What were the Middle Ages really like?

One of my favorite YouTube genres consists of videos featuring folks weighing in on their areas of expertise, such as when a submarine commander rates submarine movies. Last month, Wired had medieval scholar Dr. Dorsey Armstrong on their YouTube channel to answer questions about the Middle Ages that were submitted via X/Twitter.

The questions cover a wide range of topics, including sleeping habits, torture devices, infant mortality, games, and King Arthur’s historicity. Dr. Armstrong’s answers are both entertaining and educational, and serve as a nice rejoinder to the oft-held notion that the Middle Ages were an unspeakably brutal and uncivilized time.

Obviously, people in the Middle Ages lived more difficult and dangerous lives than most of us modern folks. But as Dr. Armstrong points out, some of the outlandish stories about medieval barbarism (e.g., torture devices) were, in fact, fabricated by people in the 19th century who just wanted to seem more civilized by comparison.