{"id":24746,"date":"2023-05-22T09:05:37","date_gmt":"2023-05-22T07:05:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.historyextra.com\/?p=224470"},"modified":"2023-05-23T02:12:54","modified_gmt":"2023-05-23T00:12:54","slug":"what-does-medieval-mean-why-the-middle-ages-was-actually-an-age-of-transformation","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/rss_feed\/what-does-medieval-mean-why-the-middle-ages-was-actually-an-age-of-transformation\/","title":{"rendered":"What does medieval mean? Why the Middle Ages was actually an age of transformation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Those who write off the Middle Ages as an unchanging backwater are overlooking the seismic advances \u2013 in everything from scientific knowledge to self-awareness \u2013 that redefined what it meant to be human. Ian Mortimer explores how our understanding on what it means to be “medieval” does not tell the whole story <\/p>

By jonathanwilkes\n \t\t<\/p>

Published: Monday, 22 May 2023 at 12:00 am<\/p>

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Listen to a version of this article:<\/strong><\/p>\n

What does the word \u201cmedieval\u201d summon up in your mind?<\/p>\n

Whether the first thing you imagine is a castle or a monastery, the chances are that the word will come with connotations of violence, ignorance, lawlessness and superstition. You only need to think of Marsellus Wallace\u2019s line in the film Pulp Fiction<\/em> to know what I mean: \u201cI\u2019m gonna git medieval on your ass.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even if you\u2019re not a Quentin Tarantino fan, you will have come across the word \u201cmedieval\u201d frequently applied by journalists and politicians to the Taliban in Afghanistan or the Russian troops occupying Ukrainian towns. In short, many people today use \u201cmedieval\u201d as a synonym for \u201cuncivilised\u201d.<\/p>\n

Historians have generally been unable to shift these perceptions in the public mind of the Middle Ages<\/a>, and a few have sought to exploit this prejudice rather than deny it. Twentieth-century popular books, like William Manchester\u2019s A World Lit Only by Fire<\/em> (1992) and Barbara Tuchman\u2019s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century<\/em>\u00a0(1978), emphasised the brutality of the medieval period, seemingly drawing their evocative power from these aspects. This is despite the fact that warfare has grown progressively more deadly since the Middle Ages, as the Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin showed in the 1940s.<\/p>\n

Read more | Medieval misconceptions: 12 myths about life in the Middle Ages \u2013 busted<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
Although other historians of that generation tried to draw attention to the real technological innovations of the period \u2013 for example, Jean Gimpel\u2019s Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages<\/em> (1977) \u2013 their work generally only underlined the primitive character of medieval technology in comparison with that of the modern world. The mechanical clock and the cannon were never going to compete with a computer or a spacecraft for pride of place in the public imagination, no matter how hard the historian in question tried.<\/p>\n
Recently, there have been a few attempts to set the record straight, the most striking perhaps being Seb Falk\u2019s The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science<\/em> (2020). However, for the most part, the bestselling popular history books are still keen to focus on the technological backwardness of the Middle Ages, as if that somehow adds to our understanding.<\/p>\n
For example, chapter 14 of Yuval Noah Harari\u2019s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind<\/em> (2014) begins by telling us: \u201cWere, say, a Spanish peasant to have fallen asleep in 1000 AD and woken up 500 years later, to the din of Columbus\u2019s sailors boarding the Ni\u00f1a<\/em>, Pinta<\/em> and Santa Maria<\/em>, the world would have seemed to him quite familiar. Despite many changes in technology, manners and political boundaries, this medieval Rip van Winkle would have felt at home. But had one of Columbus\u2019s sailors fallen into a similar slumber and woken up to the ringtone of a 21st-century iPhone, he would have found himself in a world strange beyond comprehension. \u2018Is this heaven?\u2019 he might well have asked himself. \u2018Or perhaps \u2013 hell?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Read more | The genius of medieval science: from medicine to mechanical clocks<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
The message is that nothing much happened over the first 500 years of the last millennium. The \u201cmany changes in technology, manners and political boundaries\u201d Harari mentions were inconsequential compared with what happened later, culminating in that most beloved of modern icons, the smartphone.<\/p>\n
It is not hard to understand why people happily accept this judgement. The technological creations of the modern world amaze us, so it stands to reason that they would have left medieval people utterly bewildered. However, if you judge social change purely according to technological sophistication, it\u2019s inevitable that you\u2019ll overlook such things as the fact that Harari\u2019s peasant from AD 1000 would have been a Muslim if he had lived in the area from which Christopher Columbus set sail (Palos de la Frontera). He certainly would not have \u201cfelt at home\u201d if he had woken up in 1492 \u2013 for many reasons. One was that the crusading government was determined to kill him on account of his religion.<\/p>\n

The developing world<\/h4>\n
10 great leaps forward in the medieval era<\/h6>\n
1. War lost its allure <\/strong><\/p>\n
The 15th century especially saw a decline in the desirability of warfare. Whereas the military elite had still enthusiastically endorsed military activity in the late 14th century, by 1500 the scale and destruction of warfare had become a deterrent in itself. Prominent thinkers openly mocked war leaders. \u201cNot even human, except in appearance,\u201d said Erasmus.<\/p>\n
2. The world shrank<\/strong><\/p>\n
A comparison of an Anglo-Saxon map of the world with one from the 16th century demonstrates clearly how much our geographical awareness of the wider world is due to medieval exploration.<\/p>\n
3. Slaves tasted freedom <\/strong><\/p>\n
In 11th-century England, most ordinary people were unfree, either being slaves or serfs. Yet slavery in England was a thing of the past by the 13th century and serfdom scarce by the 16th.<\/p>\n
4. The market economy emerged <\/strong><\/p>\n
There were probably only about 100 markets in England in 1000. Parts of the country still practised subsistence farming and barter. More than 2,000 more markets and fairs were granted permission over the next three centuries and, although not all succeeded, enough did that everywhere became a market economy.<\/p>\n
5. Hunger retreated<\/strong><\/p>\n
Judging by entries in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, one year in every four was a famine year in the 11th century. By the 16th century, famines were much less regular. Thanks to the Old Poor Law, the famine of 1594\u201397 was the last time large numbers of English people died from starvation.<\/p>\n
6. Literacy surged\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n
Given how few people could write in the early 11th century and the small range of documents created, the total literary output in England was probably no more than 2 million words per year. As a result of printing \u2013 and male and female literacy rates reaching 25 and 10 per cent respectively \u2013 output in late 16th-century England easily exceeded 10 billion words a year.<\/p>\n
7. \u2026 and schools multiplied<\/strong><\/p>\n
There were no formal schools in the 11th century (whatever the successors of a handful of monastic establishments claim). Nor were there any universities. It is to the Middle Ages we owe the idea that there should be a school in every town.<\/p>\n
8. Medics made their mark<\/strong><\/p>\n
You would have struggled to find a doctor in the 11th century. Medicine was a matter of local remedies, superstition and folklore. By 1300, there were medical faculties at several universities; by 1600, the ratio of physicians, surgeons and apothecaries to patients in the southeast of England was one for every 80 families.<\/p>\n
9. Kings ceded (some) power<\/strong><\/p>\n
In AD 1000, political power lay exclusively with the king. Over the following centuries, it came to be shared with lords, bishops and elected representatives of boroughs and landowners in parliament. By 1400, parliament was powerful enough to depose a king and appoint his successor.<\/p>\n
10. Land ownership was overhauled<\/strong><\/p>\n
At the time of the Domesday Book<\/a>, all of England was held from the king by a total of about 3,000 lords and churches, which, including their families, made up less than 2 per cent of the population. Gradually this percentage grew, so that by the late 17th century (using the estimates of the statistician Gregory King), about 15 per cent of families owned some freehold land and about another 10 per cent owned land on a leasehold basis. Apart from the rise of corporate landownership and home ownership in the 20th century, patterns of land ownership have not hugely changed since then.<\/p>\n
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Read more | Life as a medieval peasant: how accurate are depictions on screen?<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
Shakespeare speaks for us<\/h3>\n
If we want to understand the Middle Ages, it is necessary to take off our technology-tinted spectacles and look at the world with fresh eyes. After all, we often say that \u201cShakespeare speaks for us\u201d on account of the fact his works demonstrate a deep understanding of the human condition. Yet he knew nothing of all the technological advances since the Industrial Revolution<\/a>. In other words, the human condition has not changed as a result of technology. It is rather a product of the Middle Ages.<\/p>\n
No writer from four centuries before William Shakespeare<\/a>\u2019s time was praised by Elizabethan people as speaking for them. Everything we have in common with Shakespeare \u2013 from our language to our understanding of the ways people expect each other to treat them \u2013 is the culmination of centuries of social, cultural and psychological development that took place prior to 1600.<\/p>\n
On the podcast | Chris Dyer responds to listener queries about life in the Middle Ages<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
The simplest way to envisage this is to think in terms of cultural horizons. Let\u2019s begin with the world\u2019s landmasses. An 11th-century map in the British Library shows a barely recognisable Europe with India as a remote island at the east edge of its square shape. But between 1519 and 1522, Ferdinand Magellan<\/a> and Juan Sebasti\u00e1n Elcano led the first of at least half a dozen 16th-century expeditions that sailed around the world. Two later circumnavigations were led by Englishmen: Francis Drake<\/a> in 1577\u201380 and Thomas Cavendish in 1586\u201388. By 1600, mapmakers knew the outline of Africa, India, China, North and South America and most of the rest of the world. Our cultural horizons had expanded to embrace the globe.<\/p>\n
This idea of examining our expanding horizons is a much better way of appreciating the Middle Ages than studying their violence or comparing our technological sophistication with their lack of it. Europeans\u2019 awareness of the wider world changed enormously \u2013 almost to the maximum \u2013 between the 11th century and the 16th. Regardless of whether you think that was a good or bad thing, our cultural horizons as English, British and European people shifted from the tribal level to a national one, then an international one and finally a global one.<\/p>\n
That shift is rarely appreciated, due to all the negative connotations of the word \u201cmedieval\u201d. But it is just one of the many ways in which the metaphorical horizon can be used to see the Middle Ages in a brighter light. The same method can be applied to almost any other aspect of medieval culture. The cultural horizon is like a tool \u2013 a microscope \u2013 that, once you know how to use it, reveals many things that people don\u2019t normally notice.<\/p>\n
Read more | Climate change and pandemics: the surprisingly modern Middle Ages<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
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