The Middle Ages make us look uncivilised
We're told the medieval era was full of flat-earthers, witch-drowning and deaths by Iron Maiden. But that's pure fiction, says Patrick West
It’s customary among journalists today to describe
barbaric and senseless behaviour as “medieval”, and the reaction to
recent beheadings at the hands of Islamists in the Middle East has been
no exception. In the Times Matthew Syed applied the word to Islamic
fundamentalists’ treatment of women, while a Daily Express headline
spoke of “The chilling medieval society Isis extremists seek to impose
in Iraq”. Perhaps Pulp Fiction is to blame. In Quentin Tarantino’s 1994
film Marcellus Wallace famously exclaims: “I’m gonna get medieval on
your ass”, reinforcing the cliché of the Middle Ages as an era of
savagery. Still, today’s hacks do history no favours by repeating this
lazy and misguided stereotype.
If only Islam in the Middle
East would return to medieval values. A thousand years ago, the Muslim
world was far more civilised than Christendom, with Islamic civilisation
the torchbearer in the fields of chemistry, medicine and astronomy.
Though relatively backwards by comparison, Christian Europe was
relatively free of ISIS-style extremism and barbarism. Religious fringe
movements such the Lollards in England or the Anabaptists in Germany
were either short-lived, tolerated or expelled to the New World.
Islamic
State-style religious extremism was not a feature of the medieval era,
but rather of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. It was the
16th and 17th centuries that saw Puritanism, the Inquisition, the
massacre of Huguenots and Irish Catholics, witch-drowning, the burning
of heretics and holy wars across Europe. The Middle Ages were relatively
civilised by comparison. Indeed, medieval Canon Law stated that witches
didn’t exist.
Of course, journalists alone aren’t wholly to
blame here. We’ve all been subject to this myth of medieval barbarism
ever since the Renaissance, and Europe’s consequent desire to depict the
interregnum between the Fall of Rome and its rebirth as a dank and
brutish time.
The Victorians reaffirmed this caricature in
contradistinction to their own times (albeit with a large element of
romanticism – hence the Gothic Revival). They created the legend that it
was common belief in the Middle Ages that the world was flat. As J B
Russell’s Inventing the Flat Earth, Columbus and Modern Historians
(1991) explains, the Greeks determined that the Earth was a sphere by
500 BC. Most educated European maintained this to be true thereafter. In
his Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas gave the globe’s spherical nature
as a standard example of scientific truth.
While Aquinas did
ponder in his great work “whether several angels can be in the same
place at the time”, neither he nor any other medieval scholar agonised
over whether how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. The first
reference to this comes in 1618 (by a Protestant). There was no taboo
on dissection in the Middle Ages (a practice imported from the Middle
East), and spices weren’t added to mask the foul taste of rotten meat:
such spices from the Orient were vastly expensive and instead the
practice of smoking, curing and salting was widespread. That
quintessentially “medieval” torture device the Iron Maiden was an
18th-century invention, the first citation of it being in 1793.
The
Church and monks in Ireland preserved knowledge of Roman civilisation.
It was the Church that helped to establish the first universities in
Bologna, Oxford and Paris. The medieval era also gave us writers that
are still read today: Boethius, Boccaccio, Dante, Petrarch and
Machiavelli.
The
Church was not the censorious tyrant of Hollywood legend. As the
historian David Linberg writes: “The late medieval scholar rarely
experienced the coercive power of the church and would have regarded
himself as free (particularly in the natural sciences) to follow reason
and observation wherever they led.” Again, it was later, darker era that
saw the Church become more intolerant: Copernicus wasn’t persecuted in
the 16th century, but Galileo, in the 17th century, was.
While
some Muslims and Christians are prone to dwell on the dogmatism and
brutality of the Crusades, it was these adventures in the Holy Land that
brought Christendom into contact with Muslim advances in science and
technology – not least with what we today call Arabic numerals. The
medieval epoch was a thoroughly outward looking one. In 986AD the
Icelandic seafarer Bjarni Herjólfsson was the first European to spot
America, while Leif Erikson was the first to set foot on it.
In
more recent times, film and television, from Braveheart to Game of
Thrones, has perpetuated the popular misunderstanding that the Middle
Ages was a time of constant fighting, bloodshed, torture and execution.
In reality, the most common forms of punishment in Europe were exile,
public humiliation and fines. When execution did take place it was
usually through hanging rather than beheading – a fate reserved only for
the nobility and rarely the public spectacle of lore. In England,
medieval civilisation also saw the institution of trial by jury.
Of
course it’s easy to swing the other way, as did G K Chesterton and
19th-century anarchists, romanticising the Middle Ages, and depicting it
is as an era of agrarian simplicity, freedom, chivalry and banquets.
Nevertheless, to brand something abhorrent as “medieval” is a historical
hangover from the Renaissance, Enlightenment and Victorian eras. Such
arrogance and lofty thinking is particularly misplaced considering the
violent world we live in today or of the horrors of the last century.
That which we abhor as uncivilised and abominable should really be
called “Baroque” – or perhaps “20th century”.
Patrick West is a columnist for spiked-online.com
No comments:
Post a Comment