1 00:00:00,399 --> 00:00:06,939 No period of history is more misunderstood or underappreciated than The Middle Ages, 2 00:00:06,940 --> 00:00:11,820 the ten centuries from the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century to the start of 3 00:00:11,829 --> 00:00:14,519 the Renaissance in the 15th. 4 00:00:14,519 --> 00:00:21,099 This is especially true between the year 1000, when global warming brought grapes to England 5 00:00:21,099 --> 00:00:26,470 and grain to the coasts of Greenland, doubling the population and reviving town life all 6 00:00:26,470 --> 00:00:34,150 across the Europe, and 1348, after the warming had ended and the Black Death arrived from the east. 7 00:00:34,160 --> 00:00:40,760 Let's take a closer look at these years. We'll make a good start by dispelling some nonsense. 8 00:00:40,770 --> 00:00:46,950 The people of the Middle Ages did not believe the earth was flat. They knew it was round. 9 00:00:46,950 --> 00:00:51,330 The ancients said it was round, the Fathers of the Church said it was round; 10 00:00:51,330 --> 00:00:55,530 they saw its shadow during an eclipse of the moon, and the shadow was round; 11 00:00:55,530 --> 00:01:01,330 they saw masts of ships sinking below the horizon -- round! 12 00:01:01,330 --> 00:01:07,000 More nonsense: the Middle Ages were cheerless. Quite the reverse! They were full of color, 13 00:01:07,000 --> 00:01:14,240 of celebrations involving everybody in town; they invented the carnival; they revived popular drama, 14 00:01:14,240 --> 00:01:19,360 which had lain dormant for a thousand years; whatever they did, whether it was sinning 15 00:01:19,360 --> 00:01:25,690 or fighting or repenting or falling in love, or traveling thousands of miles to Rome or 16 00:01:25,690 --> 00:01:31,070 to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher they did it with energy and gusto. 17 00:01:31,070 --> 00:01:34,340 What do we owe to the Middle Ages? 18 00:01:34,350 --> 00:01:40,800 How about the university? Medieval man invented it. For the first time in the history of the world, 19 00:01:40,800 --> 00:01:47,120 you could go to Paris or Bologna or Padua or Oxford or Prague or Cologne 20 00:01:47,120 --> 00:01:53,840 and study under masters of law, medicine, philosophy, and theology, and your degree 21 00:01:53,840 --> 00:02:01,480 -- designating you as a master or a doctor -- would hold good anywhere in Europe. It was an international 22 00:02:01,480 --> 00:02:08,980 community of scholars. A young Thomas Aquinas, born in southern Italy at the beginning of 23 00:02:08,989 --> 00:02:15,719 the 13th century, would travel to Cologne to study philosophy under the philosopher-biologist 24 00:02:15,719 --> 00:02:21,759 Albert the Great, then to Paris where he taught theology and philosophy, then to Rome, 25 00:02:21,760 --> 00:02:28,400 and back to France -- and this sort of thing was the rule among scholars, not the exception. 26 00:02:28,400 --> 00:02:35,840 How about modern science? Thomas's teacher Albert was a biologist. Why should that surprise us? 27 00:02:35,840 --> 00:02:40,660 Medieval man believed that God made the world as an ordered whole. 28 00:02:40,660 --> 00:02:47,140 They learned it both from Scripture and from pagan thinkers such as Aristotle. Science did not burst on 29 00:02:47,150 --> 00:02:54,400 the scene with Galileo. Copernicus died in the sixteenth century, but he was a priest-astronomer 30 00:02:54,400 --> 00:03:00,620 at a Polish university founded in the Middle Ages. He wasn't even the first man to suggest 31 00:03:00,620 --> 00:03:05,260 that the earth orbited the sun. Others had ventured the suggestion. 32 00:03:05,260 --> 00:03:13,980 Most prominent was the late medieval Nicholas of Cusa -- a philosopher and a cardinal in the Church. 33 00:03:13,980 --> 00:03:20,680 How about architecture? If the Middle Ages were dark and ignorant, how come ordinary people 34 00:03:20,720 --> 00:03:27,580 -- masons, carpenters, painters, sculptors, glazers -- erected the most beautiful and 35 00:03:27,590 --> 00:03:34,309 majestic buildings to grace the earth, the Gothic cathedrals? Without power tools, 36 00:03:34,309 --> 00:03:41,079 with pulleys and winches and scaffolding and their bare hands, they built up lacework in stone 37 00:03:41,079 --> 00:03:46,419 and glass, flooding vast interior spaces with color and light; 38 00:03:46,420 --> 00:03:51,520 we have nothing to match their complexity and beauty. 39 00:03:51,529 --> 00:03:58,519 And art? Studying the ancients, Medieval man produced whole genres of art that the world 40 00:03:58,519 --> 00:04:05,579 had never seen. There had never been anything like Dante's Divine Comedy or Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, 41 00:04:05,580 --> 00:04:10,859 or the Arthurian legends of Chretien de Troyes; or the paintings of Giotto, 42 00:04:10,859 --> 00:04:17,530 or the astonishingly beautiful and precise work of the illuminators of manuscripts. 43 00:04:17,530 --> 00:04:23,150 What else do we owe to them? Western music -- they invented our musical notation, 44 00:04:23,150 --> 00:04:29,010 and western harmony; not to mention the humble carols we enjoy at Christmastime. 45 00:04:29,010 --> 00:04:36,680 A tradition of local self-government -- witness the chartered towns all over Europe. Free associations of 46 00:04:36,680 --> 00:04:43,980 men united for the common good: friars, guildsmen, members of lay orders devoted to good works; 47 00:04:44,120 --> 00:04:49,729 people who established schools, orphanages, and hospitals. 48 00:04:49,729 --> 00:04:55,389 Far from the Dark Ages, which it is popularly called, The Middle Ages might better be described 49 00:04:55,389 --> 00:05:03,320 as the Brilliant Ages, a startling epoch of progress from science to art, from philosophy to medicine. 50 00:05:03,320 --> 00:05:08,960 Indeed, in one crucial way, we are less civilized than those who enhanced human existence over 51 00:05:08,970 --> 00:05:16,640 a thousand years ago: we dismiss the achievements of our ancestors, and fall short of them; 52 00:05:16,640 --> 00:05:21,020 they honored their ancestors, and surpassed them. 53 00:05:21,030 --> 00:05:26,370 I'm Anthony Esolen of Providence College for Prager University.