History Today vs. English Heritage: "The DARK Ages"

The English Heritage Society referred to the period from 400 to 1066 A.D. as "the Dark Ages" at an exhibit at Tintagel Castle, and one of the writers at History Today doesn't like it:

The term ‘Dark Ages’ found a foothold in the 17th and 18th centuries, with historians like Edward Gibbon writing about the ‘darkness’ of the period, and reached its peak in the mid-19th century as, with a fervent belief in the dawn of a modern age, a growing Empire needed to build a dark past from which to emerge. The Dark Ages cling to Victorian ideals.

As a concept it is steeped in intellectual and cultural superiority used to dismiss the early Middle Ages as a period of ‘intellectual darkness’ before the Renaissance. In fact, we know far more about late Anglo-Saxon England than we do about Roman Britain.

The phrase feeds into a romanticised view of the period: lost to the mists of time, savage and lawless. But that could not be further from the truth. We might not have the overwhelming wealth of materials of later periods but enough survives to see the extent of their intellectual and cultural development. Pre-Conquest England was not without law, culture and politics.

Not to mention the anti-Catholic aspect of the nomenclature.

English Heritage defends its choice of term:

When considering how to refer to the period of time between c.400 - 1066 in our interpretation at Tintagel Castle, and other historic sites in our care, English Heritage carefully considered a number of factors, in full understanding of the conflict and confusion that the term 'Dark Ages' can create. We considered a number of alternatives all of which ultimately also proved to be problematic.

In relation to the interpretation scheme at Tintagel Castle, the terms 'post-Roman' and 'pre-Saxon' are difficult, particularly in the context of Cornish history. More scholarly names such as 'late Antiquity', 'migration period' or 'early Christian' are all potentially problematic for the general public. 'Early medieval' or 'early Middle Ages' is perhaps the most suitable, but we have found that these terms are popularly associated with the period around 1066 and the Normans; potentially confusing at a site such as Tintagel which also has medieval buildings.

Just label the period: c.400 to 1066 A.D. and leave off the descriptive. I think it's disingenuous for English Heritage to pretend that "the Dark Ages" is not a pejorative term. This site reflects the usual interpretation of the term "the Dark Ages" as an age of superstition, which equals religious faith:

Despite the religious conflicts, the period of the Dark Ages was seen as an age of faith. Men and women sought after God; some through the staid rituals of the Catholic Church, others in more Orthodox forms of worship. Intellectuals view religion in any form as, itself, a type of “darkness.” These thinkers assert that those who followed religious beliefs lied to themselves, creating a false reality. They were dominated by emotions, not fact. Religion was seen as contrary to rationality and reason, thus the move towards enlightenment -- a move away from “darkness.” Science and reason gained ascendancy, progressing steadily during and after the Reformation and Age of Enlightenment.

To some extent, the period of the Dark Ages remains obscure to modern onlookers. The tumult of the era, its religious conflict and denigration, and debatable time period all work together to shroud the period in diminished light.

The early Italian Renaissance poet Petrarch is usually credited with ascribing the term to the period after the Fall of Rome until his contemporary age's rediscovery of classical language and literature:

It is generally accepted that the term was invented by Petrarch in the 1330s. Writing of those who had come before him, he said that "amidst the errors there shone forth men of genius, no less keen were their eyes, although they were surrounded by darkness and dense gloom" (Mommsen, 1942). Christian writers had traditional metaphors of "light versus darkness" to describe "good versus evil." Petrarch was the first to co-opt the metaphor and give it secular meaning by reversing its application. Classical Antiquity, so long considered the "dark age" for its lack of Christianity, was now seen by Petrarch as the age of "light" because of its cultural achievements, while Petrarch's time, lacking such cultural achievements, was now seen as the age of darkness.

Why did Petrarch call it an age of darkness? Petrarch spent much of his time traveling through Europe rediscovering and republishing the classic Latin and Greek texts. He wanted to restore the classical Latin language to its former purity. Humanists saw the preceding nine hundred year period as a time of stagnation. They saw history unfolding not along the religious outline of St. Augustine's Six Ages of the World (from Adam to Noah, from Noah to Abraham, from Abraham to David, from David to the exile of the Hebrews in Babylon, from the return to the time of Jesus, the Christian era) but in cultural (or secular) terms, through the progressive developments of Classical ideals, literature, and art.

Petrarch wrote that history had had two periods: the Classic period of the Romans and Greeks, followed by a time of darkness, in which he saw himself as still living. Humanists believed one day the Roman Empire would rise again and restore Classic cultural purity. The concept of the European Dark Ages thus began as an ideological campaign by humanists to promote Classical culture, and was therefore not a neutral historical analysis. It was invented to express disapproval of one period in time, and the promotion of another. [Emphasis added!]

Tomorrow on the Son Rise Morning Show: The Bad Popes

Perhaps you remember the days before amazon.com when the Barnes & Noble catalog came in the mail with lists of bargain books. One of the remainders they listed--and stocked in their brick and mortar stores--was E.R. Chamberlin's book, The Bad Popes.

Matt Swaim and I will continue our series on Church History Apologetics on the Son Rise Morning Show, held over by Annie Mitchell demand, tomorrow morning at 7:45 a.m. Eastern time/6:45 a.m. Central time.

I will continue to occupy this time slight every third Monday of the month as we discuss different historical issues. Please note that Monday, October 19 is also the anniversary of St. Philip Howard's death as a martyr in chains, held in the Tower of London, in 1595, so I will be certain to mention him too.

Listen live here, on Sacred Heart Radio.

Sir Thomas Elyot's Connections with Thomas More

Sir Thomas Elyot, born around 1490, son of Sir Richard Elyot, died March 26, 1546. According to The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Volume III Renascence and Reformation:

Elyot had no university training. He was educated at home and, at a comparatively early age, had acquired a good knowledge of Latin, Greek and Italian. He says that, before he was twenty, he had read Galen and other medical writings with a “worshipful physician,” conjectured to have been Linacre.

His earliest work, The Boke of the Governour, the best known of his writings, made him famous and probably proved his introduction to the career as a diplomatic agent in which he spent the greater part of his life. It is a lengthy and exhaustive treatise on the education which those who are destined to govern ought to receive. It begins with a discussion of the various kinds of commonwealths, and sets forth the advantages of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. The author decides that monarchy is the best form of government; but it demands the appointment of subordinate rulers over the various parts of the kingdom who are to be the eyes, ears, hands and legs of the supreme ruler. They ought to be taken from the “estate called worshipful,” provided they have sufficient virtue and knowledge, but they must be carefully educated. It is the more necessary to insist upon this as education is not valued as it ought to be. Pride looks upon learning as a “notable reproach to a great gentleman,” and lords are apt to ask the price of tutors as they demand the qualification of cooks. . . . 

Elyot’s reputation among his contemporaries rested on more than his Boke of the Governour. He wrote The Castel of Helth, full of prescriptions and remedies largely selected from Galen and other medical authorities of antiquity. His two tracts: A swete and devoute sermon of Holy Saynt Ciprian, of Mortalitie of Man and The Rules of a Christian lyfe made by Picus, erle of Mirandula, both translated into Englyshe, provided food for the soul. His translations from Latin and Greek into English, made at a time when all were anxious to share in classical learning, and only a few possessed a knowledge of the classical languages sufficient to enable them to share its benefits, were very popular and were reprinted over and over again. To this class belong: The Doctrine of Princes, made by the noble oratour Isocrates, and translated out of Greke in to Englishe; The Bankette of Science (a collection of sayings translated from the Fathers); The Education or Bringinge up of Children, translated out of Plutarche; The Image of Governance, compiled of the actes and sentences notable of the moste noble Emperour Alexander Severus, late translated out of Greke into Englyshe and others of a like kind. Henry VIII himself encouraged Elyot in the compilation on his Latin-English lexicon: The Dictionary of Syr T. Eliot, knyght, with its later title, Bibliotheca Eliotae. This dictionary and his translations continued to be appreciated in a wonderful manner for two generations at least. If Erasmus popularised the classical renascence for scholars, Elyot rendered it accessible to the mass of the people who had no acquaintance with the languages of antiquity.

Elyot was also a friend of Sir Thomas More, a friendship with did not help him at Court during the 1530's. He acknowledged that friendship but protested his loyalty to Henry VIII was greater. When he traveled on diplomatic missions to persuade Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor to be more positive about Henry VIII's annulment of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, he was accused of being lukewarm in his efforts. Although Elyot was involved in the suppression of the monasteries, but he did not benefit or receive any spoils. Like More, he was a proponent of education for women and he married one of Thomas More's students, Margaret Barrow. In 1540 he wrote The Defence of Good Women, espousing the view that an educated wife would be an excellent companion for her husband. Queen Zenobia of Palmyra in that book may represent Queen Katherine of Aragon, who was certainly well-educated and concerned for the education of the Princess Mary.

According to this review of Greg Walker's 2005 book, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation, Elyot was indeed frustrated by his lack of success in Henry's Court:

The five chapters in section two describe and discuss the works of Sir Thomas Elyot within the context of the King's 'Great Matter', and the repeated frustrations of Elyot's desire for public office. Elyot's literary career apparently tracked his political one as he moved from the early optimism of his prescriptive work, The Book Named the Governor (1530–31), to the later reworking of classical Roman history in The Image of Governance (1540–41), which is read here, alongside Uwe Baumann's arguments from 1998–9 (for example), as a satire on contemporary life. Elyot's preface to this later book only paid lip-service to 'a measured defence of the Henrician via media' (p. 160), as Professor Walker, following George Bernard, describes Henry's 'chosen' religious policy of these years.

Elyot's fruitless search for a job at the centre of government, in particular a place on the privy council, and his real or imagined sense of grievance against Thomas Cranmer who succeeded where Elyot failed, is a familiar story. Its poignancy and its impact on his writing have also been discussed by Elyot's several biographers and by Professor Walker, briefly, in another book, but the detail and the clarity of its exposition here are to be welcomed. This section has a good narrative structure, and gives Elyot's story a satisfying emotional, as well as intellectual, coherence.

Elyot was on another diplomatic mission to the Court of the Holy Roman Emperor when Thomas More was tried, condemned and executed. He heard of his friend's death from Charles V, and was much distressed. Elyot did not profit at all from his work for Henry VIII because as a diplomat he bore the expenses of travel and hospitality. He had an estate in Carlton, Cambridgeshire and was buried in St. Peter's Church there.

Conventional Wisdom Overthrown

Whenever Renaissance art and architecture is discussed, someone says that a certain work was the first since ancient Greece or Rome. The conventional wisdom is that Donatello's bronze David was the first free-standing male nude since antiquity. Perhaps (even though there is a fig leaf) that's not quite true--Tullio Lombardo's Adam might claim that title.

The sculpture has been restored--it was broken into hundreds of pieces when its pedestal collapsed in 2002--and is back on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. According to the exhibition website, its return is important not just because Adam has been restored after his fall, but because the Met developed new processes and techniques for restoration:

The life-size marble statue of Adam, carved by Tullio Lombardo (Italian, ca. 1455–1532), is among the most important works of art from Renaissance Venice to be found outside that city today. Made in the early 1490s for the tomb of Doge Andrea Vendramin, it is the only signed sculpture from that monumental complex. The serene, idealized figure, inspired by ancient sculpture, is deceptively complex. Carefully manipulating composition and finish, Tullio created God's perfect human being, but also the anxious victim of the serpent's wiles.

In 2002, Adam was gravely damaged in an accident. Committed to returning it to public view, the Museum undertook a conservation treatment that has restored the sculpture to its original appearance to the fullest extent possible.

The exhibition allows Adam to be viewed in the round and explains this unprecedented twelve-year research and conservation project. It also inaugurates a new permanent gallery for Venetian and northern Italian sculpture. The installation of this gallery was made possible by Assunta Sommella Peluso, Ignazio Peluso, Ada Peluso, and Romano I. Peluso.

The website includes videos of the process of putting Adam back together again, and to describe the statue's fascinating imbalance--Adam may be ready to eat the "apple", the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. He holds the fruit and  his expression is anxious; although his body looks balanced and poised when seem from the front, but from another angle, on the right, he is counterbalanced in an uncomfortable pose--his weight looks even more strangely distributed when viewed from the left. I'm referring to and examining photos from the articles on the website, here and here. Tullio created the sculpture to reflect the image of God in Adam through the beauty of the statue and the crisis of the fall through the tension and anxiety depicted in the marble.

Obviously, the restoration of this statue of Adam after its fall reminds any Christian of the fall and rise of the Old Adam through the Paschal Sacrifice of the New Adam--Romans 5:15-19; 1 Corinthians 15:45-49--and this site describes how St. Paul compares and contrasts the two.

Hebrew Manuscripts at Fox's Corpus Christi

In The Wall Street Journal, Richard Carwardine writes "Out of the Anglo-Jewish Past", about a Hebrew prayer book in the Corpus Christi College library:

Corpus Christi College, which will reach its 500th birthday in 2017, is celebrated as Oxford's first Renaissance institution. The bishop-statesman Richard Fox, right-hand man to the Tudor monarchs Henry VII and Henry VIII, founded the college to instruct students in the sciences and the languages of the Bible: Hebrew and Greek. From the first, Corpus took a lead in Jewish learning and built an acclaimed library. Among the scores of manuscripts the college used for teaching its young men were Hebrew texts, several donated by the first president and noted collector, John Claymond. How and when he acquired them we don't know—and this is only a part of their mystery. They are the jewels of a small but spectacular collection of medieval Anglo-Jewish books.

These materials shaped the scholarship that gave Corpus a primary role in the translation of the King James Bible. The 400th anniversary of that publication, in 2011, sparked particular interest in the Hebrew manuscripts at Corpus. These include commentaries by the acclaimed medieval French rabbi, Rashi; other items present passages from the Hebrew Bible with a literal translation in Latin written, from the outset, directly above the Hebrew text. They point to the cooperation between Jewish and Christian scholars, eager to help non-Jews learn Hebrew and understand the primary sources of a shared scriptural tradition. The texts could equally have been used to teach Jews Latin—not impossible, given that most English law, property transactions and accounting were conducted in Latin. Command of the language would have been especially beneficial to Jewish financiers in doing business.

Read the rest there. Note that Mr Carwardine is the president of Corpus Christi College, which will observe its 500th anniversary in 2017. More about the College's Hebrew manuscripts here at the Bodleian Library website from a previous exhibition.

From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, Thomas Cahill Strikes Again!

Years ago I read Thomas Cahill's How the Irish Saved Civilization (which should probably be titled "How the Irish Saved Western Civilization") and several years ago I toted Mysteries of the Middle Ages with me on a trip to Paris--it was fun to read about Heloise and Abelard in situ, especially one day while seated in Au Sauvignon, hearing two American ex pats discussing the end of one of their love affairs. I almost wanted to tell them that love affairs can end much more badly! Cahill's animus toward St. Bernard of Clairvaux and his relentless hatred of any pope or bishop, any member of the Church's hierarchy, wore on me after awhile. As an antidote, I went to the Musee de Cluny and reveled in some of the great religious art of the medieval era. My journal for that visit includes the note that Cahill really didn't understand the Middle Ages, because he didn't understand the Church or the Catholic faith--and his hermeneutic of understanding the past by how much it conforms to current values, specifically his values, kept him from entering in to the past and trying to comprehend it.

Sounds like that's the issue with his latest book in the "Hinges of History" series, according to Michael B. Kelly in The Catholic World Report:

Since publishing the amusing How the Irish Saved Civilization in 1995, best-selling author Thomas Cahill has added five further volumes to his history of the West, the Hinges of History series. The latest volume, Heretics and Heroes: How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Changed Our World, contains Cahill’s take on the great European intellectual, cultural, and religious movements of the period now commonly referred to by historians as “early modern”. According to the author, this series aims to “retell the story of the Western world as the story of the great gift-givers, those who entrusted to our keeping one or another of the singular treasures that make up the patrimony of the West.” Such “gift-givers” left behind “a world more varied and complex, more awesome and delightful, more beautiful and strong” than the one they had entered. . . .

But over-simplifications and reliance upon older scholarship aside, the main problem with the book is its neglect of its advertised task, i.e., explaining “How Renaissance Artists and Reformation Priests Changed Our World.” Heretics and Heroes, at length, is essentially a search through history for characters presenting features that appear “modern” to the searcher. He then provides lively biographical vignettes that emphasize these features, and (as it were) announces—“Voila, modernity in the Renaissance (or Reformation).”

But simply identifying new trends and developments in art and religion in the early modern period is not the same as explaining how modernity came to be. Emblematic for the whole work may be Cahill’s account of the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, when it was momentously resolved that each prince in the Empire could decide his own domain’s religion (cujus regio, ejus religio)—Cahill snappily explains, “And so it became” (262). And apparently that is that. Readers wishing some sustained argument about the gestation of the modern world will be disappointed.

In the end, Heretics and Heroes is not an attempt to understand, or explain, the past from the perspective of the people of the past. It is a history of progress towards us, or, rather, towards those of us who are truly modern, in the right way. It is a peculiar kind of hagiographical enterprise—the scouring of history to find the people that are most like us. In fact, in his final chapter Cahill apologizes that, notwithstanding his good intentions, he has produced so many pages about “know-it-alls . . . prescribers and proscribers,” the “excluders” and limiters, “who want their circle—the circle of the saved—to be exclusive, as small and as (uncomfortably) intimate as possible.”

Read the rest here. Can you imagine what Cahill will do when he discusses the French Revolution? Surely the Enlightenment and the "Age of Revolution" will be the next "Hinge of History"!

Queen Christina Abdicates to Become Catholic

Queen Christina of Sweden abdicated the throne on June 6, 1654. I read Veronica Buckley's 2005 biography of Queen Christina when it came out in paperback.

You may read an excerpt on line here:

Not unlike the elusive figure played by Greta Garbo, the real Queen Christina stood among the most flamboyant and controversial figures of the seventeenth century. All of Sweden could not contain her ambition or quench her thirst for adventure. Freed from her crown, she cut a breathtaking path across Europe -- spending madly, seeking out a more majestic throne, and stirring up trouble wherever she went. With a dazzling narrative voice and unerring sense of the period, Veronica Buckley goes beyond historical myth to breathe life into an extraordinary woman who set the world on fire and became an icon of her age -- a time of enormous change when Europe stood at the crossroads of religion and science, antiquity and modernity, war and peace.

Although the book blurb highlights the Garbo movie, that movie's abdication scene does not site Christina's religious reasons at all--but as I recall from reading Buckley's book, it's not that clear how serious she was about her conversion. As this New York Times review notes, Christina is an odd character, so gifted and yet so thwarted in accomplishment:

though her first-act curtain was arguably the most dramatic of any in 17th-century Europe, she had no second act. (Her patronage of the arts, however, was hardly inconsiderable: both Scarlatti and Corelli conducted her private orchestra, and Bernini, who did a bronze bust of her, testified with apparent sincerity that she knew ''more about sculpture than I do.'') Buckley returns time and again to the subject of Christina's deficient self-knowledge, but serves up at least one quotation that implies the ex-queen knew herself, if not her sex, better than one might think: ''Women who rule,'' she mused in an unfinished autobiography, ''only make themselves ridiculous one way or the other. I myself am no exception.''

For all Christina's follies and foibles, it's hard not to feel a certain fondness for her. She rises from the pages of this richly evocative book (Buckley's first) as a complex, thoroughly believable human being, by turns maddening and endearing, admirable and absurd -- a bizarre cross between Francis of Assisi, Peggy Guggenheim, Eric the Red and Wile E. Coyote. 

The Middle Ages Weren't That Dark/The Renaissance Wasn't That Bright

I'm reading G.K. Chesterton's The Thing, as I mentioned, and I think he would appreciate this article, which turns the tables on the usual paradigm re: the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. That table turning is something Chesterton does all the time.

First, the article, from The Telegraph by Dominic Selwood, "The bloody underside of the 'civilised' Renaissance":

If you looked only at the luscious paintings by Fra Angelico and Botticelli, and if you listened only to the soaring ethereal voices of Palestrina and Byrd, you would think the Renaissance was a release of centuries of pent-up creativity. You would conclude, as was once fashionable, that when the Renaissance detonated in late 1300s Italy, it sprayed hope, colour, and sensuality into a monochrome and rigid medieval world grappling with a plague that had slain a third of Europe. [In case you think Selwood is exaggerating, remember William Manchester's A World Lit Only by Fire.]

But you would be wrong for many reasons.

For starters, there was nothing monochrome about the medieval world. You need only look at the extraordinary renovations now under way at Chartres cathedral, where they are restoring the hulking grey walls and statues to their former brightly decorated brilliance, injecting a vibrancy that those who grew up with 1960s architecture can barely take in.

Equally as importantly, there was a lot the Renaissance, for all its splendour, left unchanged. It may have been a celebration of living rather than earthly preparation for an afterlife, but it did not immediately improve life for everyone. For example, as the oligarchs of the day splashed their immense wealth around, patronizing works and monuments to their eternal glory, the majority of the population remained bound to the unforgiving and harsh drudgery of subsistence level agricultural and artisanal life.

We sometimes have a slightly deluded view of the period, seeing it as the dawning of a civilised age of "high culture", with an intense new focus on art, writing, and music – quite unlike anything that had gone before.

Selwood goes on to comment on two horrible executions--dark highlights of the Renaissance--that of Girolamo Savonarola (mentioned in the context of the anniversary of his "Bonfire of the Vanities" on February 7, 1497) and the other of Mary, Queen of Scots on February 8, 1587.

As he describes Savonarola's end:

In the time-honoured fashion, a kangaroo court was duly convened. Savonarola and his two most loyal fellow Dominican friars were first tried by civil judges, then by Church commissioners, although neither result was ever in doubt. As one of the judges noted before the trial, “We shall have a fine bonfire tonight.”

The three priests were quickly convicted, sentenced, stripped, walked over spikes, then hanged and burned in the central Piazza della Signoria. The once-adoring Florentines danced around the pyre, and the city’s children threw stones at the burning corpses.

And then he describes the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (illustrated above):

It was a tawdry affair. Mary was not permitted a priest of her religion, so said her own prayers quietly in Latin. She remained poised and calm. Among her last words, she forgave her executioner with all her heart because “now, I hope, you shall make an end of all my troubles”.

The first blow with the axe missed her neck and took off part of her head. The next was not hard enough, But the third finally severed her neck. Her dog, bloodied by the gore, lay between her head and shoulders, refusing to be parted from her. According to an eye witness, “her lips stirred up and down a quarter of an hour after her head was cut off”.

As a final insult, her request to be buried in Rheims was overruled, and she was given a Protestant funeral in Peterborough.

Read the rest of the article here (which also ties in the forthcoming visit of Queen Elizabeth and Pope Francis at the Vatican).

Now, for Chesterton's turning the tables: in an article titled "The Early Bird in History", Chesterton notes "there's a common and current charge against the Catholic Church, that she is, as the phrase goes, always behind the times."

Not that there's anything wrong with that, he says, when you consider the times, but then he notes at least one instance in which the Catholic Church was far ahead of anyone else and in ways that no other institution had caught up with (in 1929, at least). He examines the rehabilitation of St. Joan of Arc. Chesterton notes that her canonization may have taken centuries, but her rehabilitation did not. The Church investigated, acknowledged the injustice, and cleared her name during the lifetime of her family-- of her mother. 

Then Chesterton considers some other cases: Did Edward III repent of the brutal execution of William Wallace by Edward I?  Did Elizabeth I rehabilitate Sir Thomas More, acknowledge the error of his trial, conviction, and execution as a traitor? Of course they did not. 

He acknowledges that in the 19th century the English did "make a romance about Wallace" and finally start thinking of St. Joan of Arc with more favor and recognition of their own tawdry role. (Shakespeare's depiction of Joan, he notes, features "insular insults".)

Chesterton has two more historical parallels: have the English honored Daniel O'Connell, the catalyst of Catholic Emancipation within one hundred years of that great milestone (1829-1929)? Have they accepted Robert Emmet of Ireland as well as they've accepted George Washington of the United States of America? No--in 1929, they had not. Thus, Chesterton demonstrates that the Catholic Church was not so far behind the times as "people" say, and in fact, the secular world is really far behind in the process of acknowledging past injustices.

You've have to read the rest of the essay, particularly as Chesterton cites how far ahead of their times the Jesuits were! 

Next week, I might have to share what Chesterton writes about Dean Inge and Thomas More--it's funny, true, and surprising at the same time.

Regine Pernoud Would Agree!

Regine Pernoud wrote the book shown above, published by Ignatius Press and translated by Anne Englund Nash, and she would agree with Stephen Cooper, who "argues that we should resist using ‘medieval’ as another word for backward." He goes on to outline what we should know about the medieval period, especially the 15th century, in his article titled "Positively Medieval" in History Today:

The work of the late Dom David Knowles showed that monasticism was far from corrupt and decadent, although the heroism and austerity of the High Middle Ages may have been lost. Eamon Duffy has demonstrated that religion was thriving at parish level. In The Practice of Kingship Jeremy Catto argues that most 15th-century bishops were graduates, learned men who were both efficient administrators and conscientious diocesans. As for the origins of Protestantism, McFarlane was sceptical that these were to be found in the Lollard heresy. He showed that this had been rooted out of Oxford and respectable society by the time of the Lollard rebellion known as Oldcastle’s Revolt (1414). It survived, though tenaciously, among country ‘bumpkins’ only. By implication the origins of the Reformation lay not in the decline of the medieval Church but in the difficult family life of Henry VIII.

We can see for ourselves, in the glories of Perpendicular architecture in the parish churches, cathedrals, the abbeys, chantry chapels and collegiate churches and in the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, that the Church was by no means in decline in the 15th century. On the contrary, there was a flowering of piety, especially lay piety. Men were building and re-building to the glory of God and for the benefit of their souls, right down to the Reformation. What changed, when that came, was doctrine and fashion. The abbeys and the chantries were torn down because men had ceased to believe in the notion of Purgatory, at least officially, though their late medieval ancestors (apart from the Lollards) had taken this so seriously.

In secular architecture it was traditionally the Tudor period that saw the transition from castle to manor house; W.G. Hoskins popularised the idea of a ‘Great Rebuilding’ of more humble dwellings between 1550 and 1640. Yet this does not mean that there was no rebuilding in the 15th century. A later building may obscure an earlier one. Take Richard Beauchamp, 13th Earl of Warwick (1382-1439), father-in-law of that quintessential ‘medieval’ figure, Warwick the Kingmaker. He built or rebuilt castles and manor houses at Warwick, Hanley, Drayton Basset, Elmsley, Caversham and Hanslope and, when he died in 1439, he was buried in a magnificent tomb in St Mary’s Church in Warwick. This has a bronze effigy and weepers, the work of a Flemish master, just as beautiful and impressive as the much better known ‘Renaissance’ effigy of Henry VII by Torrigiano in Westminster Abbey. Yet, according to traditional chronology, Warwick is a ‘medieval’ figure, while Henry VII is ‘early modern’. In fact, there are wonderful 15th-century timber and plaster buildings everywhere one looks in England, but we have become accustomed to describe these as ‘Tudor’.

In literature, we have been taught that Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343-1400) was a genius, but John Lydgate (c.1370-c.1451) was a dunce; and that the whole of the 15th century, at least before the advent of the printing press, was a fallow period. Yet in his own day men enjoyed Lydgate and rated him. Henry V and his brothers, Bedford and Gloucester, were all bibliophiles; and there is a good case for saying that English Humanism began in the 15th, rather than in the 16th, century (see Daniel Wakelin’s Humanism, Reading and English Literature 1450-1530). In law, we have been taught to think that ‘medieval’ means backward and ‘modern’ means advanced; but it is in the works of Sir John Fortescue (c.1394-1476) that we find the classic statement that torture is contrary to the common law of England, while in the 17th century the state used it routinely, at least so far as Catholic conspirators were concerned.

"We were taught," "we have been taught"--when Cooper uses such phrases in the article, the traditional Whig is being knocked askew yet again. That old Whig view, espoused by historians like David Hume and James Froude in Scotland and England, and adopted by the Enlightenment philosophes of France, that the Middle Ages were the Dark Ages, worthy of nothing but ridicule, avoided by historians because of their superstition, papistry, and obscurity--it's still with us today. Think of William Manchester's A World Lit Only by Fire, which even Thomas Cahill notes is filled with Anti-Catholic prejudice and "one howler after another" (see Cahill's Mysteries of the Middle Ages, which demonstrates some of his own unexamined prejudies with a ridiculous emphasis on attacking George W. Bush and promoting "Voice of the Faithful" and "Call to Action").

Pernoud's slender volume is filled with almost Chestertonian paradoxes: one of the most memorable to me now is that she contrasts medieval Gothic and renaissance Classicism in architecture by noting that the architects, even though anonymous in the Middle Ages, innovated in developing the soaring perpendicular Gothic cathedrals: renaissance architects copied the architecture of Greece and Rome. I enjoyed Pernoud's debunking of the myths (the same myths Manchester repeated and Cahill regretted); I enjoyed her book on Women in the Age of the Cathedrals even more.

I was reading it on an airplane years ago, and another (female) passenger expressed some deprecatory interest--"I expect there's not much to say about women in those days, since we were so oppressed". You might anticipate my reply (but I'll tell you anyway)--"Au contraire; you should read Pernoud's book: you would discover how much economic and intellectual freedom women had in the Middle Ages!" I doubt she read the book, don't you?. Someday, I hope these old Whig ideas will be completely debunked and exposed, but it will take a long time for the easy prejudgements Pernod describes in Those Terrible Middle Ages and I experienced in the late twentieth century to be replaced by more thoughtful appreciation of an essential period of European history.