Time travel to medieval Europe - Q&A

I answer questions that prospective time travelers raised in my initial briefing.

A followup video, "How would a medieval European react to the present?", is available to supporters on Patreon:   / how-would-react-99631718  

FOOTNOTES

1. Eileen Power, Medieval Women, ed. M. M. Postan (Cambridge University Press, 1975), chapter 3; Diane Bornstein, The Lady in the Tower: Medieval Courtesy Literature for Women (Archon, 1983), chapter 6; Maryanne Kowaleski, “Women’s Work in a Market Town: Exeter in the Late Fourteenth Century,” in Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt (Indiana University Press, 1986), 145–64; Joseph and Frances Gies, Women in the Middle Ages: The Lives of Real Women in a Vibrant Age of Transition (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1992), chapter 9; Jennifer Ward, Women in Medieval Europe, 1200–1500, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2016), chapter 6.

2. Richard Goddard, “Female Merchants? Women, Debt, and Trade in Later Medieval England, 1266–1532,” Journal of British Studies 58, no. 3 (2019): 494–518, https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2019.4 .
The topic of women as merchants is also briefly mentioned in Power, Medieval Women, 56; Kowaleski, “Women’s Work in a Market Town,” 147, 155; and Ward, Women in Medieval Europe, 88.

3. Rémi Esclassan, Djillali Hadjouis, Richard Donat, Olivier Passarrius, Delphine Maret, Frédéric Vaysse and Eric Crubézy, “A Panorama of Tooth Wear during the Medieval Period,” Anthropologischer Anzeiger 72, no. 2 (2015): 185–99, https://doi.org/10.1127/anthranz/2014... .

4. Edward Rosen, “The Invention of Eyeglasses: Part II,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 11, no. 2 (1956): 183–218, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24619648 ; Vincent Ilardi, “Eyeglasses and Concave Lenses in Fifteenth-Century Florence and Milan: New Documents,” Renaissance Quarterly 29, no. 3 (1976): 341–60, https://doi.org/10.2307/2860275 ; Amir Mazor and Keren Abbou Hershkovits, “Spectacles in the Muslim World: New Evidence from the Mid-Fourteenth Century,” Early Science and Medicine 18, no. 3 (2013): 291–305, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24269428 .

5. William of Rubruck, The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey to the Court of the Great Khan Möngke, 1253–1255, trans. Peter Jackson (Hackett, 2009).

6. Bernard Hamilton, Religion in the Medieval West (Edward Arnold, 1986), 115, 189–91.

7. Joseph R. Strayer, The Albigensian Crusades (Dial Press, 1971), 22–25; Walter L. Wakefield, Heresy, Crusade and Inquisition in Southern France, 1100–1250 (University of California Press, 1974), 66–67, 76–79; Malcolm Barber, The Cathars: Dualist Heretics in Languedoc in the High Middle Ages (Routledge, 2000), 50–54.

8. By the way, I’m aware of the irony of talking about the Romulans being the sneaky ones while showing images from “The Enterprise Incident.”

9. Guy S. Métraux and François Crouzet, The Evolution of Science: Readings from the History of Mankind (Mentor Books, 1963), 205; A. G. Molland, “Medieval Ideas of Scientific Progress,” Journal of the History of Ideas 39, no. 4 (1978): 571–72, https://doi.org/10.2307/2709442 .


VIDEO CREDITS

Stock footage by YuriArcursPeopleimages, chipleader, BlackBoxGuild, StockVideoEU, and perovaphotostock, courtesy of Envato

“Immunization,” 2nd ed., Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, [1955]

“The Enterprise Incident,” Star Trek, directed by John Meredyth Lucas, Paramount, 1968

“Day of the Dove,” Star Trek, directed by Marvin Chomsky, Paramount, 1968


IMAGE CREDITS

Abrégé de la Chronique d’“Enguerran de Monstrelet” (15th century), folio 208
Bibliothèque nationale de France

The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1562)
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

Romans arthuriens by Robert de Boron (c. 1270–90), folio 158v
Bibliothèque nationale de France

The Cloisters Apocalypse (c. 1330), folio 5v, “The Court of Heaven”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The Cloisters Collection, 1968


0:00 Intro
1:01 What if you're a woman?
5:49 What about a woman traveling alone?
8:54 What about guns?
10:33 Can I as an engineer talk to medieval engineers?
10:57 Can I as a surgeon or doctor talk to medieval surgeons or doctors?
11:44 Can I go as a journeyman?
13:53 Health
15:51 Would it be weird that I have healthy teeth?
17:09 What if I have tattoos?
18:53 What if I wear eyeglasses and can't wear contacts?
22:03 Buddhism correction
29:37 What if I have other non-Catholic beliefs?
36:57 What if I am Orthodox?
42:58 Aren't modern social classes the same as the medieval class system?
47:10 What if I try to introduce modern technology?
48:55 What if I tell people about democracy?
49:21 What if I try to teach people modern science?
51:35 Would medieval people even understand the concept of time travel?
53:14 Should I be concerned about bears or wolves?
53:27 Novels about time travelers visiting the Middle Ages
54:32 Endnotes and credits