The idea that the Middle Ages were a "dark," crude and ignorant period between the Classical Age and the Renaissance has a little to do with the truth and a great deal to do with how Renaissance thinkers wished to view their own relationships to Classical materials. It was during the Renaissance that the myth that Classical knowledge vanished during the Middle Ages only to be discovered again by Renaissance thinkers was begun. That myth has lasted up to our own time.
Such is the point made by Regine Pernoud in Those Terrible Middle Ages, a book written more than 25 years ago, first published in France and republished by Ignatius Press in English last year.
Pernoud argues that the ideas of Classical thinkers were never lost during the Middle Ages, and in fact the Middle Ages were responsible for preserving that thought and transmitting it to the Renaissance intellectuals.
This idea seems to be accepted, with some qualification, by many writers today. Though there remains a sense (I heard as much propounded in an otherwise excellent documentary on manuscripts on Public Television not long ago) that while Classical thought was preserved by Middle Ages, it was done so by rote mechanical means: monks with no idea of what they were copying simply copied because they were supposed to, like monkeys with typewriters.
This is far from the case, Pernoud says. Instead, the thinkers and artists of the Middle Ages used the knowledge of the Classical thinkers and artists, but viewed this material as a set of tools to use to achieve new styles and visions. It was a slavish devotion to copying Classical styles exactly that led Renaissance thinkers to believe these styles had been forgotten. This was because, from their point of view, the highest possible expressions of beauty and wisdom had been achieved in the Classical period. If these weren’t perfectly replicated in the great works of subsequent periods, those periods must have lost or forgotten them. The opposite was the case.
An excellent book for dispelling myths about a vital period of development (not static bridge) for Western Civilization, as well as for beginning to think about how each of us risks mistakenly relating, either by devotedly imitating or by dismissing as hidebound, the epoch (or even simply the generation) that came before us.
Edited: PC
Article comments
1 - Matthew Bright
In the 12th century, the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church in Byzantium, in a rare display of cooperation simultaneously burned 95% of the classical literature in their possession. Among these were books of Ennius, Sappho, Livy and who knows what else? The justification for this unforgivable vandalism was so that people would be better able to ponder God without those pesky classical distractions.
The Middle Ages were a period of darkness and barbarism that the West was forced to endure as a direct result of being hobbled by Christianity.
I think the Middle Ages gets a better rap than it deserves.
2 - Ernesto
Interesting perspective, thanks for reading the review and for taking the time to respond.
Do you have a citation for your 95 percent figure or is it more an estimate based on an accumulation of reading you've done?
Your criticism brought to mind a passage near the end of the book. Regarding her analysis of the myths about, as well as terribly legitimate criticisms of, the Inquisition during the Middle Ages, Pernoud writes:
It seems that if we pick the worst error(s) of any period and use that error to represent the best of what a period could possibly have had to offer, that period if going to come off awfully badly.
3 - DrPat
Knowledge of Classical architecture and literature are not the only earmarks of the Renaissance - (relative) freedom from the paradigm that everything of value was mentioned in the Bible was another.
The Renaissance was also marked by the last remnant of Dark Ages thinkers using the waning fringes of their power to deal with Renaissance thought as heretical and anathema...
4 - Warren
Interestingly, the Renaissance also helped Christianity. "Ad Fontes" was as much a motto of Reformation Christianity as it was Renaissance thought, and brought a Christianity that was actually more focused on the Bible as the source of theological knowledge, and brought a Bible that everyone was able to read in their own language.