In contrast, historical fiction set in the early modern period (roughly 1500-1800) shows ordinary life as brutal and nasty. People are ill, victims of violence, hungry, smelly, and surrounded by death. So of course I started to wonder, why is this?
In part of course it's due to the Enlightenment. This philosophical movement of the eighteenth century, which saw education and culture as the answer to humanity's problems (to a large extent I agree with them), looked at their past as full of darkness, ignorance, superstition, and misery (here they and I part company). They saw a possible future with much better lives if only everyone could be educated, exposed to finer things, learn scientific approaches, and have at least a little tiny movement toward democratic institutions. The Enlightenment inspired both the American Constitution and the French Revolution.
Thus we shouldn't be surprised that the French Revolution was ready to get rid of anything "old fashioned," which included what they called feudalism (see more here about why medievalists don't buy their definition), religion, and the kings and queens carved on Notre Dame, whose heads they knocked off. (One head recently found is shown below, now in the Cluny museum in Paris.)
But then, early in the nineteenth century, indeed during the Napoleonic era, Sir Walter Scott started writing books set in a romanticized Middle Ages (Ivanhoe has a lot to answer for). As industrialization ('good' according to the Enlightenment, full of science and machines) separated the workers from their products and filled streams with pollution, people yearned for an earlier, better era and decided it was the Middle Ages. This golden glow never fell on the early modern period. The historical novelists followed right along.
That's the Sir Walter Scott memorial in Edinburgh, above.
So people were inspired to see the Middle Ages as better than the early modern period. But there's more to it. If you compare the twelfth century with the seventeenth, the twelfth has to win. The Protestant Reformation had given Christians a reason to kill each other, far outshadowing things like the Albigensian Crusade. In the early modern period you had frequent outbreaks of the Black Death, which had been unknown in the twelfth century (it broke out in the sixth century but then not again until the fourteenth). Its outbreak in London in 1666 was stopped only by the great fire that destroyed most of London. (But hey! it worked! It wasn't actually deliberate.)
This was also the time of the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), which European historians characterize as Europe's worst war ever, even worse than the World Wars for destruction of property and civilian deaths. Cannons had become very effective at killing people. There was a great deal of urban crowding and slums, which hadn't shown up yet in the small-but-growing cities of the twelfth century. Slavery had been revived to cultivate the land in the New World, with an accompanying disdain for non-elite people. The New World had given Europe syphilis, unknown in the Middle Ages (though Europe got their own back, decimating the indigenous population of the Americas with smallpox and measles). Kings were proclaiming themselves kings by divine right, which had not been possible in the Middle Ages. There was a great deal of famine and general misery.
So was life in the twelfth century all happiness? Of course not. There was plenty of violence, hunger, and despair. I'm very happy to be living in the twenty-first century. But if I had to choose, I'd take the twelfth century over the seventeenth every time.
© C. Dale Brittain 2019
For more on medieval history, see my ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.
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