Showing posts with label Dark Ages. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dark Ages. Show all posts

Thursday, September 29, 2022

The Early Modern Period

I've offered my own idea of when the Middle Ages ended, but of course there are other ways to look at it. I suggested specific events taking place in or around 1453, but we can look at the Middle Ages not just about specific events so much as it was about cultural norms.

At the foundation of this question—and all discussions about periods in history—is whether you can accurately establish periodization at all. One of the first to "break up" the flow of events was Leonardo Bruni, mentioned as a tutor of Lorenzo Valla. Bruni has been called the first modern historian, and was the first to define human history as three periods: Antiquity, Middle Ages, and Modern. He was influenced by Petrarch, who described the glorious Classical Roman period versus the post-Classical tenebrae or "darkness." (This may have been the origin of the popular modern term "The Dark Ages.")

For Bruni to describe "Modern" as his lifetime (c.1370 - 1444) may cause us to smile, but of course it was modern to him...and may in fact still be considered the start of the Modern Era. Was there a shift in something in the 1400s that allows us to think of it as the start of our own era?

What trends or cultural shifts were significant enough—and continuous enough—to motivate modern historians to say that the Modern Era started in the 1400s? What was so different? We talk about the Renaissance as a rebirth of art and culture, but there was more:

•Globalization, with the expansion of mercantilism and sophisticated international economics
•The Age of Exploration/Discovery, with increased travel and improved methods of transport
•Religious dissent, and the development of secular policy
•The decline of feudalism, and the development of civic politics

The point is not just that these were different from what came before, but that these changes are still in place. Many of the changes that started in the 1400s are still with us, making the argument that what makes us "modern" and not "medieval" has in fact been going on for about six centuries, not just two or three.

A modern medievalist named Nancy Partner once said that if Medieval Studies wanted more respect from historians in general, they should start calling the Middle Ages the "Really Early Modern Era." Well, that may be stretching it, or maybe not, at least when it comes to the English language. Of the 1000 words most commonly used in Modern English, 83% come from Old English. Tomorrow I'll give you one idea of how much Old English you are speaking on a daily basis.

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Why "Middle" Ages?

So if the phrase "Dark Ages" was coined by Petrarch to describe the loss/lapse of much classical learning and advancement since the Decline of Rome (5th century CE), why do we say "Middle Ages," and what were they in the "middle" of?

Petrarch's term didn't become a widespread label; the centuries immediately following him didn't study history dogmatically the way a modern liberal studies education demands. It was a German classical scholar named Christoph Cellarius (1638-1707) who standardized the three general periods of the past two millenia with his mammoth work Universal History Divided into an Ancient, Medieval, and New Period. "Medieval" was from the Latin medium aevum (literally, "middle age"). This triple division struck the right note and entered the realm of conventional wisdom.

Still, the "Dark Ages" didn't go out of fashion, although its definition and popularity shifted. The American Cyclopaedia in 1883 said:
The Dark Ages is a term applied in its widest sense to that period of intellectual depression in the history of Europe from the establishment of the barbarian supremacy in the fifth century to the revival of learning about the beginning of the fifteenth, thus nearly corresponding in extent with the Middle Ages.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition (1911) defined the Dark Ages as the period from the fifth to the tenth centuries, affirming that "the Dark Age was a reality."

In 1929, however, the 14th edition of Britannica removed the term "Dark Ages" and stated:
the contrast, once so fashionable, between the ages of darkness and the ages of light has no more truth in it than have the idealistic fancies which underlie attempts at mediaeval revivalism.
A scholarly view of the "Dark Ages" has largely been eliminated in favor of the generic term "medieval" to distinguish between the Classical and Modern eras (Cellarius would be proud). In fact, because artistic, cultural, political and technological (et alia) development is a continuum, the division of "eras" has been muddled with a recent trend to refer to the Renaissance as the "Early Modern Era" (I remember a lecture from my grad school days in which we joked that maybe the Middle Ages would soon be labeled the "Really Early Modern Era."

Part of this desire to eliminate the concept of "dark" Ages is also 20th century understanding that not only was the period not a complete intellectual wasteland, but also that there were at least three "re-births" of education and art prior to what we think of as the European Renaissance.

But that's a topic for another day.

Monday, July 16, 2012

Why "Dark" Ages?

Once in a time known as the Dark Ages
There lived a legend whose coming had been foretold
by the great prophet Merlin.
This is the opening of a 1999 film on Joan of Arc. Joan's dates were 1412-1431, a far cry from anyone's idea of the Dark Ages.* What were the Dark Ages, exactly? The term is commonly used to refer to a time when education lapsed and "not much happened." Well, the amount that was happening could fill a daily blog for quite awhile.

The concept of a Dark Age is credited to Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374), who traveled Europe looking for Latin classics. The story goes that, upon discovering a "lost" collection of the letters of Cicero (106-43 BCE) in the 1330s, he expressed his disgust that such splendor had existed long ago but not preserved or improved upon in the intervening years:
Each famous author of antiquity whom I recover places a new offense and another cause of dishonor to the charge of earlier generations, who, not satisfied with their own disgraceful barrenness, permitted the fruit of other minds, and the writings that their ancestors had produced by toil and application, to perish through insufferable neglect. Although they had nothing of their own to hand down to those who were to come after, they robbed posterity of its ancestral heritage.

Essentially, for Petrarch, the Dark Ages was that period between the glory that was Rome and the glory that was his own era. Nowadays, if the term "Dark Ages" is used at all, it is used for the first half of the Middle Ages, denoting the period right after the fall of Rome to about 1100.

So where/when did we start talking about the "Middle" Ages?

[to be continued]

*And don't get me started on "Merlin" having a prophecy about Joan.