Common Knowledge About The Middle Ages That Is Incorrect, Part 1: Why the Middle Ages, Not the Renaissance, Created the Modern World

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2019

⏱️ 49 minutes

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Summary

The popular view of the Middle Ages is a thousand-year period of superstition and ignorance, punctuated by witch burnings and belief in a flat earth. But the medieval period, more than any other time in history, laid the foundations for the modern world. The work of scholars, intellectuals, architects, statesmen and craftsmen led to rise of towns, the earliest bureaucratic states, the emergence of vernacular literatures, the recovery of Greek science and philosophy with its Arabic additions, and the beginnings of the first European universities.

This episode is the first in a five-part series to explore a revisionist history of the Middle Ages, starting with the Roman Empire’s collapse in the fifth century. We will march through the accounts of Charlemagne’s reign, the Black Plague, the fall of Constantinople, and everything in between. It explores social aspects of the Middle Ages that are still largely misunderstood (i.e., no educated person believed the earth was flat). There was also a surprisingly high level of medieval technology, the love of Aristotle in the Middle Ages, and the lack of witch burnings (those were not popularized until the Thirty Years War in the Renaissance Period).

The Middle Ages were not a period to suffer through until the Renaissance returned Europe to its intellectual and cultural birthright. Rather, they were the fire powering the forge out of which Western identity was forged. The modern world owes a permanent debt of gratitude to the medieval culture of Europe. It was the light that illuminated the darkness following the collapse of Rome and remained lit into the world we inhabit today.

Transcript

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0:00.0	There are a few times in history that are used as escape goat by so many different people with such different agendas.
0:06.8	But of all different times in history, the Middle Ages manages to accomplish this, I would say better than any other time period.
0:14.4	For example, for someone who fashions him or herself as being scientifically minded,
0:19.4	they'd probably think of the Middle Ages as the age of superstition, ignorance,
0:24.0	and a time of powerful corrupt institutions like monarchies and the medieval church.
0:28.9	And they were able to oppress the poor in any way they saw fit.
0:32.3	This negative perception of the Middle Ages has been popular for at least 100 years,
0:36.1	but more like 150 or 200 years.
0:38.9	But interestingly enough, even modern day religious people would vilify the Middle Ages.
0:43.3	To many, it represented a perversion of the true faith, as once practiced in earlier centuries.
0:48.6	In the case of Christianity, the simple faith had been subverted into an indescifable system of pilgrimage,
0:54.7	and crusading, and indulgences, and penance,
0:57.7	they made a life of faith miserable due to fear of one false step, getting yourself cast into the pits of hell.
1:04.2	The only way in this game was a top level of the church, which had full coffers from selling remittances
1:09.4	from earthly sin, and endless manpower available for the next crusade,
1:13.5	whether in the Middle East against Muslims, or in Europe, against cathars and France.
1:19.2	Well, the pushback against this view of the Middle Ages has come from a lot of different places,
1:24.2	but probably the most unlikely is the Monty Python alumnus Terry Jones.
1:29.6	He created and hosted the show Medieval Lives in an attempt to set the record straight.
1:35.1	He said it was the medieval world that dragged us into the future,
1:39.2	not the reactionary Renaissance. Humans didn't lack a sense of individuality,
1:43.8	or lack a last name before the Renaissance.
	...

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