Middle Ages in history
The
Middle Ages in history is an overview of how
previous periods have both romanticised and disparaged the
Middle Ages. After the period came to an end with the
Renaissance, subsequent cultural movements such as the
Enlightenment and
Romantics created images of the Middle Ages that say as much about their own time as actual Medieval history. The modern world is the inheritor of the images and ideas in the form of
film,
architecture,
literature,
art and the folk history of
popular culture.
Main article: Dark Ages
No one living in the Middle Ages knew they were in the Middle Ages. The origin of the term
"Middle Ages" comes from
Italian Renaissance humanists in the
15th century. Humanists at the time believed that since the
fall of Rome in the
5th century, culture had stagnated and the nearly thousand year intervening period was a
Dark Age, a term first coined by
Petrarch in the 1330s. A generation after Petrarch,
Leonardo Bruni (the first modern historian) logically defined this Dark Age as part of a
three tier outline of history composed of
Ancient, Middle and
Modern, and based on that
Flavio Biondo first coined the term
"Middle Age" in 1442. The terms
Dark Age and
Middle Age are not neutral historical descriptions, rather it was a humanists
ideological campaign to foster one cultural ideal over another and paint the period in a negative pejorative light. While humanism was the first movement to do so, it would not be the last dark image of the Middle Ages.
 |
Erasmus by Holbein (1523). Erasmus supported the Catholic Church, but made widely popular satirical criticisms of its superstitions, clerical follies and abuses, most famously in Praise of Folly. |
Between 1500 and 1800 the image of the Middle Ages was mostly seen in a negative light, attacked separately or simultaneously, by the three powerful forces of humanism, the Reformation and the Enlightenment.
Protestant reformation
Main article: Protestant Reformation
During the
Protestant Reformations of the 16th and 17th Century, Protestants generally agreed with the humanists view but for additional reasons. They saw classical antiquity as a golden time, not only because of the Latin literature, but because it was the early beginnings of Christianity. They saw the intervening 1000 year Middle Age as a time of darkness, not only because of lack of secular Latin literature, but because of corruption within the Church such as Popes who ruled as kings, pagan superstitions with
saints relics, celibate priesthood, and institutionalized moral hypocrisy.
An example of how Protestant views shaped views of the past can be seen in the example of
King John of England. In modern times King John is seen as a tyrant whose failed leadership resulted in the forced signing of the
Magna Carta and loss of English holdings in Normandy. However, because King John opposed papal authority during the crisis over the appointment of
Stephen Langton the
Archbishop of Canterbury, Protestants saw him as a hero against the oppressive force of the Pope. In support of the Protestant interpretation of history, playwright
John Bale in his 1530s drama
King Johan called him "a faithful Moses" who '"withstood proud Pharaoh [the pope] for his poor Israel". This pro-John sentiment continued and eventually found its most popular voice in
Shakespeare's play
King John.
Enlightenment
Main article: Enlightenment
During the 17th and 18th century, in the
Age of Enlightenment, religion was seen as antithetical to reason. Because the Middle Ages was an "Age of Faith" when religion reigned, it was seen as a period contrary to reason, and thus contrary to the Enlightenment. For them the Middle Ages was barbaric and priest-ridden. They referred to "these dark times", "the centuries of ignorance", and "the uncouth centuries".
Voltaire was an Enlightenment writer who was particularly energetic in attacking the religiously dominated Middle Ages as a period of social stagnation and decline. His essay
Essay on the Customs and Spirit of Nations (1750s) has over one-hundred chapters on the Middle Ages. He saw it as time of political failure because Europe "was divided among a countless number of petty tyrants".
Feudalism was a catalyst for endless civil war. His vision of the period was barbaric. "Picture yourself", he says, "in a wilderness where wolves, tigers and foxes slaughter straggling timid cattle -- that is the portrait of Europe over the course of many centuries."
Scholasticism was "systems of absurdity". The Catholic Church "has always come down in favor of crushing reason completely". Of the crusades, the
fourth crusade in particular, he said "the only fruit of the Christians in their barbarous crusades was to exterminate other Christians.. led by leaders without experience or skill."
In summary, between 1500 and 1800 the Middle Ages were viewed negatively for three reasons: it failed to meet humanists (and thus classic) standards of literature and learning, it failed to meet Protestant religious judgments, and it failed to meet Enlightenment standards.
Main article: Romanticism
The "uncouth times that one calls the Middle Ages" (Voltaire) was followed by a revolutionary change in perspective, a change which still exists in large part to this day, and of which we are still the direct heirs. During the later 18th and 19th century the movement known as
Romanticism began. One of its practitioners, poet
Heinrich Heine, defined Romanticism as "nothing but the reawakening of the poetry of the Middle Ages, as it manifested itself in songs, pictures and works of art, in art and life." The Romantic image of the Middle Ages was a reaction to a world dominated by Enlightenment rationalism in which reason trumped emotion. The Romantics viewed the Middle Ages nostalgicly as an era of emotion and mystery, the simple and natural--a period of social and environmental harmony and spiritual inspiration, in contrast to the excesses of the French Revolution and most of all to the environmental and social upheavals of the emerging industrial revolution.
The Romantics not only longed for the Middle Ages but endeavored to recreate it in art, literature and architecture. Painters such as the German
Nazarenes (1809) or English
Pre-Raphaelites (1848) advocated a return to a previous era in art. The Romantics also invented the
historical novel and its foremost practitioner was
Sir Walter Scott who wrote
Ivanhoe (1819), a Medieval drama of knights and fair maidens and
chivalry.
Ivanhoe was a 19th century best seller, nine operas were based on it, and at one point four different versions were playing on stage in London at the same time. 19th century poetry was also heavily influenced by re-discovered and newly popular literature from the Middle Ages including the famous
Brothers Grimm, who inspired
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley to write
Frankenstein (1818), a classic Romantic reaction to the potential horrors of scientific discovery.
Perhaps the greatest lasting impact of the Romantics vision of the Middle Ages is in Architecture. Vast amounts of pseudo-medieval architecture were built during the 19th and 20th centuries
Gothic revival. The completion of the
Cologne Cathedral (1880) in Gothic style marked a new era in bringing the Medieval world into the modern. Some of the leaders of this pseudo-medieval architectural movement included Englishman
August Pugin who asserted that
Gothic architecture was true Christian architecture, boldly saying "The pointed arch was produced by the Catholic faith". He went on to produce important Gothic buildings such as Cathedrals at
Burmingham and
Southwark and the
British House of Parliament in the 1840s.
Viollet-le-Duc was a leading Medieval restorer in France who restored the entire walled city of
Carcassonne as well as
Notre-Dame and
Sainte Chapelle. In America
Ralph Adams Cram was a leading force in American Gothic, with his most ambitious project the
Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York (claimed to be the largest Cathedral in the world), as well as
Collegiate Gothic buildings at
Princeton Graduate College. Cram said "the style hewn out and perfected by our ancestors [has] become ours by uncontested inheritance."
Romantic Nationalism
Main article: Romantic nationalism
One of the major themes of the Romantics was
Romantic nationalism, and the image of the Middle Ages was closely tied with its rise and dominance. Theorist
Johann Gottfried von Herder, an important Romantic leader, defined nationalism in
ethnic terms as communities of common language. He said "Language is the principal sign of a nation [it is] the true national history of a people". To that end
national epics such as
The Song of Roland,
Beowulf and
Nibelungenlied were published for the first time and were widely read and influential. For example at one point during Germanys so-called "War of Liberation" against
Napoleon in 1813-1814, at the "
Battle of the Nations", the German army handed out copies of
Nibelungenlied to its troops as a moral booster.
By the late 19th century pseudo-medieval symbols were the currency of European
monarchal state propaganda. German emperors dressed up in and proudly displayed medieval costumes in public, and they rebuilt the great medieval castle and spiritual home of the
Teutonic Order at Marienburg. Mad King
Ludwig II of Bavaria built a fairy-tale castle at
Neuschwanstein and decorated it with scenes from
Wagner's operas, another major Romantic image maker of the Middle Ages. In England, the Middle Ages were trumpeted as the birthplace of Nations because of the
Magna Carta of 1215.
See also Medieval film |
El Cid (1961) starring Charlton Heston, a movie with direct heritage to the Romantics, it helped mold popular perceptions of the Middle Ages in the middle 20th century. |
In the 20th century there were two forces which shaped the image of the Middle Ages: Academia and, most significantly, Film.
Universities experienced a steep rise in interest in Medieval studies, both in funding and numbers of students and teachers and programs. There were roughly three generations of Medieval historians in the 20th century, each focusing on different aspects of Medieval history which reflected the interests of their own time. In the early part of the 20th century the academic focus was on political and constitutional history as part of a drive to train governmental workers to fill the Great Society programs, which was believed to be the path to a better future for the best and brightest of society.
Charles H. Haskins was a leader in the USA and was called Americas first Medievalist. In the middle part of the 20th century medievalists focused more on social and economic factors, reflecting the issues of that time.
Marc Bloch was a leader in this area famously re-defining
Feudalism as a social system. Finally in the later part of the century historians began to focus on more diverse areas, such as peasants,
feminism and private lives. The
microhistory school pioneered by
Carlo Ginzburg with his
The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller (1980) is a good example of the diversity of this research, reflecting the general trends toward diversity and choice in the later part of the 20th century.
Film has been the most significant creator of images of the Middle Ages in the 20th century. The first
Medieval film was also one of the
earliest films ever made, about
Joan of Arc in 1899, while the first
Robin Hood dates to as early as 1908. Just as most peoples perceptions of the American
Wild West were drawn mostly from film, versus source material or academic research, so too most peoples perceptions of the Middle Ages were shaped by film. Influential European films included the German
Nibelungenlied (1924),
Eisenstein's
Alexander Nevsky (1938) and
Bergman's
The Seventh Seal (1957), while in France there were many Joan of Arc sequels. Probably most influential of all were
Hollywood films. The Romantic historical novels were adapted to the screen such as
Ivanhoe (1952) by MGM and
El Cid (1961). Like the works of Romantic artists, painters, novelists, and operas, the films were direct historic links to the Romantic movement. The exact same Romantic style exists in the films in music, imagery and themes. The films reached a far wider audience than academic works and were further re-enforced by 20th century pseudo-medieval popular fantasy such as
Tolkien,
role-playing and
computer games, which continued with strength in to the 21st century.
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Medieval art*
"Medieval Historiography: Selected Readings"
