Here’s Why Medieval Scientific Progress Still Matters Read more: The Idea of the ‘Dark Ages’ Is a Myth. They looked into both the medieval and classical European past and imagined they found white faces, like theirs, looking back at them. They looked outside themselves and saw barbarism. These modern thinkers used the fiction of Europe and the invented concept of “Western Civilization” as a thread to tie the modern world together. They found the proto-nations of the Middle Ages useful as a past to point to for their modern origins, pointing to both medieval connections to Greece and Rome and the independence and distinct traditions of medieval polities. Later, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, imperialist European powers and their intellectuals sought a history for their new world order to justify and explain why whiteness-a modern idea, albeit with medieval roots-justified their domination of the world. What is clear is that people in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, frustrated with the political chaos and warfare of their ugly era, decided to draw nostalgic links to the worlds of ancient Rome and Greece, using the distant past to sever their connection to the previous thousand years of history. The peoples, the plague, the art, the governments, and the wars all belong to the medieval world. The French Revolution was possible only because medieval people experimented with democratic representation, oftentimes at a small scale, and had a long history of anti-authoritarian revolt. The Ottoman Turks emerged out of generations-long interactions between steppe and city, a people fully steeped in an intellectual culture that shuttled competing interpretations of both scripture and Aristotle from Persia to Iberia, a people carrying the same luxury goods and bacteria across regions. The plague arrived because of connections between Asia and Europe that had been established across centuries. In the Iberian Peninsula, Christian armies had pushed south through modern Spain and Portugal beginning in the 8th century, graduating expelling the Moorish caliphate that had taken hold in the years following Rome’s withdrawal from the region.Ultimately, none of these moments are satisfactory. Intellectualism also began to prosper, with the advent of the printing press in 1439 allowing the masses ready access to new ideas and mass communication for the first time. In Italy, the 14th century saw the beginning of the cultural explosion known today as the Renaissance, with painting, sculpture, and architecture seeing marked advancement. The closing years of the medieval period were marked by discovery, be it technological, artistic, or territorial. It was also during this time that plague stalked the continent, with the Black Death taking the lives of an estimated 75 to 200 million people across both Europe and Asia between 13. Image credit: Public Domain, via Wikimedia CommonsĪt the same time as waging costly wars against the French, England also fought a series of conflicts against the Kingdom of Scotland, including the famous Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297, when Scottish armies led by Sir William Wallace defeated numerically superior English forces. Jean Froissart: Battle of Crécy between the English and French in the Hundred Years’ War. The Hundred Years’ War, fought between England and France from 1337 to 1453, exemplified this phenomena, as royal families grappled for control of Europe’s borders. Dynastic warsīoth the high period of the medieval era and the subsequent Late Middle Ages were marked by the rise of organised militaries and international conflict. The rise and dominance of the Catholic Church was a hallmark of the medieval epoch, and shaped the next period of the era – the High Middle Ages – in dramatic fashion.įrom 1000 to 1250 AD, the church sanctioned the seismic military pilgrimages known as the Crusades, which saw thousands of Europeans flock to the Middle East, ostensibly to win back Christian holy sites from Muslim hands.Ĭatholicism also came to govern daily life for many of the common people across Europe, as low literacy rates and poor medical provisions saw peasants turn to the church for education, comfort, and salvation.ĭuring the High Middle Ages, universities gradually began to prosper however, and the scholastic movement, spearheaded by figures such as Italian philosopher Thomas Aquinas, grew rapidly. Cat Jarman ventures out into ancient Selwood Forest in Wiltshire with art historian Amy Jeffs.
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