9 Comments

Thank you for this! I'm currently researching a novel that takes place during the 1349 plague that wiped out half of London and am grateful for the tone you strike on behalf of the medieval period. It was an age of faith, sparkling by candlelight.

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Cool piece!

I think even more fundamentally, this era was not “dark” because technological, artistic and cultural developments continued, at least if you zoom out and consider a wider world than just Europe west of Greece. Yes, western Europe fell into decline for some of this period, as the center of power moved East with the capital of the Roman Empire moved to Constantinople.

There is a narrative that lots of knowledge was lost, for example in building great structures. But this is false. See the Hagia Sophia or Bologna’s towers, literally middle age skyscrapers.

With the adoption of Christianity, there was a major change in the acceptability of enslaving close neighbors and exploiting their labor. Slaves instead were brought in from further afield, nonChristians, and simply became a far smaller percentage of the total population. So building huge structures wasn’t so much forgotten, it just became much more expensive. But this wasn’t due to loss of knowledge or any negative developments. It was due to adopting a worldview with far more respect for human suffering and a less brutal world coming into existence.

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So many good things in this article. Instant "subscribe".

The importance of actually seeing artwork "in real life", as you mentioned, whenever possible cannot be underscored enough. Pictures online or in books are not even close.

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Wonderful selection of four lighthouses of the Middle ages. I would add a fift one and that to be Romanesque architecture (pre-gothic architecture). Like the cathedral of St Michael in Hildesheim.

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Looking forward to reading the article. Can you please define the years of the so called dark ages and middle ages? Are they the same period?

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Excellent explanation of iconography.

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Very interesting. Subscribed.

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Thanks for the refreshing appraisal. I just read a related piece [ There is no period in all of human history that gets quite so much bad press as the Middle Ages. Popularly known as the “Dark Ages,” most people imagine that this was the worst possible time to be alive—a thousand years of poverty, backwardness, stagnation, superstition, and obscurantism. ] https://tinyurl.com/vKosTpMwHsl

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The westernisation of history doesn't do the world a favour. You don't even have to go outside of Europe to see a different world of prosperity and advanced culture.

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