Dawn

I feel like I've been flying through books lately! The latest to fall within my maw is The Bright Ages, a fresh look at the Middle Ages. This has been on my list for some time, and has coincidentally arrived soon after the early-medieval novel Menewood and the post-medieval video game Pentiment. The Bright Ages covers roughly the span between them.

 

The two authors are professors of history, but the book is definitely written for a popular audience: to some extent they're arguing against pre-existing notions of the medieval era, but for the most part those are widely known views, not obscure inter-academy debates. Their title gives away the thesis: our common perception of these years is as "The Dark Ages", when civilization collapsed after the fall of the Roman Empire, continental Europe slid into barbarism and lost a thousand years of development before recovering during the Renaissance. The authors combat this with what they call "The Bright Ages": an idea that the light of progress never went out, and that people during this period continually sought good things: often in religion, but also through classical philosophy, art, trade, and much more frequent contact with non-European peoples than we tend to imagine.

The overall thesis is truthful but also seems so broad that it's hard to get excited about: basically, "People were complex, a lot of different people were doing different things for different reasons at different times and places, and any attempt to summarize this reality will inevitably omit or misrepresent a lot that was going on." Which, okay, I buy that, but also it feels less satisfying than a straightforward "X caused Y" analysis. This is kind of how I feel about Capital & Ideology, too: brilliant book, and very effective at exposing incorrect ideas, but harder to wrap your head around and draw concrete lessons from.

Given that, the authors come up with a great structure to make this comprehensible and interesting. Each chapter progresses slightly forward in time and relocates to another location on the European continent. We're essentially going on a tour through time and space, witnessing what was happening at certain given moments. One thing I love about this is it doesn't pretend to be a comprehensive catalog of everything that happened during a thousand years: we've specifically just dropping in on particular moments. But we can see common themes between those moments, as well as critical variations, and so pull together a rough framework for understanding this era.

I won't recap everything in the book, but will comment on a few things that struck me. An early, provocative assertion is that Rome didn't fall. Not really. Yes, the city was conquered - multiple times! - but, it had been conquered multiple times in the past as well. Their conquerors often stayed, and remade themselves as Romans, and ruled and defended the city, including the Romans inside who had previously conquered it and made themselves Roman. And while the western Rome lost effective control of her empire, there was also an eastern Rome in Constantinople which continued to exert power and wealth through much of the Mediterranean for most of the Middle Ages - in that sense, Rome just moved.

The biggest player throughout the book is Christianity and the church. It is bookended with Christian art, first with a beautiful Byzantine-style chapel constructed in Ravenna, and ultimately with Dante writing the Divine Comedy. In between we see the evolving power of the church. Early on, the Bishop of Rome seems to be a small, fragile position; by the end, the Pope plays a dominant role across the continent and beyond. We see the development of monasteries (including a fun shout-out to Saint Hilda of Whitby!), the tug of war between center and periphery, monks and clergy, ecumenism and orthodoxy. The attitude of the (Catholic) Church shifts over generations, but overall, most of the major religious intolerance we tend to associate with the Middle Ages came late in the era. For the most part, the church saw themselves as supporters: supporters of stability, of security, of comfort and salvation. Religion was, and didn't merely represent, real power: having someone pray for you was seen as effective, not just upholding a tradition or expressing a hope.

A lot of religious and military activities were driven by apocalyptic mindsets. There was a dominant thinking (then as now!) that the world was heading towards the "end times", with very limited opportunity left for conversion before Christ returned to separate the wheat from the chaff. The authors note, though, that while we tend to think of the word "apocalypse" as meaning an ending, the word actually means a revelation, and can better be thought of as a transformation. Not so much the ending of one thing, more about evolving into the next thing. With this definition, "apocalypse" is actually a really great way to frame and consider The Bright Ages: as with all of history, it is eternally revealing and transforming itself into what will come next.

Later in the book, the authors mention that in many ways, the Middle Ages were one of the more egalitarian times in history. Yes, life sucked; but for the average person it didn't suck much more than in the classical period, and may have been better during this period than it would become in the Renaissance. Some periods like the 12th century have been described by historians as "mini-Renaissances" where the times improved; but the lives of women worsened during those periods. As always, it matters who tells the story.

Throughout the book, we see many examples of people from various faiths and racial backgrounds living in and traveling between European lands. Even in the far-away island of England, there have always been North Africans on the shore. (I was separately struck by this in a recent visit to an exhibit at the de Young Museum, which included some very striking Tudor court portraits of Islamic and African emissaries). A major motivation for writing this book seems to have been to directly challenge some of the mythologized ideas of a "pure" "western" "white" land, which is an animating drive behind a lot of white supremacists. This isn't just bad ideology, it's incorrect history. The authors directly address this, which I liked, even as it for better or worse makes the book feel less academic. In my opinion, everything is political, and everyone has their bias: choosing to support the status quo is itself a bias. It's good to know where people stand and that they care about their subject. (Of course, it helps that I agree with the authors' politics!)

A lot of these ideas and observations are familiar to me, most recently as a result of reading "A Splendid Exchange". In particular, Bernstein spent a lot of time pointing out how familiar Europeans were with the rest of the world: even after the fall of Rome, they knew that silk came from the east, and they frequently interacted with Arabs, Africans, Persians and others during all this time.

There's a really interesting theme at the end about the conflict between medieval perspectives and "humanist" perspectives. The very phrase "dark ages" and our understanding of it comes from Petrarch, an early Renaissance Italian, and it's helpful to think of the term "dark ages" as serving his agenda rather than an empirical truth. The Renaissance thinkers and artists were propping up their own project by denigrating what had come before, making their own contributions seem better by making past creations seem worse. (Of course, the Bright Ages' authors don't think that medieval history was "good" and Renaissance history "bad", but each had their own ups and downs, their own bright and dark moments.)

The book focuses on a particular debate held in Spain over the relationship the European world should have with the New World. Interestingly, the "humanist" side of nascent Renaissance thinkers tended to favor imperialism, domination and chattel slavery, while the "medieval" side of traditional Catholic monks favored equality, humility, tolerance and integration. (Not to say that that attitude was always the case - this book also highlights plenty of times where medieval people favored the idea of conquering and ruling foreigners.)

I've been meaning for ages to write a blog post about this topic, and maybe one day I will, but I'm increasingly struck by how often (at least in my personal experience), people with genuine religious belief tend to practice humanist ideals like compassion and egalitarianism, while non-religious people are more likely to express openly misogynistic, transphobic, or racist views. This seems like the opposite of what you would expect (and what's commonly portrayed in media), with "narrow-minded" religion versus "open-minded" secularism. I'm still trying to work through my thoughts, but I think that this chapter in The Bright Ages is getting at one part of it: a certain type of genuine religious belief imbues all of humanity with value and sees each individual as equally important. That isn't to say that morality requires religion - of course it doesn't! - nor that religion inevitably produces morality - obviously it doesn't! But supposed rationalists can easily self-rationalize how they're superior to others, which leads the way to all sort of terrible events in the modern era.

As I mentioned before, it's hard to draw a simple, clear lesson or theme from the book. The authors are trying to express the complexity, multiplicity and contradictions of the medieval era, refusing to fit it into a box or try to invent a new box to contain it. I think that is helpful: because it is more true, because it de-mythologizes some of the historical fantasies that still drive reactionary politics, because it opens up curiosity for learning more rather than drawing a cloak over it. It also is a fresh reminder to me personally that, while I tend to think of certain historical periods as being "exciting" and other ones as "boring", it's all part of one big story, and the closer you examine any given time the more intriguing things you'll discover.