“To the medieval mind,” the Dutch historian Herman Pleij writes, “modern-day western Europe comes pretty close to a bona fide Cockaigne. You have fast food available 24/7, climate control, free love, workless income, and plastic surgery to prolong youth.”4 These days, there are more people suffering from obesity worldwide than from hunger.5 In Western Europe, the murder rate is forty times lower, on average, than in the Middle Ages,
