Unauthorized Professor Rachel Fulton Brown defends the Middle Ages:
We medievalists all know the drill.
Somebody in public life says something disparaging about the Middle Ages, and we all leap in to insist that either:
a) Europe in the Middle Ages was actually much more advanced/enlightened/sophisticated than the off-hand comment about people believing the world was flat suggests, or
b) yes, absolutely, they’re right, medieval Christians were murderous thugs, barbarians of the first order who knew nothing of tolerance or diversity and probably ate babies for breakfast whenever they could get them.
Neither answer ever changes the public conversation one iota because everybody knows that whatever Charles Homer Haskins might try to insist about the real Renaissance happening in the twelfth century, there is no getting round the Albigensian Crusade and the massacres of the Jews in the Rhineland (the former called by the pope, the latter resisted by all the bishops and other leaders of the Church).
The more those of us who study the intellectual, institutional, and spiritual achievements of the period succeed in pointing to the great depth and complexity of the Christian tradition (including its criticisms of the very kinds of violence so often cited as paradigmatic of the Dark Ages), the more our colleagues who study the massacres and inquisitions reinforce the prevailing sense of the period as benighted and savage, and we are right back where we started, blaming Europe and its colonial offspring for all the woes in the world.
Our Enlightened and liberal predecessors would say we’ve been doing it wrong.
This is the blog attached to the coming Unauthorized course on medieval history, so if you’re interested in it, be sure to bookmark it.