Many of us use the term “Middle Ages” without giving it a second thought. Where did this weird expression “Middle Ages” come from?
Interestingly, people during the Middle Ages never referred to their time as “the Middle Ages.” You can understand why. The expression implies a time period that didn’t quite make the grade. Middle Ages! It would be like people centuries from now referring to our time as the Primitive Internet Period or the Icky Eats Epoch. It was only after the Middle Ages ended that people during the Renaissance period came up with the label “Middle Ages.” Many during the Renaissance believed that Classical Antiquity was superior to the period that had come just before them, and so they called that period the Middle Ages. To help you picture the three time periods we’ve been thinking about, I have drawn a time line. Whereas Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages lasted roughly the same amount of time, the Renaissance whizzed by in a little over a hundred years. ____________________|_________________________|____ ANTIQUITY MIDDLE AGES Renaissance And that’s how the belittling moniker “Middle Ages” came into existence! Thankfully, nowadays we look a little less disparagingly on the Middle Ages than people did during the Renaissance. We now know that the Middle Ages weren’t that “middling.” In fact, a lot of important developments happened during the Middle Ages, from mechanical clocks to multi-voice musical compositions. QUIZ #2 To help you think some more about this, I have listed three people below, one each from Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Which one of the three lived during the Middle Ages?
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John HainesI have been publishing in medieval studies for 20+ years. I started my career teaching elementary and middle school students. My favorite pastime at 10 years old was drawing cartoons! Archives
January 2022
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