The summer before tenth grade, I was assigned a book to read for AP European History called A World Lit Only By Fire. It was written by an elderly scholar of 20th-century history who, by his own admission, had never studied the Middle Ages before, or consulted any primary sources from the period.
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The blurb on the back of the book sums up its general tenor pretty well: “In handsomely crafted prose, and with the grace and authority of his extraordinary gift for narrative history, William Manchester leads us from a civilization tottering on the brink of collapse to the grandeur of its rebirth—the dense explosion of energy that spawned some of history’s greatest poets, philosophers, painters, adventurers, and reformers, as well as some of its most spectacular villains—the Renaissance.”
The Middle Ages, the book confidently informed us, were a thousand-year period during which literally nothing happened. Everyone just sat around in a puddle of their own liquefied shit, scratching their plague buboes, worrying, if they lived near water, whether all the great big ships were going to fall over the edge of the world. I mean, these people didn’t even have clocks. How do you even know what time it is if you don’t have clocks? Clearly, medieval people were idiots, who probably didn’t even think of themselves as individuals. Thank God the Renaissance came along, and everybody suddenly remembered that Greece and Rome had existed, and spontaneously invented Science, or we would probably all be dead.
Now, at this point in my adolescence, I was something of an amateur medieval historian. I had watched numerous episodes of a TV show called Cadfael, starring Derek Jacobi as a 12th-century Benedictine monk who solves murder mysteries, and I knew that lots of things had happened during the Middle Ages. I stormed in on the first day of school and gave my AP Euro teacher a piece of my mind. What about Roger Bacon! What about illuminated manuscripts! What about Gothic cathedrals! “And nobody in the Middle Ages thought the world was flat!” I fumed. “Washington Irving just made that up in the 19th century while writing a biography of Christopher Columbus on a tight deadline!”
My teacher, who was the JV wrestling coach, received my complaints benignly, but without any apparent interest. This, I have since discovered, is about as good a reception as you’re ever going to get if, in an ordinary social setting, you choose to launch into an unprompted rant about how the Middle Ages were pretty interesting, actually. Bearing this in mind, the popular conception of the Middle Ages still needs correcting. Most people, if they think of the Middle Ages at all, think of them as the “Dark Ages,” the long stretch of obscure barbarism between the glory that was Rome and the other glory that was the Renaissance. But that is false: they were pretty interesting, actually.
The Middle Ages are in the public imagination these days more than they were previously—and not just because of all of us have at least one friend who won’t shut up about Game of Thrones. The alt-right and “Bannon-style conservatives,” those charming new spurs on the evolutionary tree of white supremacy, have a special fondness for the period, believing that current conflict between “Islamic extremists” and “the West” is merely a continuation of an elemental “clash of civilizations” that began with the Islamic caliphates in Europe and the Crusader states in the Holy Land. The Crusader battle cry Deus vult (God wills) is cropping up all kinds of places, from YouTube comments sections to the walls of vandalized Midwestern mosques. At the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017, a few polo-shirted knights-errant even came bearing faux-medieval shields.