Dr. Eleanor Janega

And that's very different to what is happening in Baghdad, which is very, very different to what is, you know, happening in China, right?

You have all these kind of local cultures going on.

So it's difficult to teach in school.

Every single medieval building used to be like painted, painted, painted both inside and out.

So you'd go in and it would be covered in murals.

You know, it's got to be seven different colors.

They've got flowers climbing up the walls.

But plaster falls off of stone walls, right?

So if you go into a castle or you go into a church now, you're just going to see the bare stone.

And that's because it hasn't been kept up.

Within churches, you see the same thing because when Protestantism comes in, there's a backlash against decoration, so they stop doing it.

And so if you go into a medieval building now, you're going to go into like a big cold stone hall.

A thing I have to bring up all the time is medieval people bathed, and I literally don't understand where this...

idea has come from it's like this modern thing we're like oh yeah medieval people didn't bathe and i'm like where are you getting this from um they absolutely did so medieval people they will um usually have if you're very very wealthy you have a bath room or like a bath house and like your servants will fill it full of hot water for you every day if you live in a city or a village there will be a public bath house where they keep that going and then you go in to that and and you like get clean a couple times a week and then in between you sort of shower

where you kind of like stand in a bucket and you pour water over yourself.

It's Voltaire.

I will see Voltaire in hell.

I'm going to hunt him down.

Because he came up with this conception where he said that within the modern era, we have entered what he called the Age of Reason.

And he refers then to the Middle Ages as the Age of Faith, which is meant as a pejorative.