for his livelihood – and we know from other sources that he had knowledge of learned magic; but there is no direct evidence that he had any connection to magical plots against the papacy. Where Dante really matters is in his own writing, perhaps most famously The Inferno, a vision of Hell that also commented on the society and politics of his time. The key thing about the poet was that he wrote, proudly, in Italian. He was not the first medieval writer to do such a thing, but he was perhaps the first to make a virtue of it, and to claim the ascendancy of the vernacular, as a poetical language, over Latin. And this made him famous, sufficiently famous that he could be invoked by Galeazzo as a credible, albeit veiled, threat to Bartolomeo.
This was a world in motion, some of its essential elements changing in this very moment. Thus, if one scratches the surface of ‘the medieval’ something more complex appears. In introducing the study of medieval history, my first task has been to demonstrate that things are not quite as they initially seem. Yes, it was an age when religion loomed much larger than in many modern European countries. Yes, it contained knights and ladies and monks and saints and inquisitors and all the other inhabitants of a thousand lurid historical novels. But it was neither simple nor unchanging. It was not even ‘one’ thing, in part because when studying the middle ages one may be engaged with more than a thousand years of history and thousands of square miles of geography. But also because if one asked John XXII and Dante Alighieri about the nature of papal power, one would receive two radically different answers. That is, to put the point more broadly, every element of ‘medievalness’ is situated within a certain perspective, differing between different times, places and people, rather than one universal and univocal feature of the period.
Medievalisms and Historiographies
Over a couple of decades at the end of the seventeenth century, a classical scholar at the University of Halle in Germany, Christopher Cellarius (1638–1707), published a book under the title Universal History Divided into an Ancient, Medieval and New Period. Cellarius was far from the first person to subdivide western history into three periods: in his self-conscious links back to a classical tradition, the Italian poet Petrarch (1304–74) had inferred a difference – a darkness – about the period intervening between his own time and the antique past. The lawyer and classicist Pierre Pithou (1539–96) had talked of ‘un moyen age’, and the antiquarian William Camden (1551–1625) similarly of ‘a middle time’. The passing notion of a ‘middle age’ was not new, but what Cellarius did was to build a complete framework for historical time around the concept. And his book was a textbook, imparted as foundational knowledge. Then and ever after, western historians have talked of ‘antiquity’, ‘the middle ages’ and ‘modernity’.
The important thing to note here is that, from the first moments of its inception, ‘medieval’ has been a term of denigration. For Petrarch and later humanists, for the antiquarians, for Pithou and for later Enlightenment philosophers, what mattered was the classical past, and the ways in which it informed and was renewed by the ‘modern’ world around them. Both the ancient ‘then’ and the contemporary ‘now’ were thrown into stark relief by the darkness in between: a darkness of ignorance, decay, chaos, confusion, anarchy and unreason. As the early modern period ‘rediscovered’ (largely via the very middle ages it disparaged) texts and artefacts from the Greek and Roman past, using them as models for its own cultural productions, the middle ages came to stand for a gross barbarity of style and language. Medieval historians were disparaged for their failure to conform to classical modes of rhetoric. Its art was seen as hopelessly unsophisticated, its literature as clumsy, its music similarly lacking. The judgements passed on medieval politics were of a similar, almost aesthetic, vein. As the economist Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–81) characterized the period:
The kings without any authority, the nobles without any constraint, the peoples enslaved, the countryside covered with fortresses and ceaselessly ravaged, wars kindled between city and city, village and village … all commerce and all communications cut off … the grossest ignorance extending over all nations and all occupations! An unhappy picture – but one which was only too true of Europe for several centuries.4
As the last century of study has amply demonstrated, Turgot’s caricature of the middle ages is grossly distorted. But its spirit continues to reside: we, no less than Enlightenment philosophes, tend to look down as we look back, feeling at a gut level that something from the middle ages must be basic, crude and probably nasty. They believed the earth was flat, didn’t they? (No, that’s a later myth.) They burnt witches, didn’t they? (Not very often, that was mostly in the seventeenth century.) They were all ignorant, weren’t they? (No, there is substantial intellectual culture visible in Carolingian times, there were universities across Europe from the thirteenth century, and the beginnings of experimental science, among other things.) They never left home, hardly knew the world around them, right? (No, there were trade networks connecting Scandinavia, central Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.) But, surely, they behaved barbarically: constant local violence, waging wars against people they didn’t like, torturing people, executing criminals? (And none of this happens today?)
This initial, vast accretion of grime is the first veil that must be removed in order to do medieval history seriously. Put aside preconceptions about the period: some may have elements of truth to them, but they must be treated as a matter for investigation, rather than a foundation. The middle ages were what they were – the many things they were – rather than only the summed ‘failures’ of future ages’ expectations. The medieval was not simply the opposite of what is deemed ‘modern’; it was something much more complex, and, as we will see, something still interwoven with how we are today.
The second veil to be penetrated is bestowed by the politics of medievalism. The middle ages have frequently been an object of ideological struggle, even when being disavowed. Thus, for those fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian humanists who condemned the preceding centuries to ‘darkness’, a major consideration was the desire to deny any continuity between the old Roman Empire and the medieval Holy Roman Empire – because of the legitimacy this would confer on the existing Holy Roman Emperor. For the Enlightenment philosophes, a major factor in denigrating the middle ages was its apparent religiosity, in thrall to the command of the Catholic Church: something against which the defenders of Reason, in the eighteenth century, continued to struggle. The nineteenth century brought, in several European countries, a more positive attitude towards the medieval: France, for example, fell in love once again with chivalry, while Germany looked back to a powerful combination of law and empire, and England glowed with quiet pride over its long history of parliamentary constitutionalism. But these reinventions of the medieval were also political, informed particularly by different strands of Romantic nationalism. Because of events in the mid-twentieth century, we tend to see this as most poisonous in Germany, and certainly German historiography in the nineteenth century sought the roots of its Volksgeist in the medieval past, and looked back to the ‘glory days’ of the Empire. But it was a weakness to which every European country was prone, and while the medievalisms that it fostered varied according to nationality, they shared the tendency to romanticize, mythologize and simplify the medieval past.
This is not to say that this reappropriation is all that the nineteenth century gave us. General histories of modern historiography tend to talk of a ‘revolution’ in historical method in the nineteenth century, associated particularly with Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) and German historiography more broadly. While there are reasons for being suspicious of some of the claims made by and about Ranke with regard to how revolutionary the use of primary archival sources actually was,5 it is definitely the case that the foundations of modern, academic history were laid by Germany in the nineteenth century, and that a focus on archives and source analysis was a primary part of this. Some version of Rankean historiography informed the creation of academic history teaching, and subsequently postgraduate training, in France, Italy, England, the US and elsewhere. As various writers have shown, it was rare that the adopters of von Ranke’s ideas understood them quite in the way he intended: they tended to reify the notion of a ‘scientific method’ in an unwarranted fashion,
