We’re doing the medieval peasant discourse again. We’re doing it! Ok. Whenever we talk about “feudalism” or “the Middle Ages” or “medieval” we’re generalizing about millions of people in diverse communities and circumstances that spanned centuries. I’m necessarily going to be making huge generalizations about past societies that paper over important distinctions. That said, we can still interrogate ways in which a medieval European peasant might have experienced life in ways that weren’t as bad as we popularly imagine them to have been, or might even have been better than comparable experiences people today have. 1/many