Refs for Middle Ages World History
HIST 100: Part 4
The Middle Ages
Dr. Maureen Miller http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/westernciv/video/miller1.html Introduction
The period we are going to study this week is called the Middle Ages. By this term, historians generally mean to denote the history of Western Europe from the end of the Roman Empire in the west until the Italian Renaissance: roughly, 400-1400 AD. No one living in Europe from the fifth to the fifteenth century, of course, thought of themselves as living in a “middle age.” This term, “the Middle Ages,” was first used by Italian intellectuals during the Renaissance of the fifteenth century to denigrate the period that separated them from the authors and artists they so admired in classical antiquity (ancient Greece and Rome). So in its origins, the concept of the Middle Ages frames the period negatively as a time of cultural backwardness, a period in which the accomplishments of classical civilization were eclipsed by ignorance and superstition. This was the view of fifteenth-century elites.
Scholars still use this term, “The Middle Ages,” but our view of the period is very different from that of the Renaissance men who coined the phrase. Indeed, I will argue to you over the next hour or so that the millennium from 400 to 1400 was pivotal in the development of Western Civilization. It was during this period that Europe’s development came to depend less on the Mediterranean world -- which had been the center of civilization in antiquity -- and more on its northern lands and Atlantic coasts. Moreover, the Middle Ages created institutions and practices that are still vital and important in our world.
One of the first things to recognize about this period in European history was that it was not STATIC: Europe changed dramatically from 400 to 1400. The most important watershed comes roughly at the millennium. Before the year 1000 we call the “Early Middle Ages”(c. AD 400-1000). During this period Roman and Germanic cultures combined
The Middle Ages
Dr. Maureen Miller http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/westernciv/video/miller1.html Introduction
The period we are going to study this week is called the Middle Ages. By this term, historians generally mean to denote the history of Western Europe from the end of the Roman Empire in the west until the Italian Renaissance: roughly, 400-1400 AD. No one living in Europe from the fifth to the fifteenth century, of course, thought of themselves as living in a “middle age.” This term, “the Middle Ages,” was first used by Italian intellectuals during the Renaissance of the fifteenth century to denigrate the period that separated them from the authors and artists they so admired in classical antiquity (ancient Greece and Rome). So in its origins, the concept of the Middle Ages frames the period negatively as a time of cultural backwardness, a period in which the accomplishments of classical civilization were eclipsed by ignorance and superstition. This was the view of fifteenth-century elites.
Scholars still use this term, “The Middle Ages,” but our view of the period is very different from that of the Renaissance men who coined the phrase. Indeed, I will argue to you over the next hour or so that the millennium from 400 to 1400 was pivotal in the development of Western Civilization. It was during this period that Europe’s development came to depend less on the Mediterranean world -- which had been the center of civilization in antiquity -- and more on its northern lands and Atlantic coasts. Moreover, the Middle Ages created institutions and practices that are still vital and important in our world.
One of the first things to recognize about this period in European history was that it was not STATIC: Europe changed dramatically from 400 to 1400. The most important watershed comes roughly at the millennium. Before the year 1000 we call the “Early Middle Ages”(c. AD 400-1000). During this period Roman and Germanic cultures combined