Thoughts on The Bright Ages

This is an overview of the book, “The Bright Ages,” a book of medieval thought and accomplishments.

Overcompensating?

I am guilty of prejudice against the Catholic Church, which I find myself correcting for. Or at least, I should. But you can overcorrect.

Eleanor of Aquitaine and Catherine the Great get similar treatments. Many of their contemporaries made scurrilous, politically motivated false accusations that definitely are influenced by their sex. Our own contemporaries then go overboard to not only refute or contextualize the accusations but to give them a ‘Golden Legend,’ really stretching to apologize for not freeing the serfs and generally excusing unacceptable acts.

This sort of overcompensating ‘The Bright Ages’ narrowly avoids doing by the lousiest possible method. Namely, throwing in a few vague sentences about, ‘yeah, slavery was there and it was bad.’ The exception is the book burning bit, which also covers that charming episode when Aristotle was banned from Paris universities that I discussed recently. They actually give some space to those episodes, and the slavery mentions are throughout the book. The Cathar Crusade is even given a counterbalance.

Near the end of the book, the authors describe the debate between Sepulveda and de las Casa in Valladolid, in which the humanity and treatment of the people from the Americas was debated. De las Casas was a Dominican Friar who believed that the people were people with souls to be saved gently and kindly. Sepulveda was a landowner who argued they were savages who should be ‘saved’ by force and exploited. The authors show their hands when they frame this debate as between ‘medieval vs modern’ and describe Sepulveda as a modern secularist.

We’ve heard this noise before: oh, the modern world is so bad! Modern evil! Science bad! I’m not here for it.

The point, that the medieval church was not all cackling priests tying damsels to the bonfire was already made and made well. Castigating our own times is unnecessary.

It also ignores that a central argument of Sepulveda’s is religious: the natives worship different gods from us, so it is ok and dandy to murder ’em. Sepulveda was not secular in this argument. If you make this argument, you are veering perilously close to the very territory that the authors warn us against, making a ‘Golden Legend’ to overcorrect for a ‘Black Legend.’

Vague-ish

When you write something encompassing a thousand years and a whole subcontinent, you have to be vague if you don’t want your book to run to 700,000 words. So that is a problem inherent to the very nature of the book.

They try to summarize some vignettes to illustrate a point, starting with the life of Empress Gala Placidia and ending with the life of Dante Alighieri. They cover Moses Maimonides and Ibn Sina in one chapter about Aristotelian influence. Trying to summarize either of these people’s lives and influences should take way more than a chapter- but they are trying to cram all these folks into a point, so that’s what they get. They even summarized the Black Death in a chapter to get to how it was transformative.

Again, I have to excuse this as their purpose was not biographies of great people. They had another theme and they stuck to it. The stories used to illustrate the theme, however, suffered for it.

And then there is the connective threads, the generalized background, that these stories served. These were also vague. Again, probably unavoidable, but still standing out.

A Good Point

The overall aim of the book was to explain that the Middle Ages were complicated and nuanced, nothing was always completely dark and gritty, and that people were always striving toward the light. Grim dark/white supremacist representations are politically motivated hogwash.

Also, we are standing on the shoulders of giants. They attributed it to someone who wasn’t Newton, and now I wonder if they attributed it correctly. Anyway, that is true. Our court system grew out of the Grand and Petite Jury system of England, founded in the 1100’s. Democracy-like tests were run in places such as Flanders, the German Electorate, and cities with the Imperium. We are very much standing on our ancestors’ accomplishments.

The first point is made a million times a day by everyone from costubers making surcoats to historians reviewing ‘historical dramas.’ Hollywood loves to shoot the Middle Ages in washed-out grey and people love to paint miserable living conditions as though they were the be all, end all. It is, in fact, obnoxious and misses many great story-telling opportunities. It also cheerfully feeds stupid politics.

Another Thing

You know what I came away with, though? Hope. Our forebears fumbled, stumbled, and marched, but they were trying, and they moved the ball forward. They faced great difficulties. They kept on keepin’ on and even had fun in the process.

And you know what? So will we. Our descendants will remember our great gleaming statues and gardens along with our weird Facebook screeds. The only creatures that are likely to be here when the sun absorbs the Earth are bacteria, but we aren’t there yet. We have a lot to give still.