Middle Ages

← Encyclopedia

The Middle Ages is the name Europe gave, after the fact, to its own middle: the roughly thousand years between the end of the western Roman empire, conventionally dated 476, and the period around 1500. The term was coined in retrospect and as an insult — Renaissance humanists, certain they were reviving antiquity, needed a name for the interval that separated them from it, and the label middle age cast ten centuries as a corridor between two rooms. Petrarch, around the 1340s, was the first to speak of the post-Roman centuries as a darkness, a sleep of forgetfulness from which he hoped a later generation might wake; a century afterward Leonardo Bruni and Flavio Biondo hardened that intuition into a three-part scheme of antiquity, middle, and a modern better age, and the Latin label media tempestas appears as early as 1469, with medium aevum recorded by 1604. Historians have spent two hundred years dismantling the slander while keeping the name. The phrase Dark Ages survives now mostly as a label for how little the coiners knew about the period, not how little happened in it — and even its narrowest defensible use is the ecclesiastical historian Caesar Baronius’s saeculum obscurum, applied in 1602 to the tenth and eleventh centuries and meaning only a scarcity of surviving writers, not a darkness of mind.

The frame: a custodial civilization

A period this long resists summary, and the conventional dates are themselves conventions. Nothing ended in 476 that contemporaries experienced as an ending — the deposition of a child emperor in Italy passed almost unremarked in a world where the empire continued, intact and Greek-speaking, from Constantinople for another thousand years (see the Byzantine empire). Nothing in 1500 felt like a door closing. What the frame usefully marks is a condition rather than an event: the centuries in which Europe’s relation to its own past was custodial — holding, copying, translating, and glossing an inheritance it believed greater than itself. The Latin West understood itself as the heir of two antiquities at once, the classical and the biblical, and its characteristic intellectual labor was reconciliation: making Athens agree with Jerusalem, Aristotle with Genesis, the philosopher with the prophet. The Renaissance that named the period scorned it for exactly that humility, while standing on its shelves.

For the history of religious and esoteric thought, then, the period is not a corridor but a workshop. It is the matrix in which the streams this site follows were carried, transformed, and in several cases first assembled: Latin alchemy, learned astrology, the ceremonial-magic of the grimoires, and the flowering of Kabbalah. None of these is a medieval invention; all of them took the shape they would keep, in the West, during these centuries.

The act of copying

Monastic scriptoria did the bare, unglamorous thing on which everything later depends: they copied. What survives of Latin antiquity survives substantially because monks reproduced it, generation after generation, in houses that ordered their whole day around the divine office and treated the labor of the pen as a form of prayer. Western monasticism gave that labor its institutional form. The Rule of Benedict of Nursia, composed in the sixth century, became the constitution of the Latin religious life; the great reform houses extended and renewed it — Cluny, founded in 910 and grown to some fourteen hundred dependencies at its height, and Cîteaux, founded in 1098 as the seed of the austere Cistercian order, whose general-chapter governance the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 would commend as a model for all religious institutions. Monasticism was thus both the period’s archive and its engine of reform, and it is no accident that the West’s deepest contemplative literature came out of the cloister. The eastern half of the old empire ran its own parallel monastic civilization, and its mystical theology — the hesychast prayer of the heart developed on Mount Athos — belongs to that other Christendom rather than this one.

Boethius, at the very opening of the period, set himself to translate the whole of Plato and Aristotle into Latin and to reconcile them; he completed only the logical works of Aristotle before his execution around 524, but those texts — the logica vetus — were nearly the whole of the Philosopher that the early medieval West possessed for six hundred years. The early centuries lived on a thin diet of the ancient corpus, supplemented by the encyclopedic compilations of Isidore of Seville and the Carolingian recovery under Charlemagne, whose court scholar Alcuin standardized the script in which the classical texts would be recopied. The single most consequential intellectual fact about the early Middle Ages is simply that the copying did not stop.

The twelfth-century translations

Then, in the twelfth century, the workshop’s doors opened. The decisive event for everything this site treats is a long act of translation, carried out where Latin Christendom met the Arabic-speaking world — in reconquered Toledo, in Norman Sicily, and along the Spanish frontier. There the technical and philosophical inheritance that Greek antiquity had bequeathed and that the Islamic golden age had preserved, corrected, and vastly extended was rendered into Latin and poured into Europe. The historian Charles Homer Haskins gave this surge of recovery its enduring name, the renaissance of the twelfth century, and the phrase deliberately steals the later age’s word for the later age’s own model.

The translators were specific men with specific output. Gerard of Cremona, working in Toledo until his death in 1187, is credited with roughly eighty translations from the Arabic — his version of Ptolemy’s Almagest, finished in 1175, alongside works of Aristotle, Euclid, and Galen. Hermann of Carinthia turned the Great Introduction of the astrologer Abu Ma’shar into Latin, and Michael Scot carried the commentaries of the philosopher the Latins called Averroes into the schools. What came through this corridor was not only the recovered Aristotle and the Greek mathematics and medicine the Arab scholars had developed, but the esoteric sciences as a coherent body: judicial astrology in its full technical apparatus, alchemical theory and practice, the astral magic of the Picatrix tradition, and a literature of texts traveling under the name of Hermes Trismegistus, the Emerald Tablet among them with its formula of correspondence between the world above and the world below — the doctrine this encyclopedia indexes under as above, so below. Much of what the later West would call occult science entered Europe in that one generation, wearing the prestige of Aristotelian natural philosophy. The deepest philosophical importation was Avicenna, whose metaphysics of being and necessary existence, and whose account of the soul and the active intellect, became the framework within which Latin theologians would have to think — the indispensable intermediary, with Averroes, between the Greeks and the schoolmen.

Scholasticism and the universities

The same century that opened the translation corridor invented the institution that would digest its contents. The medieval university was a genuinely new thing — a self-governing corporation of masters and students, holding charters, granting degrees, and claiming a jurisdiction of its own. Bologna dates its foundation to 1088, Paris coalesced around 1150, Oxford was teaching by the end of the century and grew rapidly after 1167. Into these schools the newly translated Aristotle arrived like a flood, and the work of accommodating it to Christian revelation produced scholasticism, the period’s characteristic intellectual style: the method of the disputed question, the citation of authorities for and against, and the resolution that holds the whole inheritance in a single frame.

Scholasticism set about fitting Athens and Jerusalem together with a confidence the modern academy has never recovered. Anselm of Canterbury defined its program as faith seeking understanding and gave it the ontological argument for God’s existence. Thomas Aquinas, the synthesizer, built the largest of the syntheses, baptizing Aristotle for the Latin Church and dividing the truths reason can reach from those that only revelation discloses. Bonaventure held the Augustinian and Franciscan line against the new naturalism; Duns Scotus refined the metaphysics of being and individuation to a famous fineness; and William of Ockham, in the fourteenth century, began to pull the synthesis apart, severing what faith holds from what reason can demonstrate and so opening the road that later thought would take. The schools also generated their own heterodoxies — the Latin Averroism condemned at Paris in 1277, where the bishop censured over two hundred propositions, marks the point at which the Church drew a line around how far the recovered philosophy could be followed.

Alongside this rationalist enterprise ran an older, apophatic current. The tradition of learned unknowing descends from late antiquity through the pseudonymous Dionysius the Areopagite, whose negative theology — God known by the stripping-away of every name — was translated and glossed throughout the period and fed the Christian Neoplatonism that ran beneath the scholastic surface. Its boldest medieval representative, Johannes Scotus Eriugena, had already in the ninth century rendered the Dionysian corpus into Latin and built from it a cosmology of procession and return.

The inner life: mystics and visionaries

The period’s inner life ran as deep as its learning. The later Middle Ages produced a remarkable literature of contemplation, much of it written inside the most orthodox institutions and some of it by women whose only authority was the vision itself. Hildegard of Bingen, abbess, composer, and visionary, recorded a cosmology of living light; Bernard of Clairvaux gave the Cistercian century its language of love as the soul’s ascent; the Rhineland preacher Meister Eckhart pressed the apophatic to its edge in vernacular sermons on the ground of the soul and the birth of God within it; Julian of Norwich, the English anchoress, recorded the showings in which she saw all things held in a thing the size of a hazelnut and was told that all shall be well. The anonymous fourteenth-century English treatise The Cloud of Unknowing, which the library holds in Evelyn Underhill’s edition, teaches that God is reached not by the working mind but by a naked intent of the will stretching into the dark, a meek stirring of love beneath a cloud of forgetting — the apophatic inheritance turned into a discipline of the heart. The Devotio Moderna of the Low Countries carried the same interior turn into the practical piety of The Imitation of Christ. These mystics place some of the period’s most audacious thought inside its most established houses, and they show the apophatic and affective traditions running in tandem with the disputations of the schools.

The esoteric undercurrents

Beneath, beside, and sometimes within the official culture ran the streams this encyclopedia exists to follow, and the Middle Ages is where they took their Western form.

Latin alchemy began with the twelfth-century translations — Robert of Chester’s 1144 rendering of the Liber de compositione alchemiae attributed to Morienus is conventionally the first treatise of Latin alchemy. From there the discipline grew a vast pseudepigraphic literature under the names of Geber, Arnaldus de Villa Nova, and Ramon Llull, and acquired its enduring legends in figures such as Nicolas Flamel. The texts that the early-modern printing houses would later gather into the great compendia — the Turba Philosophorum, the Rosarium, the Aurora Consurgens attributed to Aquinas — are in their cores medieval works, the editorial sediment of the centuries in which alchemy was both a craft of the laboratory and a doctrine of transformation read in the key of as above, so below. The friar Roger Bacon and Arnaldus de Villa Nova are the period’s emblematic figures of natural-philosophical and alchemical inquiry held in uneasy proximity to orthodoxy.

Astrology entered as a technical science with the Arabic transmission and was rapidly absorbed into medicine, agriculture, and the universities, where it was taught as part of the mathematical arts. Its intellectual respectability was real and its theological status perpetually contested, since a sky that determined events seemed to threaten both providence and free will — a tension Aquinas managed by allowing the stars to incline the body while leaving the will free. The Hermetic and astral-magical material that came with it, the doctrine of drawing down planetary power into talismans, is the seed of the Renaissance magic that Ficino and his successors would cultivate.

The period also gave Kabbalah its classical shape. In the Jewish communities of Provence and Catalonia, across the first three-quarters of the thirteenth century, a circle of teachers transformed the mythic symbolism of the Sefer ha-Bahir into a discursive theosophy. Isaac the Blind in Provence, Azriel of Gerona and his fellow Geronese systematizers, gave Kabbalah a Neoplatonic vocabulary for the Infinite (Ein Sof) and its emanation through ten sefirot, and a theory of intention directed through that structure in prayer. The movement culminated, late in the century in Castile, in the Zohar attributed to the circle of Moses de León. This was also the great age of medieval Jewish Neoplatonism in al-Andalus — Ibn Gabirol, whose doctrine of universal matter and the divine Will entered Christian scholasticism under the misattributed name Avicebron, and Judah Halevi, whose Kuzari mounted philosophy’s own tools against philosophy’s universal claims. The deep affinity between the Hermetic foundation texts of the Corpus Hermeticum and the Kabbalistic Sepher Yetzirah tradition is one of the threads the later Christian Kabbalah would try to weave together.

Dissent, repression, and the limits of the frame

The same institutional confidence that produced the cathedral and the Summa produced the machinery for policing belief. The eleventh and twelfth centuries saw the spread of dualist heresy in the West — the family of movements the sources call Cathar, with Balkan antecedents among the Bogomils and a deeper Anatolian background among the Paulicians, all teaching in varying degrees a cosmos divided between a good God and an evil maker of matter (see Catharism, Bogomilism, Paulicianism). Whether Catharism was a real, organized, Bogomil-derived counter-church or substantially a construct of the inquisitors who recorded it is a question the scholarship leaves open, between the maximalist reading and the constructivist one. What is not in doubt is the violence of the response: the Albigensian Crusade of 1209 to 1229, proclaimed by Innocent III, brought mass killing to Languedoc — the sack of Béziers on 22 July 1209, the long siege of Montségur ending on 16 March 1244 with the burning of some two hundred who refused to recant — and produced the inquisitorial apparatus whose registers, Bernard Gui’s manual and the register of Bishop Jacques Fournier (later Pope Benedict XII), are among the fullest records of medieval popular belief precisely because they were compiled to extirpate it. Heresy and its repression are not marginal to the period; they are the shadow cast by its drive toward a single coherent order of belief.

The end that was not an end

The conventional terminus around 1500 is as artificial as the opening. The recovery of the full Hermetic corpus in 1463, translated for Cosimo de’ Medici by Marsilio Ficino, and the Christian appropriation of Kabbalah that followed, did not break with the medieval inheritance so much as recombine it; the Renaissance magus stood on medieval shelves, reading translations made by medieval hands. The universities, the religious orders, the alchemical and astrological corpora, the contemplative literature, and the Kabbalistic systems all continued across the supposed divide. What the humanists experienced as a dawn was in large part the maturing of seeds the custodial centuries had planted, watered, and kept alive in the long act of copying. The period scorned for its humility had been holding the inheritance in trust, and what came after was less a repudiation than an inheritance claimed.

Scholarship and texts

The modern study of the period as a coherent civilization, rather than a gap, begins with the rehabilitation of its intellectual life. Charles Homer Haskins’s The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927) is the founding statement that the twelfth century already possessed the energies the later Renaissance claimed for itself; it is in the public domain and freely readable at the Internet Archive. R. W. Southern’s The Making of the Middle Ages (London: Hutchinson, 1953) reframed the period’s social and religious imagination for a postwar readership. Jacques Le Goff’s Medieval Civilization 400–1500 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988; from the French La civilisation de l’Occident médiéval, 1964) is the standard Annales-school synthesis, treating the period as a total culture rather than a sequence of reigns; it is in copyright and is cited here as a pointer.

On the transmission that made the West’s esoteric and scientific inheritance possible, the indispensable corpus is Charles Burnett’s Arabic into Latin in the Middle Ages (Farnham: Ashgate Variorum, 2009), which gathers his studies of the Toledo translators and is cited here as a scholarly pointer; the older but still useful survey of the wider movement is the Wikipedia overview of the Latin translations of the twelfth century, which catalogs translators and works with references. For the alchemical texts the period produced, the standard public-domain English access point is A. E. Waite’s two-volume The Hermetic Museum, Restored and Enlarged (London: James Elliott, 1893), hosted in the library here as The Hermetic Museum; the modern critical historiography that has superseded it — Robert Halleux, Joachim Telle, William Newman, and Lawrence Principe’s The Secrets of Alchemy (Chicago, 2013) — remains in copyright and serves as pointer reference.

For Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem’s Ursprung und Anfänge der Kabbala (Berlin, 1962; English Origins of the Kabbalah, Princeton, 1987) remains the foundational intellectual history of the Provençal and Geronese beginnings, in copyright and cited as a pointer; the older public-domain access to the doctrine is the Jewish Encyclopedia (1901–1906), readable at jewishencyclopedia.com, and the primary Sepher Yetzirah is held in the library. On medieval dualism and its repression, the load-bearing public-domain apparatus includes Henry Charles Lea’s A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, 3 vols. (New York: Harper, 1888), at the Internet Archive; the modern critical readers — Wakefield and Evans, and the debate gathered in Antonio Sennis’s Cathars in Question (York, 2016) — are in copyright and serve as pointers. The apophatic line of medieval contemplation is held here in The Cloud of Unknowing and in the Dionysian corpus from which it descends.

→ In the library: The Cloud of Unknowing (Underhill ed., 1912) · The Hermetic Museum (Waite, 1893) · Sepher Yetzirah

→ Related: As Above So Below · Neoplatonism · Roman Empire · Islam · Avicenna · Ceremonial Magic · Scholasticism · Latin Medieval Alchemy · Astrology · Early Kabbalah · Catharism · The Renaissance · Byzantine Empire · Western Monasticism · Pseudo Dionysius The Areopagite · Thomas Aquinas