Today, the Middle Ages are a sort of paradox; the myth of the “Dark Ages,” which survives quite ably in popular culture, allows space for it to be whatever the popular imagination wants. When people want to kick a current problem back into the past—whether terrorism, bungled responses to COVID-19, or even the process for getting a driver’s license—they call it “medieval.” Yet when white supremacists want to claim an origin story for whiteness they too, look to the Middle Ages, seizing on glorious, golden artifacts, big castles and cathedrals to offer a simplification of racially pure patriarchal militarism. The period is good and bad, transparent and opaque, only hazily understood—but ultimately the opposite of what we want our modern world to be.
And if you can’t see into the darkness, the imagination can run wild.
Beginnings and endings are arbitrary; they frame the story that the narrator wants to tell. If we as a culture decide that the Middle Ages existed and had a beginning and end, we don’t need to start with decline or death. But because the “Dark Ages” has stood as a shorthand for the European Middle Ages for centuries, we’ll need to flip the framing from the start. So the “Bright Ages,” in contrast, begin and end bracketed by the hope of basking in light.
This doesn’t, of course, erase the violence of the past to replace it with naive nostalgia. Instead, it shows us that paths taken were not foreordained. Shifting our perspective brings people, traditionally marginalized in other tellings, into focus.
And so we look. We mark the brown skin on the faces of North Africans who always lived in Britain, as well as on French Mediterranean peasants telling dirty stories about horny priests, raunchy women, and easily fooled husbands. We find coconuts, ginger, and parrots coming in on Venetian ships that would eventually reach the ports of medieval England. We also listen to the mixing of languages in the sailors’ patois and to the commonality of multilingualism across Europe, Asia, and North Africa. We find marketplaces where Jews spoke Latin, Christians spoke Greek, and everyone spoke Arabic.
Things that begin need to end, otherwise there’s no medium aevum, no “middle age,” no “medieval.” So we could instead draw the medieval to a close just a bit later in the fourteenth century as plague ravaged Asia, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Or we might say the medieval ends in the fifteenth century as the Ottoman Turks overwhelm the entire Eastern Mediterranean, creating a new empire that extends from the Indian Ocean to, from time to time, the walls of Vienna—an empire that would fight with the Christian Venetians and ally itself with the Christian French. Some have even argued that the medieval world comes to a close only with the French Revolution and the fall of the monarchy at the end of the eighteenth century.
Know Your MBA Exams | |
