[Music] in 16605 Miguel Cervantes gave us really an enduring image of what the Middle Ages were like the book in two volumes told the story of Don kote and Don kote is a Spanish man he's a nobleman a hialgo as they were known then and Don kote in the story begins to read lots of shival novels that is stories of all kinds of folks from the past usually from Spanish history of knights rescuing damsels going out to attack beasts and of course the image that Cervantes gives us is comical the story tells of numerous accounts that are really design to make us laugh at the Middle Ages his sidekick Sano Panza really plays the comedic straight man for us in this story and the famous cases of Don kote attacking unwitting passers by in one case attacking a group of monks and sort of whipping them and a couple of them running off into the fields to get away from this crazy man or matched with the pretty famous case of Don kote getting on his Steed grabbing a lance and tilting at a windmill and this story really is a bit of an analogy really to how most of us might view the Middle Ages the common misconception of the Middle Ages is that it is a boring backward kind of filthy period of time in which people died young when all that you had before you to look forward to if you were born in the Middle Ages was farming for a period of time usually under a feudal Lord and then essentially passing on by the age of let's say 40 and that image of the Middle Ages has been enforced by the way in which many of the comedic and Hollywood stories of the Middle Ages have also played we've all seen probably the Monty Python stories of the Middle Ages the Holy Grail stories where any number of caricatures of the Middle Ages or sort of paraded in front of us wanted you know bring out your dead where it seems that everyone is sort of dying of the plague and all that is left for those who do not have the plague is to cart around a wheelbarrow and pick up the dead people and lots of other things like this and I don't doubt that for many of us the Middle Ages presents an enigma that is to say it's a period in which it's probably safe to assume that we find it to be the Dark Ages but in reality the Middle Ages are actually quite exciting the world is not lacking in hygiene money art medicine and having a surplus of War misogyny Superstition and chastity belts by our standards today of course the Middle Ages are strange they do lots of things that we're not used to seeing they have a number of beliefs that are strange and foreign to us the church looks different to the way it does today in the 21st century peasants the the married life The Agrarian ways in which people would live off the land and essentially live hand to mouth in some cases is something where not used to sort of experiencing the authoritarianism of the Middle Ages also strikes us as a bit out of touch we're so used to the modern concept of Liberty and freedom that whenever we find a culture even a period of time across multiple cultures where there is what appears to us to be a lack of Liberty or in some cases oppression we tend to find as not a very exciting place I always remind students that this is is intellectual snobbery this is chronological snobbery as one person once put it just because something from the past is unfamiliar doesn't mean that it is necessarily strange in the ultimate sense of the word that is to say just because something doesn't look like us doesn't act like us does not mean that it is somehow inferior and I also point out to students that the fact of the matter is given that we live in a computer age in a technology age really the fact that I'm even delivering this content to you through videos it makes our world utterly strange to just about any period of time prior to this age go back just three or four generations and you're likely to find a period of time in which everything seems to be archaic and boring in which you sort of wonder what did they do with themselves throughout the day if they didn't have their computers and entertainment and constant communication and all the things that we're so used to having so we just have to Simply acknowledge the fact that the past is going to be strange some periods of the past will be Stranger than others but the fact of the matter is is that we don't have to look back in derision and in fact the Middle Ages are really not all that strange when you actually get into it and look at it if you just think about it the number of things that come to us down from the Middle Ages that are cherished today or that are believed to be exciting and interesting are numerous just think of the development of the Middle Ages of literature you have the Epic bolf Canterbury Tales stories of King Arthur and Robin Hood when you look at Dante you have the trilogy in which he lays out not only his theology not only his view of the afterlife but also he weaves into it very shrewdly a critique of many of the things that were happening in his own day we have the developments in theology now some of these are looked on with suspicion by Protestants but they are nonetheless important and very very interesting if we're going to understand the Reformation itself we have the development of scholasticism we have Thomas aquinus William of aam all kinds of figures and theologians who shaped the intellectual Western World in the church and who really were the sources for much of Luther's early training as well as the other reformers now Luther and other would later react against major portions of this period of theological development but that doesn't mean it's uninteresting it just means that it's problematic when we look at it through the lens of the reformation and there are other things as well Cathedrals stained glass architectural developments like Gothic developments in music think about the importance of the Crusades the rise of Islam as it comes to the west and at times attacks the West directly and then of course the response by the West heading off into Crusade trying to reestablish the Christian world in the near East think of knights Warfare all kinds of things that we consider to be at least inherently interesting though not necessarily the things that always take up the bulk of our attention there are also positive theological developments from the standpoint of protestantism there has been a lot of work done on what we call the for Runners to the Reformation people like John Wickliffe and the theological movement of yan hus all of these movements shaped and changed and developed and worked against the Catholic church in many of the same ways that Luther and Calvin and cranmer and the other Protestant reformers would just centuries later so when you lay all of these things out and many others really you get a more composite picture of what the Middle Ages should look like like to us the Middle Ages should not be weird they should not be strange again in the ultimate sense of the word though they will be unfamiliar as we go through the lectures on this period of time and as we look at the Middle Ages I think one of the things that most students find is that some of the things they care deeply about today actually have roots or at least have developments in the Middle Ages that would not have occurred were it not for this period of time and in fact I often find that after going through the early church most people find the developments in the early church and the struggles there to be more forign more strange to them than even the Middle Ages the hierarchical development of the Roman Empire for example that to many people and the sort of resultant effect of the authoritarian structure of politics and the way the church and state became intermingled in the early church period of time and the development of Relic veneration and the veneration of the Saints and some of the other early developments in the fourth and fifth centuries in particular often for at least the Protestant perspective tends to be a little bit more Shaky Ground and then when they get into the Middle Ages at least they find something that they have some preconceptions on that they can then develop and shape but which then sort of draws all this period out if we're going to look at the Middle Ages we have to understand what the period of time is though and so I want to give you just sort of three brackets three periods of time that are vital I think to at least conceptualizing in your mind's eye what the Middle Ages is in particular at least in terms of the sweep of it historians typically break the Middle Ages down into three periods of time now I want to go ahead and caution you that these periods of time are arbitrary in some ways they are artificial these are the inventions of historians but these periods of time these subsets of the Middle Ages really make the period more manageable but still no one that lives say in the year1 would say boy this is great that I live in a different period of time than I lived just two years ago the fact of the matter is is these again are artificial ways of understanding the past but nonetheless let me go ahead and give you three periods of time three brackets by which to understand the sweep of the Middle Ages the first is what we today call the Early Middle Ages very easily titled and this runs from 500 to to 1,000 ad it's a large period of time if you're going to describe any period of time as being the Dark Ages it's probably going to be this period of time what 500 to 1,000 the reason why it's sometimes offerred to the Dark Ages is not due to any moral decline not due necessarily to spiritual decline at least not in the terms of apathy or in terms of church involvement or theological engagement there were people that loved Christ at this time there were people who read the scriptures and attempted to understand them in the light of their own day but nonetheless the years 500 to 1,000 the Early Middle Ages present some challenges for us mostly due to the fact that a lot of what we would hope to find historically there just aren't there the the best example of this is written sources from 500 to 1,000 we have significantly fewer written sources at least from a variety standpoint we we have we'd certainly have resources it's not like it everyone stopped writing but what happens from 500 to 1,000 is you have a series of Wars you have a series of national calamities you have obviously the ongoing Fallout from the destruction of Rome as the Imperial sort of unifier of all of the world both east and west and as a result you have all of these changes that occur in this period of time the Early Middle Ages that really are cataclysmic in some ways and while they're cataclysmic they're very important it's this period of time in which you see the rise of what would eventually become the modern Nations as we know them today modern Nations being like France and Germany and England all of these countries all of these regions began to be shaped during this period of time you see lots of linguistic changes people moving from Latin to more use or more concentrated use of the vernacular language now there are some efforts to resist that particularly in Charlamagne who we'll talk about in the later lecture he attempts and his scriptorium attempt to sort of codify and crystallize and perpetuate for the future Generations use of Latin but they could not hold it off and over time the vernacular languages of Europe as a whole began to still develop still this period of time despite the fact that it is quite challenging to understand from a literary standpoint or from a theological standpoint nevertheless as we'll see in the lectures there is actually a great deal of material that we can draw on to understand what is occurring in this period of time so 500 to 1,000 is the Early Middle Ages next we have what is often referred to is the high Middle Ages this runs from 1,00 to 1300 now in the past the phrase High Middle Ages had a sort of a moral value to it this was the period of time in which the Middle Ages were at its best that you you have a flourishing of art and literature you have a flourishing of church activity theological activity you have the rise in the development of scholasticism for example and a number of important developments in theological thinking in the west you also have more or less the stabilization of certain Nations or certain countries in the western part of Europe you have Kings hereditary kingships in many cases that arise and these hereditary kingships begin to develop their own dynasties and their own cultural awareness of who they are you have wars you have developments this this period of time the high Middle Ages is the time of the Crusades it's the time of any of a number of of of really sort of interesting but as well as troubling developments in the Middle Ages that have to be understood lastly we have the appropriately named latter Middle Ages the latter Middle Ages run from 1300 to 1500 this period of time is really the one that's most debated today by historians the latter Middle Ages can be seen either on the one hand as the Decay as the diminution of the church's power as the waning of theological um or theological Orthodoxy as the corruption of the church and there are a lot of historians that that that take this line of approach they see the latter Middle Ages in other words as sort of the Forerunner or the the cultural slide that occurs before Luther and the Reformation still that interpretation is Up For Debate and it's actually on the decline today most historians when they look at the latter Middle Ages don't see necessarily a decline in engagement or theological thinking or development in the later Middle Ages rather they see changes they see a lot of FL powering of medieval thought they see developments occurring but these developments are not reactionary necessarily this is not the slouching towards gamor kind of period of time now there are troubling things that occur during this period and we'll talk about some of those but by and large the latter Middle Ages should not be seen as some sort of cess pool of bad thinking and bad morals fact of the matter is is that the latter Middle Ages have a great deal of variety and a great deal of developments for us both positive and negative that set the stage for Luther and the Reformation most historians today I say usually refer to the latter Middle Ages as the flowering of the Middle Ages or as the as one historian put it the Harvest of the Middle Ages that this is a period of time in which the groundwork of what was laid before by aquinus and others is now harvested and extended and expanded and utilized others have referred to it as the headwaters as the time when a great deal of developments occur now obviously Luther and others will react against the latter Middle Ages but they react against the Middle Ages as a whole so there's no reason to see only one period of the Middle Ages as being the worst time or as the the time that really kind of got it wrong honestly a lot of what's driving this perspective that the latter Middle Ages or the time of great turmoil and Corruption really comes from an ecumenical Desire by some historians to both understand the Reformation but kind of not find fault with Luther at the same time so there were some Catholic historians in the 20th century for example who alleged or in some cases strongly argued that Luther's Reformation could be understood because the latter Middle Ages were so corrupted and so backwards and that they had lost the pristine theological developments of aquinus and others in the high Middle Ages the fact of the matter is the latter Middle Ages really are part in partial to the medieval movement part in partial to the medieval church and so we can't pin all the sins of the Middle Ages onto the latter period particularly since the Crusades and a number of troubling things happened in the high Middle Ages during the so-called pristine years and you can't pin those on the latter Middle Ages at least not in full so if that is the sweep of the history of the time periods of the Middle Ages a few things can be said about what we're going to be looking at in general the lectures on the Middle Ages that we're going to be covering run the gamut really of the experience of those who lived during the Middle Ages the first thing we're going to be looking at is of course the development of the rise of Charlamagne and the carolingian Empire and what we're going to be looking at from that vantage point is the development of European political entities how did all of these nations arise how did all of these these local communities that were formerly Roman shape themselves into what would become the medieval dynasties so we're going to be looking at Spain as it became first dominated by Aryans and then by the Muslims we're going to be looking at Anglo-Saxon England we're going to be looking at Scandinavian culture and the Vikings and we're going to be looking at a number of other things in the Rise of Nations and then moving on into the Middle Ages the higher Middle Ages we're going to start taking a look at some of the developments both personally for individuals both at the lay level and at the clergy level things like the black death things like war and famine marriage all of the things you might experience in everyday life but we're also going to be looking at some of the developments of the most important institutions of the Middle Ages we're going to be looking at the rise of various kingdoms and how they wared with one another so we're going to look at for example the 100 Years War we're going to look look at the breakdown of society how it was arranged into three different Estates and how we if we lived in that day and age would be classified and we're going to be taking a look at the developments in the papacy how did it rise how did it become strong and more importantly what were the challenges it faced as it went through a series of crises particularly in the latter Middle Ages as the papacy first was co-opted by the French government and later the papacy itself split into three different papies three different popes in the end though I want you to see that the Middle Ages are actually quite a fascinating period and that often what has left us in the dark about the Middle Ages is not that the Middle Ages are so irrelevant or that they are opaque or that there's something that is keeping us from really exploring it but rather that we maybe haven't had the best tour guides on the journey through these years and so in the end as we look at the sweep of the development of the Middle Ages we're going to be looking at all various strata and all various levels of society in the hopes that when we come away from these lectures we will have a better understanding of the Medieval World in order that we can have an understanding of the medieval church with the ultimate goal of eventually better understanding the Protestant Reformation which broke away from the medieval perspective on faith Theology and the Bible [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] oh