the social life and these stories were moral and religious. They were both enjoyable and didactic. 

To sum up, when we look at the past, Europans developed themselves so much. They pay importance science and art. So we can easily see the differences.