Medieval Fogge: In Defence of the Middle Ages

In a recent tweet, Robert Jenrick, shadow justice secretary, denounced immigrants from ‘alien cultures, who possess medieval attitudes towards women’. He claimed that these ‘medieval attitudes’ were responsible for the widespread sexual abuse of white girls in Britain. Interviewed on the Today programme, it became clear that for him ‘medieval’ was synonymous with ‘backward’ – ‘alien’, that is, to progressive, modern Britain. Professor Kathleen Stock, whose expression of her views on gender aroused great hostility at the University of Sussex, has characterised that hostility as ‘medieval’. By this she appears to mean backward, in the sense of prejudiced and irrational. The equation of ‘medieval’ with reprehensibly primitive is never questioned, but increasingly parroted, in the media.

What humanists in the 15th century came to term the medium aevum – hence ‘medieval’ – was the gap between the collapse of classical antiquity and its renaissance, over which they presented themselves as officiating. In origin, therefore, the term was a retrospective humanist slur on the preceding millennium.