The Middle Ages, “Enlightenment,” and Propaganda

It’s often seemingly hopeless to try to convince people that the Middle Ages was anything other than the caricature often found in popular culture and eighteenth-century commentary. As historian Ralph Raico has noted, other than the Industrial Revolution, there is probably no historical topic in which the general public is more propagandized and more generally wrong than the topic of the Middle Ages. Raico has described how no matter how often he told his students that medieval princes and kings were subject to the law, and constrained in their powers by a variety of religious and political institutions, his students overwhelmingly stated in exams that medieval lords ruled as autocrats. 

Although the general public still thinks of the Middle Ages in terms of images from popular culture, actual historians have long since moved on. This is partly why historians virtually never use the term “the Dark Ages” anymore. And if the term is used, it refers only the early Middle Ages, due to the fact that there is a dearth of documentary and textual evidence form that time period. The High Middle Ages—the time of the great cathedrals and urbanization in Europe—was hardly a Dark Age, of course, and the idea that the Middle Ages was a time of unchanging stagnation was jettisoned long ago.

In his lectures, Yale historian Paul Freedman notes that “Dark Age” is now generallyused as a pejorative term. Yet, there is no agreement on when these Dark Ages supposedly occurred. Freedman comments on the how the historiography of the Middle Ages developed:

The traditional periodization concentrated on the fall of the Roman Empire. And while everybody admitted this was somewhat of an arbitrary date, and indeed its origins and consequences in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire extend to the second century AD and go on to the fall of Constantinople in the fifteenth century, nevertheless, 476, the deposition of the last Roman emperor ruling from Ravenna by the barbarian chieftain Odoacer, who then proclaims Italy to be part of the Eastern Roman Empire, or at least loyal to the Eastern Roman Empire, that loyalty largely a fiction.

In the traditional periodization [the year] 476 [AD] is then followed by something called the Dark Ages. And the Dark Ages end, depending on your point of view, with the growth of the European economy in the tenth or eleventh century, with the rediscovery of Latin classical culture in the twelfth century, or with the Italian Renaissance in the fifteenth century.

Certainly, the Renaissance artists regarded everything that came before them as the Dark Ages. And it is they who call medieval architecture “Gothic,” by which they don’t mean a complimentary term. Because if there’s one thing the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris is not, it’s not Gothic in the literal sense. It has nothing to do with the Visigoths or the Ostrogoths. We have a few little remnants of Visigothic and Ostrogothic architecture, and it’s not like that at all.

But for [Giorgio] Vasari and people like this—Italian Renaissance writers—all this was just junk. It was just junk of the past. It’s just the Dark Ages. The sun rose in Florence sometime after Dante, is what most people continue to believe.

Freedman could have noted that the very term “Middle Ages” comes from a certain obsession among those same Renaissance writers, among them Petrarch in the fourteenth century, who viewed the history of Europe as being composed of only two periods that really mattered: the period of the Greeks and Romans in antiquity, and the new age (or soon-to-come) age of enlightened modernity. Thus, the middle age became the unimportant “dark” period in the middle of the two. 

As with most modern historians of the Middle Ages, Freedman finds this “periodization” to be inadequate, but, he says: “as a medievalist I long ago gave up fighting this and embraced it.” 

Of course, these time periods were not given those names through some sort of objective process. The names of historical periods did not descend to us out of the heavens. Historians, scholars, pundits, and propagandists of centuries past created these names for those time periods, often for political purposes. 

A discussion on this can be found in a new book from Ada Palmer called Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age. Palmer is primarily focused on the so-called Renaissance, but how scholars and artists and other thought about the Renaissance often largely depended on a view of the Middle Ages. In a recent interview which covered her book in detail, Palmer described how one of the basic foundation of the book is the problem of developing a dark-age-golden-age narrative. Palmer asks

Where does the idea come from that there is a golden age? Where does the idea come up from that there was a dark age? Are dark ages and golden ages even real? No. But where did this myth come from? And then why has this myth been transformed over time? So [the book is] a historic story about the invention of a historical time period. [I]t looks at Petrarch, the first person to describe the Dark Ages as “dark.” [The book] looks at Renaissance figures and why in their period it was politically convenient to talk about coming from an age of ash and shadow to a more golden one. But it continues that story forward and it talks about the seventeenth century and the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century and the twentieth century and all the different reasons that we love [the idea of a golden age] in our imaginations: the idea that there was a fall, and then there was a grim dark age, and then there was a golden age, that comes after it. And this is a very satisfying and simple narrative that has been evergreen and useful for different people. 

Palmer also makes reference to an important phenomena in societies that have absorbed the old English nationalism of the past. That is, in the Anglosphere, our modern views of the Middle Ages have come to us through political and cultural propaganda designed to specifically attack institutions connected to England’s main rival in the early modern period: Spain. It became important in this milieu to foster propaganda against the institutions associated with the Spaniards, mainly the Catholic Church, which was a key institution in the middle ages. A common side effect of this was to label all medieval institutions as backward and prone to despotism of a very “un-English” variety. 

As Palmer put it:

If you’re coming from the Anglosphere you have to remember that there was a vast propaganda machine trying to make us dislike everything Spanish for the whole formation of our civilization over the past 200 years.” These have their origins in the old “black legends” about the Spanish—the leyendas negras—dating back to the sixteenth century. [Free PDF download.] 

Palmer is certainly not coming at this as an apologist for the Catholic Church. Indeed, Palmer makes these comments on a podcast called “History for Atheists” and she notes much of her scholarship on the Renaissance began with her interest in atheism. Yet, as a historian, Palmer apparently feels compelled to separate the myth from the more nuanced reality of the Renaissance, even if this unravels some of the old accusations against the Church. Palmer notes, for example, that Galileo did not get into trouble with the Holy Inquisition for doing “too much science.” The Inquisition, she notes, was concerned with theological arguments, not scientific observations. That is, the Inquisition was not exactly troubled by Galileo’s telescope. Rather, Palmer notes Galileo got into trouble when he started fancying himself a theologian, and even then, the fact he ultimately faced house arrest was largely a political matter aggravated by Galileo’s penchant for angering his powerful patrons.

But we all know how narratives like the Galileo story become ideological weapons, portraying modern political institutions as “enlightened” and “reasonable” while the political institutions of the more distant, medieval past as somehow to be dismissed out of hand as too corrupted and backward. 

After all, the popular view of the Middle Ages remains something not too far off from the images portrayed in, say, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and is incredibly persistent. Indeed, it often seems that people are willing to believe virtually anything about the Middle Ages so long as it makes the people of that time look stupid, superstitious, and lazy. The common modern view of the Middle Ages is perhaps the most consistent illustration of “chronological chauvinism.” 

How we view different historical periods continues to be important in terms of political ideology. Political movements are often shaped by their view of the Middle Ages or the institutions that predominated at the time. So, those who take a dark view of the idea of Christendom or of pre-democratic civil governments, will often dismiss Christianity—and especially Catholicism—and monarchy as “medieval”—a term that is itself often pejorative. This is all to be contrasted with the artifacts and institutions of more recent historical periods, all of which have wonderful and propagandistic titles which let us know how much better they are than the “Dark Ages.” The modern historical periods have names like “the Age of Reason” and “the Renaissance” and “the Enlightenment.” These are extremely effective names. Who wants be against reason and enlightenment? Clearly, when it comes to historiography and the popular imagination, the parties who claim to be the inheritors of these deliberately-named historical periods are often winning the propaganda war. 

Why Does It Matter? 

Moreover, the favorable press received by the Enlightenment and the Renaissance have been most unfortunate for those who support freedom and oppose state power. After all, the ideological and political thrust of both these periods tended toward strong states, political centralization, the spread of large standing armies, the expansion of conscription, and other hallmarks of growing state power. It is not a mere coincidence that the turn away from the “backward” medievals, and the turn toward “modern” thinking, also fostered the rise of absolutism and mercantilism. These latter developments, after all, were regarded as more “rational,” “enlightened,” “scientific” and necessary to leave the old “Dark Age” behind. After all, in this new age aborning, should not economies and states and culture directed and governed from the center by enlightened experts rather than by the backward provincials who cling to their localized ways of the past? 

This, of course, was the thinking of the French Revolutionaries, and also of the absolutists—French and otherwise—that came before them. 

In contrast, we find that the political institutions of the Middle Ages were decentralized, heavily privatized, and relatively weak compared to non-state institutions such as the Church and extended family networks. (For details see my recent review of The Medieval Constitution of Liberty and my recent lecture on taxation in the Middle Ages.) 

Although the parties of renaissance and enlightenment often claim to be the parties of freedom and human rights, one can easily make the case that the turn away from the political constitutions and milieus of the Middle Ages was also a turn away from the development of pro-freedom ideology and anti-state skepticism. Rather, the embrace of “modernity” was really a turn toward absolutism, centralization, and war.