Woman Hating by Andrea Dworkin

Author:Andrea Dworkin
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

Malleus Maleficarum

It would be hard to give an idea of how dark the Dark Ages actually were. “Dark” barely serves to describe the social and intellectual gloom of those centuries. The learning of the classical world was in a state of eclipse. The wealth of that same world fell into the hands of the Catholic Church and assorted monarchs, and the only democracy the landless masses of serfs knew was a democratic distribution of poverty. Disease was an even crueler exacter than the Lord of the Manor. The medieval Church did not believe that cleanliness was next to godliness. On the contrary, between the temptations of the flesh and the Kingdom of Heaven, a layer of dirt, lice, and vermin was supposed to afford protection and to ensure virtue. Since the flesh was by definition sinful, it was not to be uncovered, washed, or treated for those diseases which were God’s punishment in the first place — hence the Church’s hostility to the practice of medicine and to the search for medical knowledge. Abetted by this medieval predilection for filth and shame, successive epidemics of leprosy, epileptic convulsions, and plague decimated the population of Europe regularly. The Black Death is thought to have killed 25 percent of the entire population of Europe; two-thirds to one-half of the population of France died; in some towns every living person died; in London it is estimated that one person in ten survived:

On Sundays, after Mass, the sick came in scores, crying for help and words were all they got: You have sinned, and God is afflicting you. Thank Him: you will suffer so much the less torment in the life to come. Endure, suffer, die. Has not the Church its prayers for the dead. 1

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