T H E M I D D L E A G E S 2 so thoroughly abandoned the civilized culture of Greece and Rome that they never bathed, lived in filth, and ate rotten meat (chapter 3). Medi- eval Christians blindly followed a corrupt and repressive Church, which actively suppressed any scientific investigation (chapter 6) and cruelly sent thousands of children to die on a pointless Crusade (chapter 7). Yet this Church was also so clueless about its clergy that it accidentally elected a woman named Joan as pope (chapter 8). The hatred of women shown in medieval documents about this “Pope Joan” was taken to horrifying extremes in the medieval witch hunts, when (according to the popular narrative) millions of defenseless women were accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake (chapter 10). Medieval historians have spent much of the last century and more push- ing against these and other fictions about the Middle Ages, but often with- out success. It doesn’t help when millions of people can watch a recent History Channel documentary on medieval history, which is still called The Dark Ages (dir. Christopher Cassel, 2007). Even though the film’s producers sought to show that the Middle Ages were anything but “dark,” their title only perpetuates the stereotype of the Middle Ages as nothing but the Dark Ages. This idea is reinforced by the cover of the DVD, which shows a worn and cracked human skull, embedded in a medieval stone wall, shrouded in darkness. An image like this aptly sums up what many people still believe about the medieval “Dark Ages.” Violent and reductive stereotypes about the Middle Ages are further strengthened by fictional works, such as the Game of Thrones novels and shows. Although everyone understands that the series is fictional, with its dragons and ancient magic, much of the plot is made convincing and familiar, as it is based loosely on actual medieval events in the Wars of the Roses, the Hundred Years’ War, and the Crusades (Marsden 2018). The Middle Ages, whether portrayed in a documentary or a fantasy epic, are usually equated with senseless brutality. How true are such sweeping condemnations of the Middle Ages? And whether we use the term “Dark Ages” or “Middle Ages,” what exactly do we mean about the chronology and culture of this historical period? In this chapter we will explore the “big myth” about the Middle Ages, namely that the era was nothing but a “dark age” that paled in comparison to the preceding Roman Empire or the Italian Renaissance that followed. How the Story Became Popular The first thing to understand about the Middle Ages—and this is a difficult starting point for a book about the subject—is that they do not
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