An article from the NYTimes...
Apr. 9th, 2007 03:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Belgians Hail the Middle Ages (Well, Not the Plague Part)
Belgians Hail the Middle Ages (Well, Not the Plague Part)
By DAN BILEFSKY
AARSCHOT, Belgium — During the week, Ivonne Janssens, 57, is a hospital cleaner. But come the weekend, she climbs the narrow steps of a three-story medieval tower and turns into a 14th-century duchess with a faux-emerald necklace, a linen headdress, a leather satchel full of fake gold coins and a retinue of mercenaries to fend off invading French knights.
Her husband, Daniel Grandjean, a 50-year-old furniture maker with a pot belly and bushy beard, becomes an ax-wielding soldier-for-hire. It was he who persuaded the council in this sleepy Flemish town to let the couple live part time in the 700-year-old Sint-Rochus tower, where guards once stood watch to prevent Aarschot, then built of wood and straw, from catching fire.
When not inhabiting the tower, the couple sleep in a replica of a medieval bed at home. They avoid eating tomatoes or drinking coffee because Columbus had yet to discover America in the Middle Ages, and such foods were not available in what was to become Belgium. Carrots are also off the menu because they grow in the ground, and the medieval church deemed them food of the devil.
“I feel proud to be a duchess,” Ms. Janssens said from the tower, which is decorated with swords and animal-skin rugs. “If I had the money, I would pretend to live in those times all day long. This was a glorious period in the history of Belgium. It was far less stressful in the Middle Ages, because there were no phones and no vacuum cleaners.”
In Belgium, a country of 10 million, there are at least two dozen groups re-enacting the Middle Ages, rubbing stones together to make fire, eating their dinners out of caldrons, re-enacting heroic battles and staging mock hangings.
Ms. Janssens leads one such group, the Order of the Hagelanders, and said: “We have doctors and lawyers, people from all walks of life. It has become a national passion.”
Such is the country’s obsession with the past that in a recent poll of 1,000 Belgians, ages 35 to 65, by the Flemish Heritage Foundation, a majority of respondents said that if they could go back to high school, they would study history, with 30 percent choosing the Middle Ages, compared with 11 percent for the 20th century. Medieval history faculties are no longer lacking students and report a surge in Ph.D. candidates.
The devotion to the medieval period — considered by many scholars to have begun in 476, with the fall of the Roman emperor Romulus Augustus, and ending in 1453, with the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire — is such that, in recent years, juvenile delinquents in Flanders have been allowed to atone for their misdeeds by making the Chaucerian pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, in northern Spain, 1,250 miles, on foot, carrying backpacks and accompanied by a guard.
Herman Konings, a Belgian behavioral psychologist who studies national trends, attributes the medieval craze to excessive nostalgia for a more glorious past. The fad has emerged as the country, divided between Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north and French-speaking Wallonia in the south, is experiencing anxiety about its identity.
The desire to escape into the past may reflect fears in the Belgian psyche about national unity in contemporary Belgium, where a far-right movement known as the Vlaams Belang, which calls for an independent Flanders and rails against multiculturalism and what it calls an invasion by Muslim immigrants in particular, has been gaining ground.
The Belgian identity crisis hit new heights late last year when a spoof news program by the national broadcaster RTBF announced that Flanders had seceded from Belgium. The broadcaster’s switchboard received 2,000 frantic calls, and Belgium’s embassies around the world contacted the authorities back home to ask whether the country’s federal system had indeed collapsed.
Above all, Mr. Konings argues that little Belgium, better known for its beer than its heroic past, is fed up with being Europe’s laughingstock. This, he said, is prompting Belgians to hark back to a period when Bruges and Antwerp were trading centers that surpassed Paris and London, and Flemish painters like Jan van Eyck were the envy of the world.
“Throughout our history, we have been attacked by everyone, from the Romans to the Vikings to the Dutch,” he said. “The late Middle Ages was a time when we were mastering the world. So at a time of national doubt, they provide a great escape as well as a sense of security.”
For Pol Malfait, an affable 53-year-old postal clerk from Ghent, the Middle Ages is not just a historical era but a state of mind. Every weekend, he becomes De Nevelaar, a 14th-century Flemish soldier who fought for the king of England against the French crown during the Hundred Years’ War and then became a full-time plunderer. “When I am a medieval plunderer, I can do what I want, and I love the freedom,” he said. Luckily, he said, his wife, Jeanne, a 49-year-old secretary, shares his hobby.
“You can be in big trouble if both you and your partner aren’t into being medieval,” he noted. “My wife doesn’t mind if I dress up in medieval clothes at home.”
Every weekend the couple and their friends — who call themselves the Gentsche Ghesellen, or Ghent companions — sleep in windowless tent encampments where they build benches from branches, bake bread, sing religious tributes to the Virgin Mary and drink hippocras, a 14th-century wine drink spiced with ginger, cloves and pepper.
Come Monday, Mr. Malfait said, it can be difficult going back to the post office. “For the first 30 minutes at work, I am still living in medieval times in my head,” he said. “Then the phone rings and I snap out of it.”
Maria Lowers, 51, is an amateur historian who impersonates a 15th-century orphan rescued from poverty by a wealthy merchant (also known as her husband, Danny Troosters). She said it was the elemental struggle of life in the Middle Ages that attracted her.
“As a medieval person, I make everything with my hands,” she said. “I appreciate the value of everything I do, which is something that has been lost.”
Some historians worry that these hobbyists underrate the medieval period’s dark side. Eduard van Ermen, a professor of medieval history at the University of Leuven, notes that the average life span was 40 years, partly because of the Black Plague, crop failures, torture for minor transgressions and wars.
“I would not trade the 21st century in order to live in 1263,” Professor van Ermen said. “I had tuberculosis when I was a child, and if I had lived in those times, I would not be alive.”
Belgians Hail the Middle Ages (Well, Not the Plague Part)
By DAN BILEFSKY
AARSCHOT, Belgium — During the week, Ivonne Janssens, 57, is a hospital cleaner. But come the weekend, she climbs the narrow steps of a three-story medieval tower and turns into a 14th-century duchess with a faux-emerald necklace, a linen headdress, a leather satchel full of fake gold coins and a retinue of mercenaries to fend off invading French knights.
Her husband, Daniel Grandjean, a 50-year-old furniture maker with a pot belly and bushy beard, becomes an ax-wielding soldier-for-hire. It was he who persuaded the council in this sleepy Flemish town to let the couple live part time in the 700-year-old Sint-Rochus tower, where guards once stood watch to prevent Aarschot, then built of wood and straw, from catching fire.
When not inhabiting the tower, the couple sleep in a replica of a medieval bed at home. They avoid eating tomatoes or drinking coffee because Columbus had yet to discover America in the Middle Ages, and such foods were not available in what was to become Belgium. Carrots are also off the menu because they grow in the ground, and the medieval church deemed them food of the devil.
“I feel proud to be a duchess,” Ms. Janssens said from the tower, which is decorated with swords and animal-skin rugs. “If I had the money, I would pretend to live in those times all day long. This was a glorious period in the history of Belgium. It was far less stressful in the Middle Ages, because there were no phones and no vacuum cleaners.”
In Belgium, a country of 10 million, there are at least two dozen groups re-enacting the Middle Ages, rubbing stones together to make fire, eating their dinners out of caldrons, re-enacting heroic battles and staging mock hangings.
Ms. Janssens leads one such group, the Order of the Hagelanders, and said: “We have doctors and lawyers, people from all walks of life. It has become a national passion.”
Such is the country’s obsession with the past that in a recent poll of 1,000 Belgians, ages 35 to 65, by the Flemish Heritage Foundation, a majority of respondents said that if they could go back to high school, they would study history, with 30 percent choosing the Middle Ages, compared with 11 percent for the 20th century. Medieval history faculties are no longer lacking students and report a surge in Ph.D. candidates.
The devotion to the medieval period — considered by many scholars to have begun in 476, with the fall of the Roman emperor Romulus Augustus, and ending in 1453, with the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire — is such that, in recent years, juvenile delinquents in Flanders have been allowed to atone for their misdeeds by making the Chaucerian pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, in northern Spain, 1,250 miles, on foot, carrying backpacks and accompanied by a guard.
Herman Konings, a Belgian behavioral psychologist who studies national trends, attributes the medieval craze to excessive nostalgia for a more glorious past. The fad has emerged as the country, divided between Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north and French-speaking Wallonia in the south, is experiencing anxiety about its identity.
The desire to escape into the past may reflect fears in the Belgian psyche about national unity in contemporary Belgium, where a far-right movement known as the Vlaams Belang, which calls for an independent Flanders and rails against multiculturalism and what it calls an invasion by Muslim immigrants in particular, has been gaining ground.
The Belgian identity crisis hit new heights late last year when a spoof news program by the national broadcaster RTBF announced that Flanders had seceded from Belgium. The broadcaster’s switchboard received 2,000 frantic calls, and Belgium’s embassies around the world contacted the authorities back home to ask whether the country’s federal system had indeed collapsed.
Above all, Mr. Konings argues that little Belgium, better known for its beer than its heroic past, is fed up with being Europe’s laughingstock. This, he said, is prompting Belgians to hark back to a period when Bruges and Antwerp were trading centers that surpassed Paris and London, and Flemish painters like Jan van Eyck were the envy of the world.
“Throughout our history, we have been attacked by everyone, from the Romans to the Vikings to the Dutch,” he said. “The late Middle Ages was a time when we were mastering the world. So at a time of national doubt, they provide a great escape as well as a sense of security.”
For Pol Malfait, an affable 53-year-old postal clerk from Ghent, the Middle Ages is not just a historical era but a state of mind. Every weekend, he becomes De Nevelaar, a 14th-century Flemish soldier who fought for the king of England against the French crown during the Hundred Years’ War and then became a full-time plunderer. “When I am a medieval plunderer, I can do what I want, and I love the freedom,” he said. Luckily, he said, his wife, Jeanne, a 49-year-old secretary, shares his hobby.
“You can be in big trouble if both you and your partner aren’t into being medieval,” he noted. “My wife doesn’t mind if I dress up in medieval clothes at home.”
Every weekend the couple and their friends — who call themselves the Gentsche Ghesellen, or Ghent companions — sleep in windowless tent encampments where they build benches from branches, bake bread, sing religious tributes to the Virgin Mary and drink hippocras, a 14th-century wine drink spiced with ginger, cloves and pepper.
Come Monday, Mr. Malfait said, it can be difficult going back to the post office. “For the first 30 minutes at work, I am still living in medieval times in my head,” he said. “Then the phone rings and I snap out of it.”
Maria Lowers, 51, is an amateur historian who impersonates a 15th-century orphan rescued from poverty by a wealthy merchant (also known as her husband, Danny Troosters). She said it was the elemental struggle of life in the Middle Ages that attracted her.
“As a medieval person, I make everything with my hands,” she said. “I appreciate the value of everything I do, which is something that has been lost.”
Some historians worry that these hobbyists underrate the medieval period’s dark side. Eduard van Ermen, a professor of medieval history at the University of Leuven, notes that the average life span was 40 years, partly because of the Black Plague, crop failures, torture for minor transgressions and wars.
“I would not trade the 21st century in order to live in 1263,” Professor van Ermen said. “I had tuberculosis when I was a child, and if I had lived in those times, I would not be alive.”