The age of transmation

Those who write off the Middle Ages as an unchanging backwater are overlooking the seismic advances - in everything from scientific knowledge to self-awareness - that redefined what it meant to be human, argues lan Mortimer

-  lan Mortimer

War and words

 A depiction (opposite page) of the Israelite leader Joshua in battle reimagines the combatants as 13th-century French warriors, while (this page) a woman teaches a child to read in the 15th century. By the end of the Middle Ages, warfare was losing its allure and women were challenging the male stranglehold on intellectual life

What does the word "medieval" summon up in your mind? Whether the first thing you imagine is a castle or a monastery, the chances are that the word will come with connotations of violence, ignorance, lawlessness and superstition. You only need to think of Marsellus Wallace's line in the film Pulp Fiction to know what I mean: "I'm gonna git medieval on your ass." Even if you're not a Quentin Tarantino fan, you will have come across the word "medieval" frequently applied by journalists and politicians to the Taliban in Afghanistan or the Russian troops occupying Ukrainian towns. In short, many people today use "medieval" as a synonym for "uncivilised".

Cruel obsessions Louis the Pious (above) has a prelate shorn of his hair and his nephew Bernard blinded in a detail from a 14th-century manuscript. Modern views of the Middle Ages continue to be dominated by depictions of brutality

Historians have generally been unable to shift these perceptions in the public mind, and a few have sought to exploit this prejudice rather than deny it. Twentieth-century popular books, like William Manchester's A World Lit Only by Fire and Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, emphasised the brutality of the medieval period, seemingly drawing their evocative power from these aspects. This is despite the fact that warfare has grown progressively more deadly since the Middle Ages, as the Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin showed in the 1940s.