The Writers' Lounge

I agree so much on the midnset thing. WE really don't know what people were thinking (aside from the hints you can get from primary documents), and it is pretty obvious that they weren't space aliens - men loved their wives, women their husbands, both loved their children, and animals were often treasured companions as well as food. (In fact, the Iliad had some interesting lines on this..."every man loves his husband", etc. You do find a lot of stories of marital devotion in the Iliad and Odyssey and oh, the love Odysseus has for that dog...)

But definitely there were differences in all of those relationships from the modern world.

I think, sometimes, that it helps to extrapolate from autobiographies that are more recent, but still written from worlds that might be more similar to those lived by our ancestors. (i.e. Laura Ingles Wilder wrote some lovely novels that state exactly what she was thinking as she butchered beloved farm animals, smoked deer, etc. Admittedly, she was not a medieval peasant. And her life had a LOT of differences from that of a peasant. But she still lived a lifestyle that was probably closer to that way of thinking than is that of a modern urbanite, like me. So while it's not a perfect comparison, it can be used along with documents from earlier eras to go "oh, I can kind of see how that works..." The same would probably be true for reading the Iliad for an idea as to how a Celtic warrior might behave. There will be differences, but those two worlds are probably a lot more similar than our world is to that of a Celtic (or any tribal) world.)