Please or to access all these features

Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

The Burning Times: fascinating docu on women's power before Christianity

985 replies

sakura · 28/05/2011 01:15

[[

#at=380 youtube]]

ANd why women are feared to the extent that they are accused of witchcraft and killed for it

OP posts:
sakura · 30/05/2011 01:47

Point taken about the woo woo ness of the video..

TBH, I thought the main point they were trying to make was that women haven't always been the ineffectual, insipid, marginalized group of people we've seen in the past 100 years or so. I thought that idea in itself was factually correct.

OP posts:
sakura · 30/05/2011 01:45

The point of me posting this video was not so that an academic could pick at this or that, but in order to draw people's attention to the withcraze, and to show that huge numbers of women were murdered because of male jealousies of women's perceived powers

LRD, GOd the amount of factual inaccuracies that are passed as "science" and fact every single day ... and nobody questions them (except feminist). LAWS have been passed in the UK to allow men who think they're women to have their birth certificate changed , when clearly they are not the female sex at all. THere are so many damaging factual innacuracies that end up becoming the basis of law-making. Concentrate your energies on the factual innacuracies of men that damage women every day, if you're a feminist

OP posts:
MillyR · 30/05/2011 01:45

I should make it clear that in my last post I am not suggesting that persecution of 'witches' was all about targeting midwives and other women providing any kind of healing.

MillyR · 30/05/2011 01:39

I've watched the first two parts, and most of this is just made up. I find it quite offensive that people do make this sort of stuff up. We do know quite a lot about what happened to women in the past, and that is important. It is also rather disrespectful to women in non-European contemporary cultures to attempt to make out that their culture is some kind of stand in for culture in Europe half a century ago, when there really is almost no relationship between the two.

It is just bizarre to make out that Christianity was new or relatively unknown in Europe in 1132. That is 400 years after some people in England starting writing dates based on AD - years after the birth of Christ. Are we meant to pretend the Lindisfarne Gospels were not written 400 years earlier, or that there hadn't been Christian communities in Britain for hundreds of years prior to those Gospels? Are we pretending that Christianity was not mainstream among the Romans by the time they left Britain?

Religion before the arrival of Christianity is very interesting, but you have to start by being clear about when that was - the PreRoman Iron Age. You can't make it 1,000 years later and place it within an entirely different culture - one that is an emerging market economy with nations, as opposed to a subsistence based tribal society. That is just as extreme as making out that now is just like 1132.

I also dislike women providing medical treatment being treated as something that is primarily religious. It is primarily scientific, regardless of what era it happens in. It is largely based on an understanding of the natural world, why over-emphasise the supernatural aspects of it? Yes, women were persecuted under a religious justification; it doesn't mean what they were doing was exceptionally religious. Galileo was persecuted for religious reasons, but we refer to him as a scientist. What makes it so different if the person being persecuted is a female midwife?

LRDTheFeministDragon · 29/05/2011 23:33

Incidentally - and because the Catholic Church is taking a beating here, and it's a fair one but no need to push it further than the facts - the synod of Whitby didn't bring the English Church to RC either, not for another 500 years or so.

LRDTheFeministDragon · 29/05/2011 23:26
Confused

I don't think Abbess Hild is a fairytale either.

I love studying strong women who really existed, that's great! (And reading about fictional ones, for that matter!)

What bothers me is that someone should feel the need to make up a past about strong wonderful women oppressed by men. Why not focus on real women who were oppressed by real men? It's not as if they're uncommon!

SmellsLikeTeenStrop · 29/05/2011 23:22

''I find the picture of a 'strong woman' existing in some not-very-well-defined historical past quite insulting. There's no need to create fairytales about women having had some kind of awesome power that's been stolen from them: why not just admit we're equal to men and deserve to be treated the same?''

Abbess Hild wasn't a fairytale. She doesn't pre-date Christianity of course, being an abbess and all that. But she was from a different Christian tradition to Roman Catholicism, what we now call Celtic Christianity. After the Synod of Whitby, the king of the time opted to follow Rome and over time women were stripped of their power and authority.

LRDTheFeministDragon · 29/05/2011 23:05

I mentioned several factual inaccuracies, actually. They're all in the same sentence, but there are several of them.

If you want more (and I did give up on watching after the 1132 gaffe because I thought it was just ridiculous), then the claim that the Romans recognized nature as sacred is not defensible, and the implication that the Romans were also approved of by feminists had me more than confused, seeing as how they were as patriarchial as they come. The etymology put forward for 'witch' as coming from a Anglo-Saxon word 'wic' meaning to 'bend or shape consciousness' is bollocks, and 'wicca' as a word meaning witch already exists in AS. The Romans certainly didn't accept the religions of those they conquered; they deliberately assimilated them into the Roman pantheon.

Can't remember more, but the millenium-out one really hit me - I mean, why?! That's not minor academic quibbling, that's absurd.

StewieGriffinsMom · 29/05/2011 23:04

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

MisterDarsey · 29/05/2011 23:04

Also worth mentioning that witch burning was not a Christian invention. The pagan Saxons used to burn witches until the practice was outlawed by the (Christian) Emperor Charlemagne.

dittany · 29/05/2011 22:58

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

StewieGriffinsMom · 29/05/2011 22:58

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

dittany · 29/05/2011 22:57

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

LRDTheFeministDragon · 29/05/2011 22:53

Oops, took ages to write that, excuse the cross-posting.

LRDTheFeministDragon · 29/05/2011 22:52

Firstly, it's factually inaccurate to a fairly stunning degree. Eg., it claims Christianity was 'new' in Europe in 1132, which is out by nearly a millenium. If the wiki link posted above is correct, it also places Trier in the wrong country and mis-dates the cross it's talking about by a couple of centuries (looking at the cross, I think wiki must be right). It claims that pointed hats were once a symbol of some kind of power (authority, it might have been?).

Secondly, it presents lots of authoritative-sounding opinions as if they were facts, but doesn't back them up at all, mainly about women's powers and religion pre-dating Christianity. As far as I know, there is no way they can bee this authoritative, because there's little written evidence. If they have evidence, they should give it; if they have a basis for interpretations, they should give it. I felt it was dishonest.

I find the picture of a 'strong woman' existing in some not-very-well-defined historical past quite insulting. There's no need to create fairytales about women having had some kind of awesome power that's been stolen from them: why not just admit we're equal to men and deserve to be treated the same?

StewieGriffinsMom · 29/05/2011 22:49

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

dittany · 29/05/2011 22:48

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

dittany · 29/05/2011 22:35

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

LRDTheFeministDragon · 29/05/2011 22:32

I don't think anyone is disputing that, dittany (certainly I wasn't).

It's just that the film, if you watch it, isn't 'history' at all, which is a real shame.

dittany · 29/05/2011 22:25

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

MisterDarsey · 29/05/2011 20:41

Here's an interesting article about the witch craze, arguing that it was all part of a plot by the medieval nobility to crush the increasingly unruly peasants:

Who were the witches?

lucysnowe · 29/05/2011 17:56

wiki seems to have a similar view...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burning_Times

LRDTheFeministDragon · 29/05/2011 16:50
Grin

Well, I've got as far as the Neolithic woman-statues and I have a soft spot for those. One of my teachers had a replica on her desk, which I quite fancy.

AliceWorld · 29/05/2011 16:47
Wink
LRDTheFeministDragon · 29/05/2011 16:43

Thanks! Will have a look.

I totally agree that you get some really, really shoddy documentaries on the dominant view of history too. But it doesn't stop me feeling cross that someone has, basically, been dishonest and hoped that lots of fancy camera work would make them seem believable. It just makes anyone else who is interested in saying that women have/have had any kind of power look like a liar by association. Sad

Anyway, off to cheer myself up with a look at your link!