@Satsuma (my point here just being that it appears to be a metaphor with long historical precedent and it’s possible (?) they simply didn’t think too hard about it?)

@Lady I’m well aware of the history of the term which, which is why I think it’s an oddly political choice to use as the default term in a modern textbook

@Satsuma in my experience people who work regularly in given fields (the sort who might be writing textbooks) often get desensitized to the political nature of the terms they use, and such language usually only gets dropped after someone writes a scathing enough critique in a peer‐reviewed journal that enough of them read

maybe this is overly cynical of me

@Lady except its not the default term as far as i can tell — every other class i’ve taken uses Avignon Papacy in all the modern materials

@Satsuma wait do you mean to say they are *exclusively* calling it the Babylonian Captivity?!

@Lady it’s a short passage, so it only gets proper nouned once. But basically yeah

@Satsuma okay nvm that is weird then

@Satsuma i could understand it if it was like “the author got tired of spelling Avignon and wanted a slightly spicier heading”

@Lady something along the lines of ‘[political setup] resulted in the papacy being moved to Avignon in 1309. The resulting period was called the Babylonian Captivity and was widely criticized for….’

@Lady and then they go back to talking about french kings and I was just sitting there like ‘wait what the hell’

@Satsuma ah, i might chalk that up to just ambiguous language; i think they meant “was” to demonstrate the feelings of people at the time (who?) and not contemporary views on the matter

they should have said like, “The resulting period, called the Babylonian Captivity by its detractors, was widely criticized…”

@Lady its still bad form to not use the standard terminology in an introductory level textbook — like avignon papacy should be on the vocab list not omitted entirely (its self explanatory enough to be forgivable, but it makes me less willing to let the ambiguous language slide)

I also dislike textbook choice to list a whole bunch of historical critiques without confirming to the reader which are accurate / to what extent bc I feel that the reader will naturally assume they’re fact. I understand brevity is a challenge with these kind of texts but it still irritates me

@Satsuma i feel like you probably have both much more experience and much stronger opinions regarding the writing in history textbooks lol

@Lady haha yes that is an unfortunate byproduct of being a history major

@Satsuma i respect it lol