Remember when people were planning The Great Gatsby themed parties for NYE 2020? Yeah, that did not age well. Almost as if to spite the few of us who hoped the 2020s would be a prosperous, but not alcohol-free, period of history, the decade kicked off with one of the worst global pandemics that the world has seen in years.
2020 feels like ages ago so let’s do a quick recap of the Before Times. Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna died in a helicopter crash on January 26. Harvey Weinstein was put on trial for sexual assault and rape charges. The U.K officially left the European Union. And there’s a whole bunch of other smaller stuff (and bigger) stuff that we more or less collectively forgot because of how stressful the decade has been so far.
But while it sucks that we didn’t get our second roaring 20s, we definitely got a rehash of earlier 20s eras and by that, I mean the medieval ones. From plague to bardcore to worker’s unrest, here’s just a few of the ways that the 2020s resemble the middle ages. So swap in your flapper dresses and suits for girdles and tunics because, by the time you get to the end of this, you’ll be asking yourself “What century am I in?”
1. There Is a Literal Plague
Let’s start with the obvious one because you’re already thinking of it too.
The international coronavirus saga is kind of a cheat because if you did your research at the time, you’ll remember that it wasn’t a 2020 issue. The COVID-19 story actually started in 2019. On December 12, 2019, people in Wuhan, China started coming to hospitals complaining about flu-like symptoms that included a fever and breathing difficulties.
Despite attempts by Chinese officials to downplay COVID as just another SARS or flu, Dr. Li Wenliang sounded the alarms by letting his fellow medical school alumni know about the patients that were then quarantined at the hospital he was working at. When screenshots of the WeChat conversation went viral, he was accused by Wuhan police officers of spreading rumors to scare citizens.
Instead of getting timely help, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission issued what was essentially a gag order. The notice told hospitals that “organizations or individuals are not allowed to release treatment information to the public without authorization.”
Fast forward a few weeks, the World Health Organization finally declares the coronavirus pandemic a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.
COVID’s medieval counterpart, the eternally famous Black Plague, turned up in Europe around the mid-1300s thanks to international trade. At the time, the initial spread was due to merchant ships. With COVID, it was travelers coming in and out of airports. The o.g pandemic killed about 20 million people in Europe. Right now, COVID has a kill count of about 5.34 million.
2. Workers Versus Their Employers Are a Tale as Old as Time
Plagues suck, but according to history, they aren’t all that bad. Now, before anyone comes at me, I’m not saying that the coronavirus pandemic did not push millions of people into poverty. However, the unrest that followed the coronavirus pandemic spawned a shift in the way we see ourselves in relation to work.
COVID moved many office workers to a work-from-home setup that put them in closer contact with family and friends while giving them time to actually enjoy a slower, morning rush-free pace of life. Perhaps reminded of how fragile our mortal lives really are, many of us became more vocal about the things we dislike about work, especially when those drawbacks take away precious time and resources from our personal lives.
Along with TikTok videos of Dalgona coffee came cottagecore clips that promised an escape from the stress of living through a global pandemic and the dreariness of professional life. Then came the “I do not dream of labor” trend which saw people revealing that, shocker, they actually don’t like living for the sake of their jobs.
Our growing collective dissatisfaction with how workers live led to a realization that the reason we dislike work so much is that so many of us are exploited and treated as disposable. These culminated in the explosive popularity of r/Antiwork, a subreddit and social movement that seeks to end the coercive nature of work. The sudden surge of pro-union sentiment is currently helping drive wages up in the service sector and encouraging factory workers to strike.
According to Christine R. Johnson, an associate professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis, this isn’t the first time a disease has started a chain of events that helped improve working conditions. The number of deaths made the supply of labor drop drastically compared to the demand for it, driving wage increases. Instead of ponying up the amount, wealthy landowners began compelling workers to work for pre-plague wages.
Your average peasant was, of course, unhappy. Records from 1352 tell of employees who walk out on their employers and demand additional wages. Other workers left in droves to work for employers who were willing to pay more.
Their 2020s counterparts? Well, let’s just say fast-food workers have used this pandemic’s labor shortage to demand a 10% wage increase.
3. We’re Calling Women “Earthen Vessels” Again
You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that being a woman in the Middle Ages was not so great. For one, a woman couldn’t be a witness in court nor could she borrow money in her own name. She had few rights that, as far as the courts were concerned, boiled down to her barely existing in the legal sphere. Unless she was being punished for a crime because of course.
On a more personal level, women had to worry about childbirth. If you ladies out there think the pressure to do the whole get married and have kids routine is intense now, imagine what it would have been like if you were a woman in a time where there was just that or “get thee to a nunnery.” Most women went with the “having kids” route. In a time before anesthesia, painkillers, or even just plain medical hygiene standards, this meant you were even likelier to die.
But hey, as a woman, it’s your job to risk literal life and limb whether you want to or not because you’re an “earthen vessel.”
Good thing we don’t have that anymore, right? Right? Oh, wait, Rep. Madison Cawthorn wants Roe v. Wade overturned because your reproductive rights don’t matter as much as being “earthen vessels, sanctified by Almighty God.”
Welp, at least we have epidurals now.
4. But Letโs Not Forget Blaming a Group of People for the Plague
Pretty self-explanatory. “[Insert race here] brought the [insert disease here] upon us.” is rhetoric that people have used since the Middle Ages.
According to Albert Winkler, the medieval period had its own mini Holocaust following the spread of the Black Plague in Germany around 1348. As the disease marched its way into Europe, Jews all over Germany found themselves the targets of increasingly violent persecution, likely due to the belief that Jews invited the wrath of God.
While it’s unclear whether the hate crimes started because of the plague or the plague triggered the explosion of an already existing gunpowder keg of anti-Semitic sentiment, either way, enough people hated Jews enough to kill and attack them on suspicions that they’re harbingers of disease.
Many Christians even believed that the Jews used dark magic to harm the majority Christian population. Among their many crimes included the desecration of the Holy Eucharist, murdering Christian children, and using Christian blood for rituals.
They had a reason to be afraid, though. It’s not like the fear had no basis in reality considering that their systematic persecution of Jews may have made them a little anxious about getting a taste of their own medicine.
Data gathered by Stop AAPI Hate shows that roughly 9,000 attacks on people of Asian and Pacific Islander descent were connected to the COVID-19 pandemic.
5. Or the Weird โCuresโ People Are Using
Next up on ways we’ve gone medieval since the start of 2020 are all the weird cures people have been using to treat COVID or avoid contracting it. It’s basically anything that isn’t proven by modern medical science because apparently, swathes of the global population have decided we’re LARPing medieval peasants for the 2020s.
Some Christian groups have gone out to claim that the blood of Jesus is their vaccine, making an actual vaccine completely unnecessary. It’s a beautiful return to tradition that pays homage to medieval beliefs about praying the plague away and calling it a day. That said, it’s true that religious and spiritual beliefs help improve your health, but it’s through the behavioral and emotional regulation changes that a faith encourages in its followers.
Fortunately, some of us have moved onto ivermectin.
6. Oh, and in Case You Havenโt Heard, Weโre Listening to Bards Again Too
If you’ve seen The Witcher on Netflix, you’ll likely agree that bards are pretty cool. I mean, Jaskier is so camp. What’s there not to love with a guy who screams D&D bard energy?
The rest of the internet apparently agrees. Sometime in early 2020, coinciding with the start of global lockdown policies, bardcore started showing up on people’s YouTube recommendations.
Bardcore is a niche genre of music that takes existing pop tracks and famous songs from multiple genres, the kind many would agree are classics, and reimagines how they would sound like if they were being played by a wandering bard in your local tavern.
Bardcore actually started in 2017 when YouTubers like LjB0 and Algal the Bard created medieval remixes of the Halo Theme and “Toxicity” by System of a Down. While Algal the Bard’s “System of a Down – Medieval Style” cover has racked up 7.7 million views as of December 2021, it was only last year when the genre gained significant traction. That popularity is largely attributed to another YouTuber who calls herself Hildegard von Blingin‘ whose name is a parody of St. Hildegard von Bingen, a German abbess and, you guessed it, composer.
Among Hildegard von Blingin’s banger hits are a hauntingly beautiful and convincingly medieval rendition of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” a King Athurified version of “Holding Out for a Hero,” and even “Willow” (Hildegard’s Version).
Other Bardcore musicians have gone as far as creating period-appropriate translations of popular songs like this version of “House of The Rising Sun” that’s sung entirely in Old French from 800 -1,400 A.D. Medieval not quite your style? Relive the glory days of Rome with a “Smells Like Teen Spirit” cover sung in Classical Latin.
Why was 2020 the renaissance era of Bardcore? Aside from reliving our collective memory of the Black Plague, it likely has something to do with The Witcher‘s Jaskier and the unprecedented spike in popularity of Dungeons and Dragons in 2020. A combination of the two seems to have enticed people to seek out bard-related content which makes sense because hey, if you’re gonna be a D&D bard, you better commit to the medieval theater kid persona.