Medieval overview (src: Ryan Reeves)

Video

• Link to recording segments on Dropbox

Summary

Contrary to prevailing misconceptions, the Middle Ages did not merely consist of people laboring through their miserable lives only to die an early death. Although this time period had certain customs and beliefs that we in the 21st century might find odd, the world during this time was not completely lacking in hygiene, money, art, or medicine. Many interesting artistic, theological and literary developments occurred during the Middle Ages.

To help conceptualize the overall sweep of the times, the Middle Ages are typically broken down into three separate periods: The Early Middle Ages, The High Middle Ages, and the Later Middle Ages. The developments and events that took place across this span of time (c. 500 A.D. to c. 1500 A.D.) are important to understanding and explaining how Western Civilization came to be; you cannot skip straight from Greece and Rome to the Renaissance. To properly understand what led to the Reformation, we must study the Middle Ages. History is more than a jumble of names, dates and places. Events happen within specific circumstances, and studying the background context will help us trace the lines of cause and effect throughout history. So this is why we study the Middle Ages before turning our attention to the Reformation.

Content

The Middle Ages were not actually as dark and dreary as all that

Video clip from Ryan Reeves

Summary points

In 1605, Miguel Cervantes published Don Quixote, in two volumes.

• Gives us an image of what the Middle ages were like.
• Told from the perspective of a Spanish nobleman (a so-called Hidalgo) named Don Qixote.
• Don Qixote becomes enamored of chivalric romances, and… acts out his interpretation of them, shall we say.
• Played for comedy, brutally satirizing medieval chivalric idealism. Don Qixote’s squire (named Sancho Panza, whose background is that of a simple farmer) plays the straight man to Don Qixote’s over-the-top delusions.
• The humor comes from Don Qixote attempting to impose a 12th-century code of chivalric knighthood onto 17th-century Spain.

This work helps fight against prevailing misconceptions about the Middle Ages:

• That they were merely a boring, backwater, kind of filthy period of time where everyone died young.
• That those inhabiting this period lived a miserable life of farming under a feudal lord, barely making it to 40 before capping off their unhappy existences with an early death.

Media tropes concerning the period help perpetuate this line of thought:

• Monty Python and the Holy Grail, for example. Obviously we oughtn’t evaluate a work of comedy through an overly historical hermeneutic, but nonetheless the point is that clearly the setting is taken to be moderately to severely depressing.
• If you are not yourself dying of the plague, then you are carting a wheelbarrow around to pick up those who did die of it. And so forth.

But actually this period was not so uniformly awful as all this might lead one to believe.

• For example, the world during this time was not completely lacking in hygiene, money, art, medicine.

Although this period did have its fair share of quirks.

• Strange superstitious nonsense, chastity belts, the whole nine yards.

To us in the 21st century, various features about their way of life can seem odd to us. For example:

• Their conception of marriage.
• Living off the land, hand-to-mouth.
• The authoritarianism of the period.

We can often find ourselves falling into intellectual snobbery as a result of this: condemning a perceived lack of liberty and freedom (e.g.) as leaven that corrupts the whole loaf. But it would do us well to remember that just because things were done differently does not always mean worse (any more than various cultural differences between countries in the present should be spoken of in terms of “better” and “worse”).

In fact, on the stage of human history, the modern time (in the sense of the internet age, with constant communication and connectedness) is the decidedly weird period. The Middle Ages were far more “normal” compared to the rest of history, relative to us.

So we definitely ought not blanket condemn the whole period with derision. There are things that come out of it that are definitely exciting and interesting (from a historical point of view, if nothing else):

• The epic poem Beowulf
• The Canterbury Tales
• Stories of King Arthur and Robin Hood
• Dante’s Trilogy, AKA The Divine Comedy (Italian: La Divina Commedia)

There were also developments in theology (cf. again Dante). We Protestants are sometimes suspicious of these developments (and quite rightly so, in some cases), but nonetheless, to fully understand the Reformation, you have to understand that which came before in the Middle Ages:

• The development of Scholasticism
• The writings and views of Thomas Aquinas, William of Occam (ever heard of “Occam’s Razor”? It’s from this guy), and other theologians who shaped the intellectual fabric of the Western World.

Luther and other reformers would eventually react against portions of this period’s theological developments, but that doesn’t make these things completely useless. For much the same reason why we study Arianism even though it is false in order to better understand the Trinity, we study some of these theological developments in the Middle Ages in order better understand the Reformation.

Of course, the views of some individuals carried forward more fully too, making these folks true “Forerunners to the Reformation” (if you will):

• People like John Wycliffe and Jan Hus

What these men did in theology—in changing, developing, and in some ways working against the Catholic Church—has much in common with later reformers like Luther and Calvin.

Literature and theology aside, the Middle Ages also had some other interesting developments:

• Cathedrals, stained glass, architectural developments like Gothic architecture, developments in music.
• The rise of Islam as it came to the West (and Christianity’s reactions against it, like the Crusades).
• Armored knights, developments in warfare.

When you lay all of these things out and pull everything together, you get a more accurate composite picture of the Middle Ages (as opposed to the overly simplistic uniformly negative caricatures of it, as discussed above).

With this more complete picture, we may in fact find that far from being foreign or strange, the culture of the Middle Ages may, in some respects, be more easily grasped by modern audiences than the culture of the Early Church. This is because some facets of the time period of the Early Church truly are quite different from and wholly incompatible with Evangelical Protestantism:

• The hierarchical organization of the Roman Empire, and the resultant effect of that authoritarian structure upon Ecclesiology, in the close intermingling of church and state.
• The development of relic veneration and the veneration of the saints.
• Etc.

While in the Middle Ages, even if their way of doing things had not grown up to be Protestantism quite yet, there were at least some whispers along those lines. Those whispers can make us feel a bit more at home overall.

Follow-on topics

Reflecting again upon how art can color our perspective of history and theology in problematic ways

If most artistic representations of the Middle Ages portray it in a certain way, yet we have little true objective evidence that the Middle Ages in fact operated in that way, then… this is exactly why art is poor teacher of history, and can often do more harm than good as a pedagogical tool.

This is not to say one must never consume art. More the point is that one ought never really look to it for any sort of factual information. Unfortunately, this is the exact opposite of how history-focused art typically advertises itself. That is, it typically shouts the equivalent of “Learn about the past through me!” rather than “Nothing I portray is likely to have any sort of rigorous scholarly analysis behind it, so you should trust almost none of it!”

This is unfortunate. This is why people think Marie Antoinette said “Let them eat cake!” (Qu’ils mangent de la brioche), despite the quote showing up in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions in 1765… 24 years prior to the French Revolution, and when Antoinette was nine years old and had never been to France. Whoops.

In our context, common misconceptions about the Middle Ages have much to do with fanciful artistic representations of it, and this is an excellent example of the “art is often wrong, and mostly untrustworthy as a scholarly source” phenomena under discussion here. So any time in the future you are tempted to base any of your views about something off an artistic representation of it rather than something more rigorous, try keep in mind how terribly wrong most art gets the Middle Ages.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on the site, this holds just as much for theology-focused art as history-focused art. And this is why things like The Chosen, The Passion of the Christ, and so on ought to be viewed more as entertainment with potentially glaring factual inaccuracies than anything more useful in terms of developing one’s academic understanding. Not holding them at arms length with a degree of measured skepticism inherently opens one up to theological misimpressions, as I see things. Misimpressions are bad enough when they are in relation to our understanding of secular history, but it is an entirely different kettle of fish when it comes to our theological beliefs, because it is ever so much more important for us to strive for 100% accuracy when it comes to spiritual truth. The stakes are so much higher in this area that we ought to accept nothing but exacting rigorous scholarly analysis, and absolutely nothing less than that.

The Middle Ages too are important in the development of Western Civilization, not just Greece and Rome

I graduated college with a degree in ancient Greek, and a degree in Classics generally (so more the history/culture side of things). This is to say, as an individual, I am very interested in the histories, cultures, and writings of ancient Greece and Rome, and spent multiple years formally studying them at University. I know why people love these areas specifically, since I am one of them.

Yet despite being biased in this way, I can tell you that the developments that took place during the Middle Ages are not somehow less important than Greco-Roman Antiquity when it comes to explaining how Western Civilization came to be.

The transformation of the broken Western empire of the early 5th century into modern Western Europe is a fascinating progression of kings and empires, of Popes and power.

You cannot skip straight from Greece and Rome to the Renaissance and pretend like everything in between never happened (no matter what the biased Renaissance writers would have you think). Trying to understand modern European history without the bit in the middle will leave you flying blind, and with a terribly warped view of what actually happened and why.

We should not think ourselves too good for this period of history, even if it hasn’t always historically gotten as much love as other periods before and since. And as Dr. Reeves has taken pains to point out in this section, there are plenty of interesting developments in the Middle Ages to study; we do not have to grasp at straws to make it interesting, because it already is so from the outset.

The Early Middle Ages, High Middle Ages, and Later Middle Ages

Summary points

The Middle Ages are typically broken down into three separate periods of time that can be useful in conceptualizing the overall sweep of the time period.

• These three periods of time are in many ways simply arbitrary and artificial, being the inventions of historians. That is to say, nobody that lived a few year after one of the boundary points would have said “Gee, I’m so glad I now live in this new period!” or anything like that.
• Instead, these divisions are made to help us as students of history better make sense of the overall scope of the Middle Ages, given the broadness of their chronological span.

First we have the Early Middle Ages (c. 500 A.D. to c. 1000 A.D.).

If you wish to call any period of time “The Dark Ages”, then this period of time would be the most fitting in a relative sense, although as we’ve been discussing, it is best not to view the period any more negatively than the historical evidence actually gives us leave to.

The “darkness” here (insomuch as this term is not so entirely unhelpful to the point one would wish to avoid using it altogether) has less to do with spiritual or moral decline—as if people in this period were largely apathetic or hostile when it came to church involvement or theological engagement—but is instead best understood in light of a relative paucity of written sources from this time period when compared to Classical Antiquity and the periods that follow, and also a less strong emphasis on the texts of Classical Antiquity during the period. To later writers like Petrarch, the absence of the “light” of the cultures of Roman and Greek Antiquity (which light was “rediscovered” and firmly embraced in the Renaissance) is what made this period dark, supposedly.

While there is perhaps an argument to be made for the appropriateness of the title “Dark Ages” if one considers the relative-lack-of-written-sources angle (since less direct textual evidence really does complicate the job of historians trying to accurately map out the events and developments of the time), modern historians have largely abandoned the label as misleading, since it oversimplifies the era and implies a total lack of advancement, which simply wasn’t the case.

In any case, a few different variables end up making the Early Middle Ages a period defined by at least some measure of widespread chaos and reorganization:

• A series of wars and calamities.
• Ongoing fallout from the destruction of the unified Roman Empire, which up until its collapse, had been a sort of glue holding together the unity of East and West.
• A rising force of nationalistic sentiment.

It is in this period that nations (like France and Germany and England) started to coalesce and take shape. This occurred alongside (and perhaps in part, because of) linguistic fragmentation. As people moved from Latin to more vernacular languages, different cultural identities formed, and things proceeded naturally from there.

Now, there was a push to resist this rising tide of linguistic fragmentation. Charlemagne and his scriptorium, for example, tried to codify Latin and perpetuate its use for future generations, but this ultimately proved unsuccessful, as the vernacular languages of Europe came to overshadow it as the centuries rolled on.

Despite all of this making this period objectively somewhat more challenging to understand from a holistic literary or theological standpoint, we nonetheless possess more than enough evidence to come to accurate conclusions about the Early Middle Ages. It just takes a bit more scholarly elbow grease to get there, compared to some other times and places in history that have a greater variety of evidence to simplify the process of piecing things together.

Next we have what is often referred to as the High Middle Ages (c. 1000 A.D. to c. 1300 A.D.). In the opinion of some, this period represents the period of time during which the Middle Ages were at their best, with:

• The flourishing of art and literature.
• A rise in visible church activity.
• The development of Scholasticism and other theological ideas in the West.
• The stabilization of certain nations in the western part of Europe, with the emergence of heredity kingships in some cases.

This was also the period during which the Crusades occurred, which somewhat leads one to wonder whether this time period is truly worthy of its title that suggests positive moral excellence.

Finally, we have the Later Middle Ages (c. 1300 A.D. to c. 1500 A.D.). Nowadays, of the three divisions, this is probably the one that has the greatest amount of ongoing scholarly debate in regards to its nature.

On one side, you have people who suggest that the Later Middle Ages were a slide into corruption, eventually leading to the Reformation. This line of thinking suggests that a perceived decay or diminution of the the Church’s power, a waning of theological orthodoxy, and so on were harbingers of necessary coming change.

Such a point of view has fallen out of favor in the eyes of some as once again being a bit too contrived and overly simplistic. Put simply, it is not like all of the church engagement and theological thinking and other developments that began earlier in the Middle Ages ever really stopped or atrophied. Quite to the contrary, during this period, some of what was “planted” before comes to “bear fruit” and “flower” (if one wishes to think of things in such metaphorical terms). That is to say, the groundwork of what was laid before by Aquinas and others was harvested and extended and expanded and utilized, for better or for worse. The rapid growth led to many developments, both good and bad, branching out into manifold directions.

Now, the fact that some of the directions ended up being bad does not mean therefore that none of the directions were good. While there certainly were troubling things during this period, it is nonetheless not entirely accurate to label the entire time as some cesspool of bad thinking and bad theology.

Why then was such a point of view ever put forward? It is possible it is a combination of reasons:

• A desire to understand and explain the origin of the Reformation, and why it came about when it did.
• A desire to exonerate the reformers’ clear break with authority (AKA their outright rebellion, if one wishes to use a more connotatively charged term).
• A desire to rehabilitate the image of some of the rest of the Middle Ages (e.g., the period High Middle Ages, and the supposedly pristine theological developments coming from the hand of Aquinas and others) by framing the later practices that brought about the ire of the reformers as being corruptions and perversions of an ideal that did not itself have issues.
• Etc.

However, we cannot completely pin all the sins in the Middle Ages onto the Later period, particularly since the Crusades and a number of other troubling things definitely happened during the High Middle Ages (contrary to their reputation for being the pristine golden years), not the Later Middle Ages.

While Luther and the reformers do certainly react against specific developments in the Later Middle Ages (such as blatant corruption in the selling of indulgences), it is not inaccurate to say that they reacted against the Middle Ages as a whole, not just the one specific period. For this reason, we need not try to make the facts fit some neat narrative where only one period of the Middle Ages is seen as being the worst time or as the the only time that really kind of got things wrong. History is very seldom as tidy and easy to categorize as that… which ought to make us skeptical of this point of view’s overall accuracy.

Follow-on topics

The utility of categorizing history into sections, with hindsight

In this section we go over a threefold breakdown of the Middle Ages into the Early Middle Ages, the High Middle Ages, and the Later Middle Ages.

When pointing out that this division is arbitrary (not to mention the fact that it came about only centuries after the periods in question), we need not really take issue with the divisions themselves.

There can be great utility in later historians analyzing and categorizing periods of history based on shared commonalities and characteristics. Doing things like this often helps us better understand the spread of people, technology, ideas, and so on across places and times, in a way that would be much less readily understandable if we were not to use such labels and make such distinctions.

In fact, this sort of thing is largely why history as a profession even exists. That is to say, nerding out on the details and posing conceptual frameworks for understanding the past is sort of what professional historians get paid to do to begin with, so we ought not look at the products of their process with more skepticism than is truly warranted. They are theories rather than fact, to be sure, but they are nonetheless very useful tools in our analysis, and we would be far less better off if we refused to ever use them out of some misplaced sense of “accuracy” or “avoidance of anachronism” or what have you.

Historical scholarship can be tested and updated based upon new evidence and analysis, much in the same way as hard sciences

This sort of observation might seem surprising to those who view “soft sciences” like history and sociology as perhaps not being quite as methodologically rigorous as biology, chemistry, and physics (say).

I will not deny that there are branches of the humanities that tend to lean away from rigorous evidence-based analysis more than they ought. However, you don’t have to engage in these fields in such a way, and there are in fact plenty of ways to involve statistics and quantitative analysis (and so on) in these matters.

When done right, the conceptual frameworks that are proposed as a part of historical analysis can be viewed much in the same way as hypotheses and theories in formal science. What we mean by that is that they may be formally tested, to see if the data supports or rejects the hypothesis.

In our context, the hypothesis “Between the fall of Rome and the beginning the Renaissance was a period in Western Europe of stalled forward progress” is what was tested, and found by most professional historians to be wanting. It is sort like early scientists thinking that things orbit around the earth rather than the sun, or thinking that matter was made of of fundamental elements (like Fire, Air, Water, and Earth—cf. Aristotle) instead of atoms.

When more data rolled in, the professional scientists updated their theories. So too with regards to how professional historians came to update their way at looking at the Middle Ages.

This “changing of their minds” does not make history as a field unrigorous any more than scientists updating their theories of planetary orbits or the composition of matter makes the fields of astronomy and particle physics unrigorous. In all cases, hypotheses are being tested and updated based upon the evidence available at the time.

Future topics in our study of the Middle Ages

Summary points

The three time periods we just discussed span the full sweep of the Middle Ages, covering a lot of ground. So it is no surprise that the future topics we will be covering will sort of run the full gamut of the experience of those who lived across all these centuries.

First, concerning the rise of nations, we will be looking at:

• The rise of Charlemagne and the Carolingian Empire, and the development of European political entities:
  • How did all of these nations arise?
  • How did the communities that were formally Roman (at least in name) shape themselves into what would become the medieval dynasties?
• Spain, is it came to be dominated first by Arians, then by Muslims.
• Anglo-Saxon England.
• Scandinavian culture, and the Vikings.
• Etc.

Then, moving into the High Middle Ages and Later Middle Ages, we will examine (from the level of both the lay and the clergy) topics like:

• The Black Death plague pandemic.
• War, famine, marriage and everything else you might experience as an individual living in these times.
• The rise of various kingdoms, and how they warred with another other (in, for example, the Hundred Years’ War).
• The breakdown of society—how it was arranged into three different “estates” (something along the lines of 1) Clergy, 2) Nobles, and 3) Peasants/Merchants = everyone else who did not belong to the first two estates).
• Developments in the papacy—how did it rise, how did it becomes strong, and how did it face the series of crises that came up (like getting co-opted by the French government, and even fracturing into multiple pieces with multiple Popes floating about, for a time).

In short, we will be arguing that the Middle Ages are actually quite fascinating, rather than being irrelevant or too hard to study on account of fewer overall textual sources. The goal is to:

1. Examine all strata of medieval society, so that
2. We can have a better understanding of the medieval world as a whole, so that
3. We can get a general understanding of the medieval church, so that
4. We can properly contextualize the Protestant Reformation, which in some ways broke away from the medieval perspective on faith, theology, and the Bible.

Follow-on topics

Trying to understand the Reformation without first understanding the Middle Ages will not work very well

If there is one thing to get from this last section, it would be the fact that you cannot properly appreciate where the Reformation came from if you completely ignore the Middle Ages as an area of study.

If the Reformation was a reaction to something, then trying to analyze it without know what it was reacting against is necessarily doomed to failure. Studying the Reformation without the context of the Middle Ages is just as foolish as trying to study the French Revolution without first studying the French Monarchy, or trying to study the American Revolution without first studying Colonial America.

Generalizing the principle, studying any sort of rebellion or push to reform in history without first understanding what caused the pushback is not going to work very well. Events happen within a specific set of circumstances, and the logic that drives them operates within that individual context. If you try to remove the events from their context, it will be much, much harder to properly trace the lines of cause and effect… which is a huge part of understanding history as anything more than a jumble of facts (names, dates, places, etc.) floating about in the void. In other words, getting to the bottom of “the why” is just about the entire point of the overall effort, so any approach that militates against such is eminently counterproductive.

So this is why we study the Middle Ages before turning our attention to the Reformation. It is not that you cannot say anything about the Reformation without the full context, but that having the full context allows one to analyze the Reformation to a degree that is simply impossible without it.

Review Questions

Coming soon!