Week 2/Tuesday, 28 September

Readings for the week

"September," from the Très Riches Heures of Jean, Duc de Berry (c. 1416; The Limbourg Brothers)

defining the middle ages

OED definition, "medieval," "Middle Ages" [below]

"Medieval," "Modern," Raymond Williams

"Medieval, The Middle Ages," Fred C. Robinson

"Reflections of a Medievalist: America, Medievalism, and the Middle Ages," Morton W. Bloomfield

"Dreaming of the Middle Ages," Umberto Eco

The uses of the Middle Ages: Manchester, Lederer [below]

Four levels of meaning: one way the Middle Ages defined itself (below)

"Medieval Studies," Anne Middleton

"New Mediaeval Aesthetic," Rebecca Zorach [Wired 2.01, January 1994]

Video: England in the Middle Ages, David Boulton [30 min.]
 

The Oxford English Dictionary:

Middle Age, sb.
The Middle Age, now usually the Middle Ages: the period intermediate between 'ancient' and 'modern' times; in earlier use commonly taken as extending from c. 500 to c 1500; now used without precise definition, but most frequently with reference to the four centuries after A.D. 1000. Cf. mod.L. medium ævum, G. mittelalter, F. moyen âge.

Mediæval, medieval (medi ival, midi ival), a. and sb. [f. L. medius middle + ævum age + AL.]
A. adj. Of, pertaining to or characteristic of the Middle Ages. Of Art, Religion, etc.: Resembling or imitative of the Middle Ages.
B. sb. One who lived in the Middle Ages.
 

The Dark Ages were stark in every dimension. Famines and plague, culminating is the Black Death and its recurrent pandemics, repeatedly thinned the population. Rickets afflicted the survivors. Extraordinary climatic changes brought storms and floods which turned into major disasters because the empire's drainage system, like most of the Imperial infrastructure, was no longer functioning. It says much about the Middle Ages that in the year 1500, after a thousand years of neglect, the roads built by the Romans were still the best on the continent.
. . . Shackled in ignorance, disciplined by fear, and sheathed in superstition, [Europeans] trudged into the sixteenth century in the clumsy, hunched, pigeon-toed gait of rickets victims, their vacant faces, pocked by smallpox, turned blindly toward the future they thought they knew . . .

Then came the Middle Ages, when everyone was middle aged. King Alfred conquered the Dames. King Arthur lived in the Age of Shivery with brave knights on prancing horses and beautiful women. King Harold mustarded his troops before the Battle of Hastings. Joan of Arc was burnt as a steak and was cannonized by Bernard Shaw. And victims of the bluebonnet plague grew boobs on their necks. Finally, Magna Carta provided that no free man should be hanged twice for the same offence.

In Middle Evil times most people were alliterate. The greatest writer of the futile ages was Chaucer who wrote many poems and verses and also wrote literature. During this time people put on morality plays about ghosts, goblins, virgins, and other mythical creatures. Another story was about William Tell, who shot an arrow through an apple while standing on his son's head.