The North-South cultural split in Europe still intrigues me. Sure, it's fallen off of the front page of the news, but Europe's financial problems are not over with, and they could have quite an impact on the world. Besides, this blog is not enslaved to the Breaking News Syndrome.
I've found a shelf of books at the local college library that seemed like it would enlighten me on the North-South cultural split in Europe. But after reading a half dozen books on the origins of cultures and civilizations, I was disappointed and frustrated. Think of history as a machine that has an input and an output. What is the input other than other books? But there weren't a lot of books written when Germans were being Christianized and de-barbarianized. And what was written doesn't really explain the habits of thought and feeling that evolved in northern Europe and set it apart from the Mediterranean South. (I've already rejected Protestantism as an explanation or Cause; it is an Effect.)
Historians sometimes do have an imagination, although using it might seem subjective, unscientific, and unprovable. Consider Toynbee's emphasis on the under-rated point that medieval Europe was a frontier society. There are habits of thought and feeling that go with frontier societies.
It was also an agricultural frontier: forest was converted to field. Did that make it easier for yeoman farmers to get their own land than in Mediterranean lands? If so, that could have encouraged Germans to develop an earnestness to their work that a Mediterranean peon wouldn't have had.
The City survived in the South, as did a bit of trade and transportation. The North was almost entirely based on subsistence agriculture. Agriculture in the North must have been different than in the South. Let's not forget that the vast majority of people were farmers until the last few generations. Historians tend to forget this; they are city-slickers, trapped in the library.
Northern soils were heavier and richer than the South. The growing season was shorter. During a Northern winter, firewood chopping and gathering must have been a task that you could never relax from.
Was dairy farming more prevalent in the North? Isn't there a daily relentlessness and meticulousness to dairy farming that could spill over to life in general? If you work a little harder or better, the cheese, meat, and turnips might survive the winter in a root cellar, thanks to the cold climate of the North. (And you could also dig the cellar; there wasn't pure rock under a thin layer of soil like in the South.) Alas, I'm too much of a city slicker myself to answer these questions.
Christianity took over the North 500 years later than the South. Although the Roman Empire was long-gone in the Middle Ages, the Roman bureaucratic, legal, and organizational mindset survived in medieval Catholicism. Perhaps these traditions were weaker in the North, where people were more interested in the emotional and psychological buzz and benefits of religion. Again that fosters an earnestness to an important part of life.
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