Why Do We Call Them the “Middle” Ages?
By: Rachel Singer
Tags: Names, Renaissance, History, Medieval, The Middle Ages

Why Do We Call Them the “Middle” Ages?

What’s in a name? Centuries of disparagement.

Photo by JOHN TOWNER on Unsplash

What do we mean when we call something “medieval?” From “Pulp Fiction” to Taylor Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down,” modern references to the Middle Ages tend to invoke backwardness, brutality, or intolerance. But this is not a misuse of the term. The moniker “the Middle Ages” was always intended to disparage everything medieval.

This time period, which lasted from around 500–1500 CE, has been called “middle” for centuries. Enlightenment thinkers named it to distinguish themselves as new, special, and uniquely tied to the classical Greek and Roman past. The idea was that the time between Rome and the Renaissance formed a “middle age” in which there was no memory of the past, original thought, or innovation. This concept was also behind their name “Renaissance,” which means “rebirth” in French and refers to the reemergence of classical ideas.

What’s the problem, then?

This perception of the Middle Ages is just not true. The Middle Ages were not a break with Roman traditions or a time of exceptional irrationality. And Renaissance humanists were not as unique as they and their successors believed.

The memory of Rome remained strong throughout the medieval period. Roman motifs, literature, and thought did not just vanish. Instead, medieval people used them in new ways. Medieval kingdoms, including Francia, England, and Islamic Spain, drew on the traditions of Rome to bolster their legitimacy. They incorporated Roman laws into their own legal codes. Many of kingdoms continued to use Latin, which evolved over time into the Romance languages. Roman literary motifs are also common in medieval literature. Virgil’s Aeneid, the works of Ovid, and Suetonius’ biographies all remained relevant and influential throughout the period.

It is also false that the Middle Ages were especially “backwards.” In reality, medieval people were not any less intelligent, rational, or innovative than people of any other time. Some of the world’s greatest thinkers lived and wrote in the Middle Ages. Thomas Aquinas, Christine de Pisan, Maimonides, and Ibn Rushd (Averroes) all tried to transform the way that people thought, and their contributions are still valuable today. Medieval Europeans also invented the university to further intellectual pursuits and made great architectural and artistic innovations.

Medieval people get a bad wrap. But they were not extraordinarily stupid. Educated medieval people did not think the Earth was flat, and they were not totally blinded by religious dogma. They also weren’t unusually smelly or dirty. And although medieval science and medicine seem laughably wrong today, the same is true of most of the science and medicine of the Enlightenment and even the early twentieth century. The medievals were as right as they could be at the time with the tools they had available to them. And although they were often intolerant of religious or ethnic difference, they were not measurably more prejudiced than the people of any other time period.

Renaissance thinkers were also kidding themselves when they claimed to be a totally new phenomenon. If they were right, it would be easier to determine when the Middle Ages end and the Renaissance begins! There are lots of turning points to choose from, including the fall of Constantinople (1453), the rise of the Medici in Florence (the early 15th century), and the Battle of Bosworth Field (1485) to name a few.

But even scholars who agree on an end for the period still bicker about what should count as “Renaissance” thought, art, or literature and what is still “medieval.” Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, for instance, are all fairly claimed by scholars of both periods. The truth is, the shift from the late Middle Ages to Early Modernity took place slowly. There is no one event that we can point to as the end of the Middle Ages, and there are plenty of antecedents to the Renaissance in the late Middle Ages.

Renaissance humanists, no matter what they claimed, owed a lot of their thinking to medieval thought. Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, for instance, often invoke the backwardness of the Middle Ages and glorify the Roman past. But even Machiavelli’s Discourses are philosophically indebted to the Middle Ages. Machiavelli is concerned that knowledge of the past may vanish and thinks of time as a divinely planned linear progression of events. But these ideas are not Roman. Roman historians wrote to provide behavioral models and to comment on the present, not to preserve knowledge for posterity. They also did think of time as a single divine plan — that was a later, Christian idea. So, medieval thought remained influential, even in the Renaissance. It was not totally replaced in favor of classical ideas.

Photo by Flo P on Unsplash

A global problem

But calling this period “middle” is even less straightforward today than it was in the Enlightenment. This is because of history’s recent global turn. Historians and literary scholars increasingly aim to study the whole world and to bring more attention to regions outside of Europe and North America. Many medieval scholars have embraced this development, speaking of a “global Middle Ages.” This is fruitful, fascinating, and important work that has helped us better understand the world between 500 and 1500 CE.

But there was no “Renaissance” outside of Europe. So the medieval period is defined differently in different geographical and cultural contexts. It also doesn’t always fit perfectly with each region’s traditional set of periodizations. Different regions usually have different names for time periods, and often divide them in different ways.

This is not to say that there are no regions outside of Europe which use the labels “ancient,” “medieval,” and “modern” for their history. Scholars of Chinese history have used this periodization since the 19th century. But even though the names are the same, the time periods they represent are different. The Chinese Middle Ages may have begun as early as 220 CE — almost three centuries before the European medieval period! And, although, just as in Europe, there is much debate about when the Middle Ages ended in China, the possible dates range from 770 to 1600 CE. Using the same label for both periods implies that they refer to the same span of time. And this could flatten the finer distinctions between East Asian and European history.

But at the same time, the word “medieval” makes as much sense in China as it does in Europe, if not more. The Middle Ages are differentiated from the ancient and modern periods in China by meaningful political, cultural, and social changes. And the word “medieval” is not pejorative in the context of Chinese history in the same way that it is in European history; it just conveys that the period is situated in between two others. Scholars of Chinese history therefore use the name “Middle Ages” without the derogatory subtext, and are just as entitled to it as European historians.

So what should we do?

The name “Middle Ages” may not make much sense. But it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. The name is just too ingrained in popular understandings of the time period. It will be hard for scholars to call the Middle Ages anything else if they want the public to know what (and when) they are talking about.

The myth of the Middle Ages’ backwardness is deep-rooted and frustrating to medievalists. But it is not the most dangerous threat to the field of Medieval Studies. A widespread lack of interest in the period threatens the field’s future. And the resulting vacuum of general knowledge about the Middle Ages has allowed white supremacist groups to co-opt elements of the period. These hate groups are wrong to believe the Middle Ages were “whiter,” “purer,” or better than the present. But their abuse of medieval history, symbols, and ideas could irreparably damage public opinion of the the Middle Ages.

The time period’s name is therefore not its most pressing problem. It is more important to educate the public about what “medieval” really means than to try to ditch the word itself.

Suggestions for further reading

The 2019 essay collection Whose Middle Ages?: Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past is a wonderful, readable introduction to the use and abuse of the medieval in the modern world. It covers topics including racism, antisemitism, gender and sexuality, and conflict between Christians and Muslims, and is therefore a good place to start looking into what the “medieval” means today.

For more on the global Middle Ages, see the Global Medieval Studies Bibliography compiled by Georgetown University faculty. Many thanks to Professor Michelle C. Wang for her invaluable help with this article!