![]() In reality, the Inquisition as it was known in the 18th century took shape at the beginning of the Modern Age (late 15th century), and witch-hunts were unknown during the Middle Ages: they developed between the 15th and 17th centuries,” he adds. “That led to images of the Middle Ages as a time filled with dungeons, witch-hunts and heretics burnt at the stake. Fuente, who last year received the Leonor de Guzmán Essay Award, feels that the period “has either been very idealized or considered accursed.” The historian notes that the bad press began right around the time when someone came up with the term during the Renaissance, and that leading thinkers such as Voltaire helped disseminate fake news about the Middle Ages.Īlberto Montaner, one of the biggest experts on the historical figure of El Cid, notes that it was in fact the most enlightened individuals of this period who created the worst stereotypes about the Middle Ages because they viewed it as “the age of feudalism politically, and of obscurantism intellectually.” ![]() “The Middle Ages are a period of light,” says María Jesús Fuente alluding to medieval illuminated manuscripts. In the movie Pulp Fiction, the gangster Marsellus describes his plans to torture a man with a line about getting “medieval on your ass.” ![]() The Middle Ages’ bad reputation extends to politics, journalism and to every corner of popular culture. “And so you find statements such as ‘don’t be medieval and support science and medicine,’ or ‘a medieval Left that thinks of itself as sophisticated.’” “The word carries a stigma that scholars of medieval history endure stoically, but during this pandemic year, the use of the term has been expanded to describe a diversity of issues,” reads the text, which was signed by over 70 researchers from Spain’s main universities. A medieval manuscript at the Spanish National Library. “We can say that ‘medieval’ has been used to describe anything related to backwardness, ignorance, lack of culture, unwholesome habits, barbarity, cruelty, fanaticism, horror, poverty, monstrosity, violence.” reads the manifesto that emerged from a seminar titled The medieval legacy, organized by María Jesús Fuente and held at the Julio Caro Baroja Historiography Institute at Carlos III University in Madrid, where De la Fuente is an emeritus professor in medieval history. We wouldn’t even know about the ancient Greek and Roman classics, since these works were preserved in medieval monasteries. Without medieval times, we wouldn’t have the majority of languages that we speak today, there would be no time measurement, or many of the recipes that we use to prepare our favorite meals, or even some of the cities that we live in. ![]() The Middle Ages, they say, are an essential time to understand the world we live in today. So much so, that Spain’s top scholars of medieval history have signed a manifesto defending the good name of the period they have devoted their career to. The clergy and the nobility enjoyed the most power and prestige in society and generally held most of the important positions in the government and military, while the peasants, who made up the vast majority of people, lacked any sort of power but did the most work.Rotten teeth, famines, plagues, routine torture, bodies hanging outside cities to “greet” visitors, feudal lords exercising their droit du seigneur to sleep with young women on the latters’ wedding ’s hard to deny that the Middle Ages have had some really bad press. The clergy were the first estate, the nobility the second, and the peasants would represent the third estate. In general, feudal societies would have three estates, including: clergy, nobility and peasants. The monarch would rule over the country while the rest of the people were bound by a hierarchical system in which people were placed into estates in which they were born. It was popular in European society from the 9th century until the 15th century and was the form of government in which the country was dominated by an absolute monarch, in which all power was held within a single king. Feudalism was a form of government common during medieval Europe that involved society being structured in a very rigid and hierarchical way.
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