Meetings with Remarkable Forgeries (British History)

[Steven Avery]

[Mick Harper]

[Steven Avery]

[Mick Harper]

I hate to go on about it--and everyone does it, even me--but it is not helpful saying 'here's a nice video' and 'this is a good YouTube' because it means we've got to either lumber through something that turns out to tell us what we knew already or we shall ignore something we don't know and need to know.

You have to decide exactly what it is you want us to know, tell us what it is and then stick up an URL that confirms it. That way we can either take your word for it or have a butchers for ourselves. You'll soon get the hang of our little ways.

[Wile E. Coyote]

The Lindisfarne Gospels: Medieval Multiculturalism

This is from the British Library:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU9RJSIUNhY&t=6s

It makes the case that our society has always been shaped by an ever changing mixture of people and ideas, the Lindisfarne Gopsels are discussed by way of illustration, its all rather attractively done with serene music playing in the background....

But is it so?

Multiculturalism is about celebrating the coexistence of multiple cultures.

How many cultures are we celebrating?

The content of the Lindisfarne Gospels, are the four gospels, biblical accounts of the life of christ, in Latin along with translation.

So those celebrating are those that believe in Christianity, (a monotheistic religion) that also beleive in Apostolic succession, and that specifically there must be 4 Gospels.

This is not a book for Christians like Tatian who provided a single harmonised Gospel. Single gospels were destroyed. In fact, even according to ortho, Christians were responsible for a lot of book burning around the fifth century so they could push their very specific, highly exclusive Roman version of gospels.

The great majority of the population could not anyway understand the Latin or the translation within the Lindisfarne gospels, they certainly would not understand the content. The gospels were simply not designed for them.

They, the people, might be attending church on a Sunday and also to celebrate births and mourn deaths, but this was in part because they had no choice and they were made to fear (sometimes fined or otherwise punished) for non-attendance.

This is really nothing to do with multiculturalism that I can see.

[Steven Avery]

[Mick Harper]

The English were notoriously unreligious. Laws had to be passed constantly to force them to attend church. And the church itself had to be paid for by either the state via the episcopacy or the local gentry. Nor were English celebrations at all religious despite the Church's attempts to solemnise them.

Not that I would dispute Christianity played a positive, if lowkey, role in the national pageant. England was a majorly boring place to live in despite it always being pretty much the richest and safest place to live anywhere in the world. Or because of it, presumably.

As for multiculturalism, the English were not just insular, they were rabidly prejudiced against the Welsh and the Scotch on their own island. This idea of a mongrel nation is strictly for the birds. They were all one race from the end of the Ice Age (o.n.o.) until quite modern times.

What the 'British' Library means by multiculturalism is government bodies giving cash to minority academics and other acceptably un-English lah-de-dahs in the high-minded hope that the various minorities might be weaned off watching WASP telly along with the rest of us. (And kept quiet.) In fact, now I come to think of it, telly is nowadays highly multicultural.

[Mick Harper]

[Hatty]

There are accounts of people who avoided going to church but they might have been a minority as there's no need of course to record law-abiding folk. It seems, at least from circumstantial evidence, that in pre-Reformation England most people were religious and carried on believing, or maybe hedging their bets, if surreptiously, until the 16th century if not later.

A recent post in the British Medieval History group on Facebook about 'Marian marks'

[Mick Harper]

This is interesting. I have probably assumed irreligiousness from scraps and selected them because of my own irreligiousness. However, if we apply the AE principle of 'as it is, is as it was', surely no-one in his right mind would go to a church service in Latin rather than drink in the pub/play footie/whatever?

I accept, after the Reformation, religion became more engaging.

[Mick Harper]

On the other hand, the Pilgrimage of Grace demonstrates the old religion had a great deal of popular traction. But by the same token, the ease with which Protestantism took hold, here and in northern Europe generally, suggests it was more skin deep than heartfelt.

Is there any country in the world today that is less religious than Britain? Come up with any examples in which real religious observance is below one per cent? (I think it is, and excluding Muslims and others for whom religion is a badge of identity.)

[Hatty]

It's not easy or perhaps possible to differentiate between public and private religiosity but especially difficult to gauge what people did or didn't believe (as Elizabeth I supposedly recognised). The Pilgrimage of Grace does seem to be an anomaly but then again the Dissolution of the monasteries was an exception to the Rules. It took a generation, roughly 1534 to 1563, for the Church of England to officially supplant the Church of Rome, though unofficially maybe two to three or more generations.

Presumably there were people who had no religious beliefs long before atheism or agnosticism became legally accepted, but wouldn't have been considered dangerous if they were discreet?

According to Wiki the most irreligious countries are Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Vietnam and Japan. The Asia-Pacific region is listed as having the greatest non-religious population but the figures are skewed because of China. Scandinavia is interesting though in view of our historical connections.

[Mick Harper]

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Mick Harper]

Individuals will go to the stake on a question of faith, that's doctrine. But when it's tens of thousands putting their lives on their lives it's got to be a whole way of life that's at stake.