This is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. We focus a lot on history in the program and what it can teach us, how careful attention to prior conflicts could protect America from possible catastrophe.

But history badly told can also mislead us. Case in point, today when we encounter the medieval world, it's mostly a dark time, unenlightened by reason, but also literally gloomy all bare stone and gray skies.

We know it as a brutal time, dominated by white men with mighty steeds and flashing swords, or drenched in blood by marauding vikings, as rendered on the history channel, with a Netflix spin-off coming soon.

I've been told your god is a carpenter. And guess what? So am I!

The Dark Ages have long been a prime setting for fantasy, as on Game of Thrones.

A dark rocky wedding without at least three deaths is considered a dollar fan.

But in their new book, The Bright Ages, a new history of medieval Europe, historians Matthew Gabriel and David M. Perry trace the harm of the myth of the Dark Ages, and illuminate the medieval stories that have mostly escaped our modern games.

Welcome to On the Media, Matt and David.

Nice to be here. Thanks so much.

In your book, you write about the tendency to kick a current problem back into the past by identifying things like terrorism, death penalty, even pandemic mismanagement as medieval.

It's a way of bolstering our 21st century sense of superiority.

This is David, and I'll jump in. There's little examples of there's big examples.

There was a funny story calling the process of getting a driver's license in Russia, medieval.

I mean, it's literally to operate a car. They mean it's really complicated bureaucracy, which is really not the medieval bureaucratic state.

And then there's a lot of things when we get kind of violence or barbarism that become categorized as medieval.

And it suggests that this 1,000 year period, let's say, in Europe was more violent or more barbaric than something else.

It was like when President Trump would call ISIS medieval or when people talk about war as medieval or anything else, you know, before, let's say, 400 CE in Europe, there was lots of war and violence and torture.

And in some ways, the power of the mechanized world has only enhanced the ability for people to do harm to each other, imposing distance between us and these things you don't like by calling them medieval.

It seems to me it's harder for us to understand what's really going on and address the problems now.

So by calling something medieval and adopting that kind of fatalism, you're like the 40 year old kid who's still blaming his parents.

Yeah, this is a map. It's kind of like, you know, when a politician says, that's not who we are. Well, it is who we are because we just did that thing.

You're trying to give a very simplistic explanation and say, you know, this is an aberration. So we don't actually have to pay attention to why it's happening.

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