Middle Ages

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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 “middle age” cast ten centuries as a corridor between two rooms. Historians have spent two hundred years dismantling the slander while keeping the name; “Dark Ages” survives now mostly as a label for how little the coiners knew about the period, not how little happened in it.

For the history of religious and esoteric thought, the period is not a corridor but a workshop. Monastic scriptoria did the bare, unglamorous thing on which everything later depends: they copied. What survives of Latin antiquity survives substantially because monks kept reproducing it for a thousand years. Then, in the twelfth century, the workshop’s doors opened — translators in Spain and Sicily began turning Arabic learning into Latin, and with it came not only Aristotle and Greek medicine and mathematics preserved and developed in the Islamic world, but astrology, alchemy, and texts traveling under the name of Hermes, the Emerald Tablet among them. Much of what the later West would call occult science entered Europe in that one long act of translation. The same century built the cathedrals and invented the university; scholasticism, the period’s characteristic intellectual style, set about fitting the whole inheritance into one coherent frame, with a confidence the modern academy has never recovered.

The period’s inner life ran deep as well. The later Middle Ages produced a remarkable literature of contemplation — Meister Eckhart’s sermons, Julian of Norwich’s visions, and the anonymous fourteenth-century English treatise the library holds, The Cloud of Unknowing, which teaches that God is reached not by the working mind but by a naked intent stretching into the dark, a meek stirring of love. That tradition of learned unknowing descends from late antiquity through the pseudonymous Dionysius, and it places some of the period’s most audacious thought inside its most orthodox institutions.

A period this long resists summary, and the conventional dates are themselves conventions — nothing ended in 476 that contemporaries experienced as an ending, and nothing in 1500 felt like a door closing. What the frame usefully marks is a condition: the centuries in which Europe’s relation to its own past was custodial — holding, copying, translating, glossing an inheritance it believed greater than itself. The Renaissance that named the period scorned it for exactly that humility, while standing on its shelves.

→ In the library: The Cloud of Unknowing (Underhill ed., 1912)

→ Related: As Above So Below · Neoplatonism