Recently I was reading about medieval privacy in Barbara Tuchman's 'A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century' when I began to see a series of privacy-related stories pop up in the news. Around the same time, I was starting a writing project at work related to the European Union General Data Protection Regulation, a new privacy law with wide-ranging implications for businesses and consumers. I started to wonder: how does medieval privacy compare to privacy today? Does the contrast between the two teach us anything interesting or valuable about modern privacy? Is what we have today really "better"?