What Do We Mean When We Talk About the Middle Ages?

About the Topic

The Western Middle Ages are often labeled dark and stagnant, as though they were an empty interval between classical civilization and the modern world.

Yet the Renaissance, Reformation, and Scientific Revolution are difficult to imagine without them. During this millennium, Christian thought encountered Greek reason as European societies broke apart and reformed, changing the organization of the world.

Continuing from the late Roman Empire, we enter an age of multiple peoples, cultures, and narratives:

How did new kingdoms establish order among the ruins?

How did monasteries, churches, and knights shape Europe?

How did Christianity move from a persecuted outside belief to a central spiritual authority?

What ideas brought reason and faith together and helped prepare Europe’s later resurgence?

We will trace stages of medieval development through religious and secular histories, considering the period as a setting from which the modern world emerged, rather than simply a dark age.

From patristic to scholastic thought, Romanesque art to Gothic cathedrals, and the return of Greek learning through Arabic and Byzantine traditions, we will consider Christianity’s organizing ideas, the Renaissance, and modern ideas of reason and individuality.

On Friday evening, let’s return to the Middle Ages that helped shape our world.