Hanging with History

Harald Hansen
  • 5.0 (13)
  • History
  • Updated Semimonthly

The first season focuses on the origins of the Industrial Revolution or the Great Enrichment, we go deep into history to gain enough background knowledge to actually understand the various theories of the origins of the Great Enrichment. Eventually we learn that we also need to know how the miracle was consolidated, as the many other close approaches to the Industrial Revolution failed.A kwirky style, but intellectually ambitious with the goal of understanding history well enough to understand the miracle that happened that one time. It's gonna be a long series.

  1. 1d ago

    225. Early Modern Poverty, Part 4

    You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. We left last episode with the policy response of Venice, Ypres, Rouen and Grenoble to first the 1527-1531 famine and later structural response.  Today, we’ll look at Lyons, Valladolid and England.   It’s not easy, it never is when demons are involved.           Anyway, we will have looked at France, the low countries, England, Spain and Italy.  One of the points is that Humanist inspired regulation, adopting their core ideology was done by both Catholics and Protestants.  The Catholics suffered more from internal politics, as there was political pushback from the monasteries and other sections of the church when the policy response of the cities was always, eventually always, to secularize the aid to the poor.  Because the secular authorities, by the 16th century, were where all the repressive power was.  And repression of the poor gradually became a key plank in the solution set.  Remember Rouen and the gibbets standing right next to where food was distributed. Lyon has been a favorite of historians studying 16th century poverty. It follows and unusual, but dramatic arc.

  2. Sep 9

    224. Early Modern Poverty Part 3

    You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. We are summarizing the problem circa 1525, before we get into the pan-European, well, Western European, solutions to the problem, driven by the Humanists. We have a simultaneous admiration and horror towards poverty.  The warmth stems from the role of poverty in elite society.  They are objects of charity, and without charity how do we get into heaven?  Plus, we sense the people who renounce their power and wealth and choose to live like poor hermits are spiritually superior, they are blessed; they are holy.  So in those senses poverty is good actually.  And this confounds everything, because of course mainly poverty is horribly bad, in obvious ways.   It’s horrible in the countryside, where there is still a lot of elite oppression, and food storage is not deep or high quality.  There are terribly insufficient wild resources for the numbers of people that live in more densely populated country.  You might say there is always enough fish in Norway, but the Tuscan countryside is overpopulated for wild resources to help for long.    It’s horrible in the cities where the poor go when they starve, hoping there is food there.  The granaries and warehouses help.  Places like London and Antwerp, Lisbon and Amsterdam are getting grain from surplus areas like the Baltic.  1525, we don’t really have much in Ukraine yet, the steppe nomads are still out there.  There is little in the way of ghost acreage in North America. Europe is on its own really. And the poor, how to think of them, they are increasing in number, dramatically.  And changing attitudes towards the poor are a big part of the cultural change and ideological shift towards secularization that is part of our subject.

  3. Sep 2

    223 Early Modern Poverty; The Medieval Roots

    You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Last episode we had the emotional episode about the sufferings of paupers in 16th century Italy.  So we are now done.. with autophagy, cannibalism, dung eating, baker murdering, and all that. We are now moving on to a European wide response to poverty at the policy level.  Bronislaw Geremek’s Poverty A History is a primary source.  Then when we move on to the specifically British response of the poor laws we will mainly be using Paul Slack’s Poverty and Policy in Tudor England.   And a long essay by Paul Fideler  called Poverty, Policy and Providence. Some of the specific incidents come from Camporesi’s Bread of Dreams. “Social Science has from its very inception, always recognized the importance of poverty, and its two most vital questions, what causes poverty and how is it to be eradicated.” I’ll point out that the philosopher Hannah Arendt, named John Locke’s notion that wealth is the product of human creativity.   Therefore, it is theoretically unlimited, opening the possibility that poverty can be eliminated.   I have to mention that, because the question of what causes poverty is sort of foolish, physics causes poverty.  Humans have to expend effort merely to live and creating wealth requires a high degree of coordination and cooperation.  The how is poverty to be eradicated question is more interesting, because it has happened and failed in many different ways.

  4. Aug 26

    222. Early Modern Poverty, the Worst of it.

    You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. Quoting Dante: “The disease of the starving, I mean hunger, is a pitiable affliction.  Of human calamities hunger is certainly supreme.  It brings about the cruelest end of all deaths. Hunger is a disease that torments with slowness, a pain that endures, a sickness that lasts, and is hidden in the bowels.  Since it consumes the natural humor the heat becomes cold, the bodily form is consumed and strength is weakened little by little.  The flesh becomes thin, the vermillion disappears from the blood.  The voice is weak and feeble, the eyes weakened and without their natural support in the cavities sunken in the sockets like dried nuts in their skins.  The torments of hunger force many to cross the limits of nature, that is to feed on the bodies of people related by blood or friendship and mothers who give birth to children only to put them back into the womb with horror.” And this episode dives into famine poverty with emotions and icky feelings.  Expect analysis next episode.  The idea is that the miracle stopped and defeated famine and poverty.  This is what its enemies want to bring back. The focus here is Italy in the 16th century, but goes as far afield as France in the 17th century.

  5. Aug 12

    221. Changes in the Life of a Knight

    You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. We are trying to take a look at the life of a knight.  A look at the life in full, stripped of idealizations and self righteous outrage on behalf of oppressed peasants.  Last episode we were looking at medieval life.  There were knights and clerics as relatively free parts of society.  We know that west of the Hajnal line, the catastrophe of the Black Death will weaken serfdom a great deal, while they get screwed down even harder in eastern Europe.   The life of a knight is something different than we might expect, if we have drunk too deeply of the Victorian era ideal of the courtly knight, who protects the weak, idealizes women, is always an honest and true member of society.   One who upholds the good and meets evil with violence. We talked of the violence, the love of killing and enjoyment of torture, the fact that emotions like shame and embarrassment only occurred with those of the equal or higher status, you weren’t really embarrassed if peasants saw your private parts or that they know YOU DOUBLE DIPPED your chips in the salsa. Tacitus, the ancient Germans, the Franks, Vikings, the Crusades all make their appearance in the development of the life of the knight.

  6. Jul 29

    220. The Civilizing Process; The Knights, Aggression and Torture

    You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. We are going to start with trivialities, then get into some serious differences between now and the medieval psyche.  Around gross stuff, aggression and killing and finally torture,  and torture’s enjoyment.  This is absolutely not an episode for children.    If you hate me by the end I will understand.  This is going to explain that western Europe was led in part by a really horrible elite class of chivalric knights.  There will be a small flavor of it.  And this is what almost the whole rest of the world lives under.  This is what Europe developed away from. Still aggression has powerful effects.  Part of the discussion will include the impact on history of aggression turned to the theoretical maximum, the Cimbri and the Teutones and the development of the Roman Empire.  At the end I try to soften the blow by having Camie appear, which will give you a normal person's reaction to this horror.

  7. Jul 22

    219. The Civilizing Process

    You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. It was probably while the brutal siege in Vienna went on, and the little boys and girls of the region were being sold into slavery, after being raped a few times if more modern examples teach us anything.  That Erasmus wrote a book l  On Civility for Boys.  This was a publishing blockbuster, full of useful advice, like- try not to fart so Loudly!  Again, the contrast is part of the theme. If you can manage to avoid slavers, then don’t wipe your nose on your sleeve.  You can so easily see the advantages of civilized society, of being so powerful the savages cannot hurt you. Please don’t throw that away. On Civility for Boys went through 30 editions in 5 years, was likely the number one best seller of the time, new editions keep coming out into the 20th century, something like 140 editions all told.  The book is seen as marking a transition from an aristocratic culture touchy about its honor to something more modern emphasizing civility and manners. It was the first major western treatise that was about the moral and practical education of children in terms of everyday manners, rather than an advice manual of how to behave at court, which has a longer history and there are several surviving examples of.  So this work becomes a core piece of Norbert Elias’ history of manners, which we can use to take a look at cultural evolution, and kind of take a first glance at a big question.

  8. Jul 8

    218. Erasmus and the Siege of Vienna

    You can send a text, include contact info to get a response. There are two stories here, their opposition is part of a theme.   Erasmus, the great Erasmus , Erasmus of Rotterdam was even more a product of the Devotio Moderna than was Luther.  Most of his young education was by the Brethren of the Common Life or their imitators. I am Groote. Last episode I called him a Satirist.  Of course he was much more than that.  You’ve heard of him, but are unlikely to have read any of his full length works, unless you are a specialist in the time. And yet he had great influence of his period, being perhaps the highest status intellectual of the period.   He was the writer of 1 in 3 books purchased during the 1530s.  And as he wrote Suleiman the Magnificent was first overcoming Hungary and then moved on to the Siege of Vienna. Erasmus wrote In Praise of Folly, which we discuss in the episode, while folly is being acted out in Hungary, to a tragic end. Hungary was well able to defend the West from the Ottoman during the days of Matthias Corvinus.  But on his death, short sighted magnates pursued a foolish policy, leading to their defeat.  After an absolutely heroic defense of Vienna, Suleiman was defeated, losing 20,000 men in the retreat.   Oddly enough, this is about the same number of boys and girls taken as slaves by the Ottomans on this campaign.   You want your civilization to be so powerful you do not have to suffer slavers.

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About

The first season focuses on the origins of the Industrial Revolution or the Great Enrichment, we go deep into history to gain enough background knowledge to actually understand the various theories of the origins of the Great Enrichment. Eventually we learn that we also need to know how the miracle was consolidated, as the many other close approaches to the Industrial Revolution failed.A kwirky style, but intellectually ambitious with the goal of understanding history well enough to understand the miracle that happened that one time. It's gonna be a long series.

Information

  • Creator
    Harald Hansen
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    225
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Hanging with History
  • Show Website
    Hanging with History

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