13 Absurdities People Believed in the Middle Ages

There are some claims that, to people today, sound like complete nonsense. But history reveals, for example, that during the Middle Ages, while science was going through difficult times and discredited, people believed in all kinds of crazy things.

Even though we, from awesome.clubwe know that there are many misconceptions about antiquity, it is a fact that, from the Medieval Era to now, human knowledge has evolved a lot.

At the end of the post, you will see a bonus about misconceptions about this period of history, but which persist to this day.

Yes, that’s what scholars believed in the 17th and 18th centuries. They thought that the child was already formed inside the sperm, and that it just needed to grow. Thus, the role of women in reproduction would be limited to the function of “incubator”.

A short time later, opponents of this idea emerged, for whom the beginning of life took place in the female body: the male seed only “awakened” this life. In the end, the truth lay somewhere between the two theories.

In the Middle Ages, books were produced by monks, who wrote everything by hand. No wonder they made mistakes.

However, apparently these religious did not want to admit the flaws, as they even invented a specific demon for writing errors: Titivillus.

Supposedly, the spirit gathered all the errors of a monk in a bag so that, after his death, the devil could present them, making it difficult for the religious to enter paradise.

In the past, transporting bodies was a very complicated thing. But what if the deceased had asked to be buried in a place important to him? For cases like this, people around the 10th century used to extract the heart and bury it where it would be impossible to place a whole corpse.

However, only the rich could do such a thing. Among them were Anne Boleyn, Richard I and Frédéric Chopin.

Animals could be considered criminals. They were even brought to trial, with lawyer, judge and all. The animals could be arrested and even hanged.

On one occasion, in the Swiss city of Lausanne, the court summoned maggots that were being prosecuted for eating the plants in the gardens. They didn’t show up. So they were excommunicated and expelled from the city.

Cats, on the other hand, were among the most executed animals, as they were believed to have a part with the devil. This led to a feline extermination, and a consequent proliferation of rodents. These, in turn, would have been responsible for spreading the plague across Europe. Yes, this is a real crime!

A long time ago, different nations believed that a continent that was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean had sunk. The territory was called in many ways: Pacifida, Mu or Lemuria. Easter Island was seen as an indirect proof of the existence of the continent, which would have gradually sunk until it disappeared completely.

Before battles, ancient Roman gladiators made sacrifices to the gods, who gave them strength and endurance. This made many people think that the blood of those warriors had miraculous properties.

The famous Pliny wrote on the subject: “Epileptics drink the blood of gladiators as if it were the elixir of life. They believe that it is best to drink it hot while one is still breathing.”

In the well-known work “The Hammer of the Witches” it is mentioned that witches stole male genitals to use them as pets. They would place the limbs in a nest and feed them.

The strange thing is that this story did not come out of nowhere: in medicine, there is something known as Koro syndrome. Those who suffer from the problem irrationally believe that their genitals are disappearing. And as was to be expected, the blame for this fell on the women who were considered witches in the Middle Ages.

Even today, in western countries, some people make a cross-shaped cut before cooking brussels sprouts. Although there is a belief that this way the vegetable cooks faster, the habit has another origin.

In medieval Britain, little demons were believed to hide among the leaves of Brussels sprouts. If someone accidentally ate one of them, they would suffer from indigestion. An effect very similar to that caused by the consumption of contaminated food, isn’t it? We can deduce that medieval people did not know much about the importance of washing vegetables well before eating them. Thus, the cross cuts were a way of “baptizing” the cabbage.

In the Middle Ages, it was believed that mold, worms and insects simply appeared in garbage or by the design of evil forces. With the low level of development in biology at the time, it is not surprising that such an explanation was so widely accepted.

But it’s weird to know that centuries ago, people thought that rats also appeared on their own.

The medieval bestiary, a kind of catalog about animals, remains an interesting read today. Bees, for example, were considered small and strange birds, which not only produced honey, but also went to war with other hives. It was believed that when a bee broke a rule in its hive, it would sting itself out of guilt and then die.

First, for some reason, beavers were considered fish, and consumption of the animal’s meat was allowed during Lent.

Second, it was known that the beaver’s testicles had healing properties, which made the beaver very hunted during the Middle Ages. Popular belief held that when a beaver understood that he would not escape hunters, he would bite his own testicles and thus manage to escape.

The legend has a rational side: the secretion produced by the animal’s glands continues to be used by perfumers today.

The claim that young children do not feel pain sounds like a real delusion, but the opposite was only proven 30 years ago. It was thought that babies’ brains were not developed enough.

Therefore, babies were operated on without anesthesia, and if they cried, the reason could only be a pure and simple reaction of the nerves, without a sensation of pain.

In the Middle Ages, the Church forbade a certain combination of sounds in music: the tritone (when there is an interval of tones between the notes), as this combination seemed too “satanic”. When someone was caught playing music with tritones, they could end up in the dungeons in the Inquisition.

The sound of the tritone can be heard here.

Even though the Middle Ages are considered the Dark Ages, many of the rumors are exaggerated. For example, that people only washed once a day, that women were constantly humiliated, not even being considered people.

In fact, even if there were precedents of this kind, and women were generally regarded as second-class people, the condition of women was not as deplorable as we might think, and they did not stay all day cloistered, reading the Bible.

And not all those who didn’t marry ended up in a convent. Many helped their parents to take care of the house (after all, why would they lose a pair of hands to work?), others learned a trade and worked at the same pace as men.

As can be seen in these illustrations, women from the lower classes had the right to dominate any kind of profession.

Women worked as scribes, binders, book sellers, brewers, laundresses, stonemasons, and glaziers.

Below, for example, a woman draws a portrait.