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  • No period of history is more misunderstood or underappreciated than The Middle Ages,

  • the ten centuries from the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century to the start of the Renaissance in the 15th.

  • This is especially true between the year 1000, when global warming brought grapes to England and grain to the coasts of Greenland,

  • doubling the population and reviving town life all across the Europe,

  • and 1348, after the warming had ended and the Black Death arrived from the east.

  • Let's take a closer look at these years. We'll make a good start by dispelling some nonsense.

  • The people of the Middle Ages did not believe the earth was flat. They knew it was round.

  • The ancients said it was round, the Fathers of the Church said it was round;

  • they saw its shadow during an eclipse of the moon, and the shadow was round;

  • they saw masts of ships sinking below the horizon -- round!

  • More nonsense: the Middle Ages were cheerless. Quite the reverse!

  • They were full of color, of celebrations involving everybody in town;

  • they invented the carnival; they revived popular drama, which had lain dormant for a thousand years.

  • Whatever they did, whether it was sinning or fighting or repenting or falling in love,

  • or traveling thousands of miles to Rome or to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, they did it with energy and gusto.

  • What do we owe to the Middle Ages?

  • How about the university? Medieval man invented it.

  • For the first time in the history of the world, you could go to Paris or Bologna or Padua or Oxford or Prague or Cologne

  • and study under masters of law, medicine, philosophy and theology,

  • and your degree-- designating you as a master or a doctor -- would hold good anywhere in Europe.

  • It was an international community of scholars.

  • A young Thomas Aquinas, born in southern Italy at the beginning of the 13th century,

  • would travel to Cologne to study philosophy under the philosopher-biologist Albert the Great,

  • then to Paris where he taught theology and philosophy, then to Rome, and back to France --

  • and this sort of thing was the rule among scholars, not the exception.

  • How about modern science? Thomas's teacher Albert was a biologist. Why should that surprise us?

  • Medieval man believed that God made the world as an ordered whole.

  • They learned it both from Scripture and from pagan thinkers such as Aristotle.

  • Science did not burst on the scene with Galileo.

  • Copernicus died in the sixteenth century, but he was a priest-astronomer at a Polish university founded in the Middle Ages.

  • He wasn't even the first man to suggest that the earth orbited the sun.

  • Others had ventured the suggestion.

  • Most prominent was the late medieval Nicholas of Cusa -- a philosopher and a cardinal in the Church.

  • How about architecture?

  • If the Middle Ages were dark and ignorant,

  • how come ordinary people-- masons, carpenters, painters, sculptors, glazers --

  • erected the most beautiful and majestic buildings to grace the earth, the Gothic cathedrals?

  • Without power tools, with pulleys and winches and scaffolding and their bare hands,

  • they built up lacework in stone and glass, flooding vast interior spaces with color and light;

  • we have nothing to match their complexity and beauty.

  • And art? Studying the ancients, Medieval man produced whole genres of art that the world had never seen.

  • There had never been anything like Dante's Divine Comedy or Chaucer's Canterbury Tales,

  • or the Arthurian legends of Chretien de Troyes; or the paintings of Giotto,

  • or the astonishingly beautiful and precise work of the illuminators of manuscripts.

  • What else do we owe to them? Western music.

  • They invented our musical notation, and western harmony; not to mention the humble carols we enjoy at Christmas time.

  • A tradition of local self-government -- witness the chartered towns all over Europe.

  • Free associations of men united for the common good: friars, guildsmen, members of lay orders devoted to good works;

  • people who established schools, orphanages, and hospitals.

  • Far from the Dark Ages, which it is popularly called, The Middle Ages might better be described as the Brilliant Ages,

  • a startling epoch of progress from science to art, from philosophy to medicine.

  • Indeed, in one crucial way, we are less civilized than those who enhanced human existence over a thousand years ago:

  • we dismiss the achievements of our ancestors, and fall short of them;

  • they honored their ancestors, and surpassed them.

  • I'm Anthony Esolen of Providence College for Prager University.

No period of history is more misunderstood or underappreciated than The Middle Ages,

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