I mean, yeah, water was obviously a polluted source, particularly around cities where people are dumping their waste into gullies in the road running into a water source. Drinking it meant disease and parasites.
But isn't boiling water a step in the brewing of (small) beer? And so wouldn't the water be purified anyways, and the beer thing be just an extra, unnecessary step?
I mean, they're not dumb people, even if a bit superstitious. I doubt they would have failed to make the connection, given a thousand years, that boiled water is purified. Right?
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Called the Dark Ages for a reason man... Then again wasn't the Dark Ages before the Middle Ages? Probably a religious thing maybe? Water has always been seen as a purifying thing, and the church was pretty influential back then.
Dunno, that's the best I got.
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Well, there is a new accent of n00b language. It's called: Vet LUEser goes Foreign!-MegaSpy22
Those must be the pants of the gods!-Digitalpython
Well, the dark ages might be used to refer to the early middle ages, i.e. from Rome's fall to roughly 1000 A.D, which is where we say the high middle ages begin, more or less.
But even so, most historians dislike the terminology "dark ages" because it's misleading and kind of one-sided. Obviously no one during the middle ages thought they were living in dark times- they thought they were at the pinnacle of learning for the time. Often, they were. The prejudice against the middle ages really comes from the renaissance era, where pompous scholars wanted to separate their time from times before them (just like we want to separate ourselves from hippies, or propaganda-sucking fools, or disco). It's kind of a reaction they had against the way things had been, especially religious order, and so they attacked it fiercely. Shortly after, there was a reaction against *that* reaction, where people criticized the enlightenment and celebrated the romantic.
Admittedly, there was a lot of information lost during the early middle ages, and learning slowed down. But a lot came out of the middle ages, both in science and culture, and there were many advancements, especially as trade routes opened up.
If someone notices I'm wrong here, feel free to point it out.
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Ehh Mark you're not wrong, but I think the whole "Renaissance propagandists made it up" line is a bit hypercorrective. That was certainly going on (the whole "everyone thought the world was flat" thing is a great example of something that the Enlightenment pretty much made up to feel good about itself), but there were a fair number of people who genuinely believed that the Roman world had come to an end and they were living in a pitiable shadow of it. Gildas, for example, in the De Excidio Britaniae is very much of the idea that ever since the Roman legions had departed Britain, it had turned into an utter hole and would never be redeemed because there were only native Britons left and they're just not as good as Romans and no one is and we're boned.
That slowed down considerably once Roman successor states started popping up (I want to credit the Carolingian Renaissance as the beginnings of people thinking they were doing pretty okay for themselves, but I am not the one to ask about that).
Re: The original topic: one answer is that tea (and to a much, much, much lesser extent coffee) came about not because people lusted for the taste of tea, but because they wanted something to flavor their boiled water (which was also probably pretty nasty even after you boiled it).
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Willis, it seems like every other time you post, I need to look up a word that's in the OED or Urban Dictionary but not both.
-Mimir
Good points. Aye, the notion that learned folk of the middle ages (I can't speak for common folk) believed the world to be flat was definitely a lie (or at best a very unfortunate misunderstanding on someone's part, I don't know), but you make a good point that there were those who saw Rome as a glorious point in the past, and the present to be, well, a shadow of it. True, especially in the early middle ages during migration times, with exception to the Carolingian Renaissance (which I only recently learned about). But of course Petrarch came quite later than that and still felt that way, so you're right that it must have permeated throughout the time. So I can't really assign blame to a group of guys during the Enlightenment for making it up since, you're right, it was there all along.
My only question then is what motivates people to feel the way they do. If Gildas (isn't he one of like, two sources from sub-Roman British culture?) just doesn't like the new way things are because his walls are decked out with Team Rome penants and legionary figurines, and half of the people agree with him, but the other half think it's just swell and start redecorating their old shrines, and he's the only one to write it down... well, his opinion will be that much more important to us. Kind of like how if one American recorded our history and did talk trash about Obama and how the country was going down the drain, people of the future would look at America now as a place going down the drain (ignore the economic crisis, for this example, which isn't the administrations fault exactly, and makes it more certain that things *are* going down the drain), when half of the population, or maybe 40%, are happy with Obama? Are Gildas and Petrarch just naysayers, or do they have valid points, or can they be both?
I'm certainly not claiming that this has any grain of truth to it- it's merely hypothesis (I was going to say postulating before I learned that it doesn't mean quite what I thought. It apparently means "to assume without proof" and to "make claims", not "to take a thoughtful guess"). You've done genuine studies on the stuff, which is why I was hoping you'd be in this topic to teach it, and I'm kind of, well, a wikipedia scholar. I don't mean to demean wikipedia by saying that, but you know, I don't have any primary research.
But then there is this really interesting insight about the use of tea, and a fellow could kind of infer from it that if tea leaves were needed to cover up the taste of boiled water, similarly, that was why beer was brewed, to cover up the taste of the boiled water, because it just wasn't tasty.
Genius!
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I mean, as far as I know, it is true that people just drank beer all the time, as opposed to water, probably for that very reason. (Well, that is one of the reasons.)
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"To truly live, one must first be born." ~ Evan [aX]
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It's so simple, and yet makes complete sense. It tasted bad, so they didn't drink it.
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I dunno whether they knew that alcohol was an antiseptic, but that may also have had something to do with it. A boiled water drink will be fine but can get recontaminated, but an alcoholic drink, less so.
Very interesting topic... I like :)