Those who write off the Middle Ages as an unchanging backwater are overlooking the seismic advances – in everything from scientific knowledge to self-awareness – that redefined what it meant to be human, argues Ian Mortimer
By the end of the Middle Ages, warfare was losing its allure and women were challenging the male stranglehold on intellectual life
What does the word “medieval” summon up in your mind? Whether the first thing you imagine is a castle or a monastery, the chances are that the word will come with connotations of violence, ignorance, lawlessness and superstition. You only need to think of Marsellus Wallace’s line in the film Pulp Fiction to know what I mean: “I’m gonna git medieval on your ass.” Even if you’re not a Quentin Tarantino fan, you will have come across the word “medieval” frequently applied by journalists and politicians to the Taliban in Afghanistan or the Russian troops occupying Ukrainian towns. In short, many people today use “medieval” as a synonym for “uncivilised”.
Historians have generally been unable to shift these perceptions in the public mind, and a few have sought to exploit this prejudice rather than deny it. Twentieth-century popular books, like William Manchester’s A World Lit Only by Fire and Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, emphasised the brutality of the medieval period, seemingly drawing their evocative power from these aspects. This is despite the fact that warfare has grown progressively more deadly since the Middle Ages, as the Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin showed in the 1940s.
Although other historians of that generation tried to draw attention to the real technological innovations of the Middle Ages – for example, Jean Gimpel’s Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (1977) – their work generally only underlined the primitive character of medieval technology in comparison with that of the modern world. The mechanical clock and the cannon were never going to compete with a computer or a spacecraft for pride of place in the public imagination, no matter how hard the historian in question tried.
Recently, there have been a few attempts to set the record straight, the most striking perhaps being Seb Falk’s The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science. However, for the most part, the bestselling popular history books are still keen to focus
