In my previous post I discussed the idea of the Global Middle Ages, a fairly new aspect of the study of medieval history, taken up in part to counter the white nationalists who want to see the Middle Ages as a model for a contained, all-white, all-Christian society, because in fact the Middle Ages wasn't like that. Today I want to continue that discussion.
As well as interacting with people outside of western Europe, especially through trade, medieval people recognized a large range of diversity at home. For one thing, they were not all Christian. Christians and Muslims lived side by side, sometimes amicably, sometimes not, all around the Mediterranean. There were Jews in most medieval cities, making the loans that ensured commercial development when Christian lenders wouldn't.
And Christianity itself had enormous variation, from differences like Scandinavians sometimes drinking beer instead of wine for the Eucharist, to outright heresy. Even if there was general agreement on theology and liturgy, churchmen and secular rulers always differed on who ought to be in charge. The Holy Roman emperors spent much of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries at war with the popes. And there were always doubters.
Skin color was not as big a concern in a primarily Caucasian population as it is in modern Western countries, but there were always what we would call "brown" people in the mix. Outright Blacks were rare, to the extent that a mating between a White and a Black was imagined to produce someone spotted black and white, like a cow. A Black person was intriguing.
But there is more to trying to make the Middle Ages global that recognizing that it was not a uniformly white, Christian era. Recently scholars have also tried looking again at the chronology that western historians take for granted. First there was antiquity, the story goes, then around 500 the Middle Ages begin, to end around 1500, leading to the "early modern" period, then the French Revolution and American Revolution (we adopted our Constitution in 1789, same year as the French Revolution), and we're into Modern.
You can see where this is going. Modern is good! Like us! The early modern period was preparing for us! The Middle Ages were that time in the middle, after antiquity (from which we can get Greek democracy, Roman law, and early Christianity), before modernity sets in, a dull middle period "best forgotten." Pretty clear why medievalists aren't happy with this.
Historians (of whatever place and time) need to avoid teleology, that is looking at the past as only interesting if it leads to what we like in the present. So one might look at the English Parliament as an example of representative democracy, which is good, and leave out the tidbit that it originally only met if called by the king (kings of course being bad).
Looking at the Middle Ages, or for that matter any historical period, teleologically, as leading to us, ignores all the different modernities of different modern countries. Global studies helps shake us out of that. While Columbus and Martin Luther, on either side of the year 1500, were obviously crucial to Europe, with new continents to conquer and the rise of Protestantism, 1500 is a pretty meaningless date for most of Asia and Africa. For that matter, though South America quickly felt the impact of Columbus, North America really did not for another century.
The planet is too big and has too many different cultures to be able to study the whole thing properly. But by not taking our historical periods and our dates as obvious and absolute (even "the year 1500" is predicated on being able to date the birth of a Jewish boy who grew up to be considered a trouble maker), we can make fewer assumptions about what was important about our ancestors (both biological and institutional).
History done right helps human understanding. The Middle Ages (as we're stuck calling it) was full of people both like and very unlike us. Thus we can practice understanding people by starting with medieval people, before branching out to those with very different histories.
Yes, many medieval institutions led to ours, including representative democracy and the legal profession and banking and universities. Many of the other things that concerned them have no modern analogues. We'll understand these ancestors better if we don't start with the assumption that they were the embodiment of what the white nationalists today would like to be.
© C. Dale Brittain 2024
For more on medieval culture, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback.
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