Posts Tagged ‘Middle Ages’
“Why do I feel so exercised about what we think of the people of the Middle Ages?”*…
There was more to the period than violence, superstition and ignorance: The Economist on a new book, Medieval Horizons, from Ian Mortimer…
“In public your bottom should emit no secret winds past your thighs. It disgraces you if other people notice any of your smelly filth.” This useful bit of advice for young courtiers in the early 13th century appears in “The Book of the Civilised Man”, a poem by Daniel of Beccles. It is the first English guide to manners.
Ian Mortimer, a historian, argues that this and other popular works of advice that began appearing around the same time represent something important: a growing sense of social self-awareness, self-evaluation and self-control. Why then? Probably because of the revival of glass mirrors in the 12th century, which had disappeared from Europe after the fall of Rome. The mirror made it possible for men and women to see themselves as others did. It confirmed their individuality and inspired a greater sense of autonomy and potential. By 1500 mirrors were cheap, and their impact had spread through society.
Mr. Mortimer sets out to show that the medieval period, from 1000 to 1600, is profoundly misunderstood. It was not a backward and unchanging time marked by violence, ignorance and superstition. Instead, huge steps in social and economic progress were made, and the foundations of the modern world were laid.
The misapprehension came about because people’s notion of progress is so bound up with scientific and technological developments that came later, particularly with the industrial and digital revolutions. The author recounts one claim he has heard: that a contemporary schoolchild (armed with her iPhone) knows more about the world than did the greatest scientist of the 16th century.
Never mind that astronomers such as Copernicus and Galileo knew much more about the stars than most children do today. Could a modern architect (without his computer) build a stone spire like Lincoln Cathedral’s, which is 160 metres (525 feet) tall and was completed by 1311? Between 1000 and 1300 the height of the London skyline quintupled, whereas between 1300 and the completion of the 72-storey Shard in 2010, it only doubled. Inventions, including gunpowder, the magnetic compass and the printing press, all found their way from China to transform war, navigation and literacy.
This led to many “expanding horizons” for Europeans. Travel was one. In the 11th century no European had any idea what lay to the east of Jerusalem or south of the Sahara. By 1600 there had been several circumnavigations of the globe.
Law and order was another frontier. Thanks to the arrival of paper from China in the 12th century and the advent of the printing press in the 1430s, document-creation and record-keeping, which are fundamental to administration, surged. Between 1000 and 1600 the number of words written and printed in England went from about 1m a year to around 100bn. In England, a centralised legal and criminal-justice system evolved rapidly from the 12th century. Violent deaths declined from around 23 per 100,000 in the 1300s to seven per 100,000 in the late 16th century.
Another “horizon” was speed and the sense of urgency that went with it. By 1600 a letter bearing important news could be carried 200 miles in a single day, thanks to people starting to use relays of horses at staging posts. Over the course of the 14th century mechanical clocks were developed, allowing time to be standardised and appointments to be kept.
The period was also marked by growing personal freedom, with the banning of slavery within England by the English church in 1102 and the rapid decline of serfdom after the Black Death of 1348-49, when nearly half the labour force died. Political power expanded to include a growing land and property-owning yeoman class. Whoever thinks the Middle Ages were all darkness has a middling understanding of history’s truths…
Shedding light on the Dark Ages: “Is everything you assumed about the Middle Ages wrong?” (gift link) @TheEconomist on @IanJamesFM.
* “Why do I feel so exercised about what we think of the people of the Middle Ages?…I guess it’s because so many of their voices are ringing vibrantly in my ears – Chaucer’s, Boccaccio’s, Henry Knighton’s, Thomas Walsingham’s, Froissart’s, Jean Creton’s… writers and contemporary historians of the period who seem to me just as individual, just as alive as we are today. We need to get to know these folk better in order to know who we are ourselves.” — Terry Jones (@PythonJones) in The Observer
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As we look back, we might recall that it was on this date (the feast day of St. Mary Magdalene) in in Middle Ages (more specially, in 1342), that Central Europe’s worst flood ever occurred. Following the passage of a Genoa low, the rivers Rhine, Moselle, Main, Danube, Weser, Werra, Unstrut, Elbe, Vltava, and their tributaries inundated large areas. Many towns such as Cologne, Mainz, Frankfurt am Main, Würzburg, Regensburg, Passau, and Vienna were seriously damaged, with water levels exceeding those of the 2002 European floods. Even the river Eider north of Hamburg flooded the surrounding land; indeed, the affected area extended to Carinthia and northern Italy.
“History is not the past but a map of the past, drawn from a particular point of view, to be useful to the modern traveler”*…
Timelines are now a commonplace. But as Emily Thomas explains, Joseph Priestley’s “A New Chart of History” revolutionized how we view history…
… Priestley (1733-1804) is best known for his scientific work, especially the co-discovery of oxygen. Yet he was also a teacher and a philosopher. As a teacher, Priestley sought to better communicate history to his students. He was fascinated by chronologies, texts ordering events. Since ancient Greece and Rome, chronologers used ‘time tables’ or grids to depict the order of events in time. An obvious problem with these chronologies, though, is that only so many events can fit on each page.
The mid-18th century saw many experiments in representing history, including Thomas Jefferys’ 1753 A Chart of Universal History. Jefferys was a mapmaker and his chart depicts empires almost as though they are countries on a map, allowing you to scan them all at once. Impressed, Priestley determined to create a chart of his own that readers could scan ‘at one view’. He made several innovations but one proved key: lines, inspired by his philosophy of time.
For this, Priestley drew on a seemingly unconnected topic: John Locke’s 1690 account of abstract ideas. For Locke, abstract ideas include ‘redness’, ‘triangle’, or ‘animal’. They are general ideas, produced when our minds consider particular things. Take a pint of milk, a stick of chalk and a lump of snow. I can consider these things while leaving out their particular features, ‘abstracting’ what is common to them: their whiteness. Many philosophers accepted some version of Locke’s account of abstraction, but puzzled over how to mentally visualise them. Locke writes that our abstract idea of a triangle ‘must be neither Oblique, nor Rectangle, neither Equilateral, Equicrural, nor Scalenon; but all and none of these at once’. Clearly we cannot picture such a thing. Priestley makes an alternative suggestion: represent abstract ideas using a variable particular. A child, he writes, has an idea of ‘what a triangle in general is’, even though all the ideas of triangles he ‘contemplates’ are ‘particular’. In other words, our picture of the abstract idea of a triangle can change: from equilateral to, say, scalene. In the same essay, Priestley argued that time is an abstract idea. And this view feeds into his timeline…
How Joesph Priestley’s “A New Chart of History” used the ideas of John Locke to revolutionize our undertstanding of history: “The Invention of Time,” from @emilytwrites in @HistoryToday.
Pair with “Putting Time in Perspective,” from @waitbutwhy.
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As we ponder the past, we might send evocative birthday greetings to Jules Michelet; he was born on this date in 1798. Considered one of the founders of modern historiography, he is best known for his multivolume work Histoire de France (History of France).
Influenced by Giambattista Vico, Michelet emphasized on the role of people and their customs in shaping history, a major departure from the then-current emphasis on political and military leaders. He coined the term “Renaissance” (meaning “rebirth” in French) as a period in Europe’s cultural history that represented a break from the Middle Ages, creating a modern understanding of humanity and its place in the world. (The term “rebirth” and its association with the Renaissance can be traced to a work published in 1550 by the Italian art historian Giorgio Vasari. Vasari used the term to describe the advent of a new manner of painting that began with the work of Giotto, as the “rebirth (rinascita) of the arts.”)
“Historians will silently murder you with their eyeballs if you say ‘Dark Ages’ unironically”*…
Henrik Lagerlund explains how medieval thinkers foreshadowed modern physics in investigating the character of machines, devices, and the forces that animate them…
The Middle Ages still suffers from the embarrassment of comparison. Before it glowed the light of the ancient Greeks – the great, early speculators of the natural world and our place in it. After the Middle Ages came the scientific revolution – Copernicus, Galileo, Newton – and the surging onrush of modernity. Even if the idea of the so-called ‘dark ages’ is waning, there remains the widespread impression that the Middle Ages is in some sense a time of stagnancy, especially in its understanding of science and the natural world. Is this an accurate view of medieval science? There is one discipline, often overlooked, that serves to illuminate the Middle Ages, as well as its place in the history of scientific thought: mechanics.
The predominant assumption about the rise of modern science is that it went hand in hand with the conception of nature as a universal mechanism. By viewing nature in this way, it could be studied, analysed and experimented upon with mathematical rigour, and its functioning could be elucidated by physicists harnessing empirical methods. While the motion of inanimate bodies became theorised on the model of projectiles, some mechanical philosophers even claimed that the complex organisation of animate bodies could be understood on the model of levers, springs, pulleys and other mechanical devices. This step – nature as a universal mechanism – is often seen as the important break from the Middle Ages.
But, in fact, mechanics was not unknown in the Middle Ages, and medieval thinkers continuously discussed mechanical problems at the crossroads of natural philosophy and mathematics. Mechanics enjoyed continuous interest and progress throughout the Middle Ages, and modern physicists and mathematicians relied to a large extent on results inherited from the Middle Ages. But mechanics as a scientific discipline did not always go under that name.
Taking this into account, a close look at the Middle Ages reveals that the consideration of mechanics as a core part of physics, together with the mathematical treatment of weights, forces and resistances, all generally assumed to characterise the birth of modern science, was there long before Galileo. That means that medieval thinkers did not simply lay the foundations of the scientific revolution. It means they started it. There should be no more embarrassment of comparison for that great era of scientific thought, especially when we review the fascinating history of mechanics…
Read on for that review: “Machina mundi,” from @HenrikLagerlund in @aeonmag.
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As we give credit where credit is due, we might note that today is the Summer Solstice– or Midsummer– the day with the longest period of daylight and shortest night of the year, when the Sun is at its highest position in the sky.
Often celebrated during the Middle Ages as the Feast of St. John (six months “opposite” the celebration of Christ, for whom John “paved the way”), it has pagan roots, and was often observed with songs, games, displays, processions, mystery plays, and dancing (often around a Maypole), which served to repel witches and evil spirits.
“Oh the places you’ll go”*…
The amazing life of “Gudrid the Far-Traveled” has, Frank Jacobs argues, been unjustly overshadowed by her in-laws, Erik the Red and Leif Erikson…
She’s been called “the greatest female explorer of all time,” and the “best-traveled woman of the Middle Ages.” Just after the year 1000 AD, she gave birth to the first European baby in North America. And she concluded her global odyssey with a pilgrimage on foot to Rome. Yet few today can name this extraordinary Viking lady, even if they have heard of Erik the Red and Leif Erikson, her father- and brother-in-law…
An extraordinary story: “The Viking woman who sailed to America and walked to Rome,” from @VeryStrangeMaps in @bigthink.
* Dr. Seuss
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As we tag along, we might recall that this date in 2014 was purportedly the date of the final battle in Ragnarök, a series of events (many natural disasters) culminating in a catastrophic battle and the end of the world-as-we-know-it: giants and demons approach from all points of the compass and attack the gods (Odin, Thor, Týr, Freyr, Heimdall, Loki, et al.), who meet them and face death like heroes. At the conflict’s end, the sun darkens, the stars vanish, and the earth sinks into the sea. (Happily, afterward, the earth rises again, the innocent Balder returns from the dead, and leads hosts of the just to a life in a hall roofed with gold.)
In the event, of course, the world did not end that day. The prediction had been promoted by the Jorvik Viking Centre in York, England, intended to draw attention to an event that the institution was to hold on that date. In an obvious lift from the 2012 Mayan Prophecy frenzy, the Centre attributed the claim to a “Viking Calendar,” though no such calendar is known to have existed. Authentic scholars were predictably (and understandably) irked, though as philologist Joseph Hopkins noted, the media response was an example of a broad revival of interest in the Viking Age and ancient Germanic topics.
(Historians believe that Gudrid did in fact exist and did make the journeys discussed above.)
“When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule”*…
Anne Wallentine considers an exhibition that depicts how people have reimagined the medieval period in the centuries since, and how they have revealed their own interests and ideals with each new interpretation…
To explain why I am standing outside the dinner theater juggernaut Medieval Times in the name of journalism, I would have to go back to the beginning: specifically, to 500 CE, the generally agreed upon start of the Middle Ages, which is a contemporary term for a 1,000-year period (500–1500) in world history. This term is now preferred to the “Dark Ages,” which derived from the assumption that the enlightened learning of Greco-Roman antiquity was extinguished with the collapse of the Roman empire. The retroactive valorizing of past eras — reflected in our names for them — is as constant as our passage into new ones. The Getty Center’s latest exhibition, The Fantasy of the Middle Ages, explores this historical habit by depicting how people have reimagined the medieval period in the centuries since, and how they have revealed their own interests and ideals with each new interpretation…
The fantastical imagery that many of us consider “medieval” today has been invented, at least in part, in the centuries since. While some legends are rooted in the period, like the stories of King Arthur and Camelot, many others were embroidered onto an imagined, “medieval-ish” past through fantasy stories, films, and other forms of popular culture, especially from the 19th century on. Modern medieval tales have become populated with knights, dragons, witches, and fairies — though, as the show explains, only the first two were frequently depicted in the period, and anything magical or mysterious was understood through the lens of religion. The exhibition pairs medieval and later imagery to explore these shifting depictions and the powerful legacy they have left…
Read on: “What Our Fantasies About the European ‘Middle Ages‘ Say About Us,” from @awallintime in @hyperallergic.
* Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century
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As we ponder the past, we might recall that it was on this date in 1264, in the midst of the War of Saint Sabas (a Crusades-related conflict between Venice/Knights Templar and Genoa/Knights Hospitaller over land in the Kingdom of Jerusalem), that the Genoese tricked the Venetians into sailing east to the Levant, and captured an entire Venetian trade fleet in what’s known as the Battle of Saseno.
Still, the war continued until 1270, when the Peace of Cremona ended the hostilities. In 1288, Genoa finally received their land back.
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