I assume he picked this date just because it rearranges the numerals (2012 → 1220) and for no other reason.
For reference: In 1220, Catholicism had a stranglehold over Western Europe, Orthodox Christianity over most of Eastern Europe and parts of the Middle East. Protestantism didn’t exist yet, and Baptism was a very minor branch of Christianity. It wasn’t uncommon for male priests to be “married” to each other, though the relevant ceremony was known as “brother-making” rather than marriage (such relationships were generally assumed to be chaste). Women had lots of rights and often worked outside the home, and occasionally there were all-female households (such were not necessarily assumed to be chaste); it wasn’t until a century after the Black Death that women started really losing rights. Unless you were a serf (the lowest level of peasant), in which case you were basically a slave but not “really” a slave so the biblical rules on slavery didn’t apply, though serfs were still better off than slaves during the 1700s-1800s. Also there was a complex, multi-tier social hierarchy which was essentially a “soft caste” system - a lot messier and not as strict as a true caste system (except at the highest levels of aristocracy), it’s just that social mobility was extremely low. Plagues, famine, and war were constant and unpredictable threats. The printing press didn’t exist yet, and most people were illiterate. Europe wasn’t lily-white, though darker-skinned people were fairly rare outside the Mediterranean region. Oh and there was no “America”, just saying.
Also culture can’t be divorced from history, technology, contemporary regional politics, and the general knowledge base, so… good luck trying to reconstruct the culture of any specific place during a specific era (or, more likely for golden age “reconstructionists”, an imaginary idealized pastiche of multiple places and/or eras) into the modern world. Even modern Israel isn’t really a cultural reconstruction of historical Judea, despite a fairly close geographical overlap.
[Edit] Oh, and in addition to the whole executing heretics thing mentioned in my response to Pizzamaster below, there were no age of consent laws. Just throwing that in as well.
