[Artemisia] Historiography and Richard Lionheart

[rcfaevans at comcast.net]

Okay, I am jumping back into the fray...

What we have going on here is called Historiography: The superimposing of non-contemporary concepts on contemporary events.  In other words: Trying to attach ideas from one period in time to a different period.  

(The classic example of this was in Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire".  During Gibbon's time, there was a large anti-Christian bent within academia.  Gibbon's thesis was that Rome was destroyed by the inception of Christianity.  This thesis has been completely disproved, but was very popular ***during Gibbon's time***.  "Decline and Fall..." is still taught to History majors to this day to keep fledgling historians from falling into this trap.)

So, what's going on?  About 30 years ago, with the greater acceptance of homosexuality as a social norm, historians began to reexamine historical figures with the intent of proving that many of these figures were homosexual.  In this way, homosexuality would be accepted at a greater rate.  Much of this historiography is, at best, taken out of context.  At worst, completely wrong.  A fundamental problem is the English word 'love'.  As we all know, 'love' can mean many things in many contexts, most of them non-sexual.  Even doctors make a mess of this in technical terms: Pedophilia means, literally "love a child as a brother".  Pedoeros would be the correct word, meaning "love a child sexually".

Some examples of this effect:
Alexander the Great had sex with men, therefore was homosexual: (bisexuality in Greece and Macedon were social norms, accepted, and expected.  About the only ones who condemned this at that time were the remaining Hebrew Tribes in Judea)
Abraham Lincoln slept with a man, therefore was homosexual: (He slept with him because there was only one bed, it was large enough for two men, and it was too cold and stupid for one to sleep on the floor)
Gilgamesh and Enki loved each other {from the Epic of Gilgamesh}, therefore Gilgamesh was homosexual: (First, Enki wasn't even human.  Second, as our good King mentioned in a prior post, this just means they were close friends)

The absurdity of these arguments can easily be seen with common expressions we use all the time:
"I love beer and peanuts at a baseball game": Odd that Security doesn't arrest you in the stands.
"I love the Denver Broncos":  All of them? It would probably be wise to go to a clinic and get yourself checked.
"I love Christmas": Okay, this is just getting weird.

It is very unlikely that Napoleon, T. E. Lawrence, Augustus Caeser, Peter the Great, Richard Lionheart, and so many others just happened to be homosexual.  It is even more unlikely that it was homosexuality that made these figures, and others, great.

The Church wasn't trying to cover-up anything.  "Cover-up" became part of the vernacular in the 1970s, following Watergate.  The Church didn't have to hide anything.  They were the just about the only ones who could read and write.  Universal literacy only came into existence about 100 years ago.  Things we take for granted today didn't even exist 20 years ago.  My admonition: be very careful with history.


Ryryd