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.

People in the Middle Ages had no inkling that they were medieval. So far as they were concerned, antiquity had not declined or fallen. Rather, as consummated in the Roman state, it had been transfigured by Christianity during the fourth century. The fused Empire and Church thereafter fulfilled its role of spreading the faith to the world.

In the eastern half of Christendom the imperial regime continued without a hiccup. In the western half, there were no specifically West Roman emperors for three centuries; but from 800 the pope, exercising Christ-given powers, appointed them. All other rulers were, at least in theory, subordinate to them. This is the period that we, still trapped in disparaging humanist terminology, label medieval. But was this ‘Midle age’, as the great antiquary William Camden claimed in 1605, ‘overcast with darke clouds, or rather thicke fogges of ignorance’?

Consider some of its innovations. Monasteries, which, among many other achievements, preserved most of the antique texts that have survived. Scientific jurisprudence, concerned with the law of the Church, canon law, and that law’s principal foundation, Roman law, was most systematically embodied in a compilation authorised by Emperor Justinian in the 530s, and rediscovered in the late 11th century. This integrated law of Christendom – ius commune – was as important a conduit for the transmission of ancient civilisation as literature: it became the basis for all Western legal systems. But ius commune was not simply a time capsule preserving ancient legal texts. It was deployed to resolve current problems. A 13th-century dispute about how the newly invented mendicant orders, committed to a life of extreme apostolic poverty, might nevertheless have and use lands and goods without owning them, necessitated the definition of property rights. By rapid extension, the notion of subjective rights was coined. This is the source of our language of individual rights. Many scholars argue that it was a concept unknown in antiquity.

After a catastrophic papal election in 1378, a disagreement about whether ultimate authority in the Church resided in the pope or a general council representing all the faithful provided the foundations for analysis of the Church as a constitutional structure. In turn, that analysis could be mapped onto other governmental entities. Paradoxically, this medieval ecclesiological conflict became one of the roots of modern political liberty. Universities, created initially for the teaching and study of ius commune, quickly expanded to encompass theology too. Christianity had to be shown to be reconcilable with ancient, pagan thought, because reason and divinely revealed truth could never contradict each other.

Or take the most obvious medieval survival, architecture. By the 11th century it was already of a technical and aesthetic calibre surpassing that of antiquity – it still inspires awe in modern observers. Reflect on the mathematical skill necessary to ensure that a Gothic cathedral, consisting far more of stained glass than stone, and the vaulting of which spans vast interior spaces, stayed gracefully upright.

How could anyone dismiss this period as backward, alien, and irrational? Perhaps Jenrick and Stock have been spending too much time watching Game of Thrones. If primitiveness is to be measured in terms of brutality, surely the modern period is the most primitive of all?

It might be contended that Jenrick had certain manifestations of modern Islam in mind. But Islam is of course another road taken by late antiquity. Muslim scholars were primarily responsible for the preservation of much ancient philosophy, particularly Aristotle. It was via Islamic Spain that many of Aristotle’s works reached the medieval West. To categorise Islam as medieval, meaning backward, is as absurd as to characterise Christianity thus. Jenrick’s and Stock’s denunciations are based on an implicit assumption that all societies pass through a similar sequence of stages of cultural development, from ‘backward’, irrational, and ‘medieval’, to advanced, enlightened, and modern. These are large, contentious claims that have not been articulated, let alone justified. Even were Jenrick and Stock to make the attempt, they should eschew ‘medieval’ as a term of opprobrium. Medieval people were not wallowing in savage, lawless, ignorant darkness before the dawning of rational, civilised, progressive, law-governed modernity. Many of our greatest buildings, institutions, and concepts are to be credited to them. ‘Medieval’ is being deployed as a crude antitype to assumptions about what the modern world is, or should be. It has nothing to do with the Middle Ages, and everything to do with modern preoccupations. Paradoxically, it is a manifestation of ‘thicke fogges of ignorance’.

George Garnett is Professor of Medieval History and Fellow of St Hugh’s College at Oxford University.