(no subject)
I just finished a book entitled Mysteries of the Middle Ages by Thomas Cahill. I gave it as a gift once and it seemed interesting, so I bought a copy for myself as well.
Cahill's built a career as the optimist's historian. What interests him aren't the wars, political struggles, glories, and evils, but the remarkable, positive moments -- like how Irish Catholic monks copied and preserved technically heretical Classical texts so as to keep them alive and in memory.
Mysteries is kind of a random sampling of the people and places he finds interesting, and which tend to get forgotten in the modern view of the Middle Ages as a sterile and superstitious age. He covers the City of Alexandria, the first universities, Hildegaard of Bingen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Francis of Assisi, Dante, Giotto, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Héloïse and Abelard, among others.
He argues that the Middle Ages was less brutal than the Renaissance, that people weren't mindless sheep of an evil church, and that the Medieval Church could be a positive force in human lives, even if the papacy was hopelessly corrupt.
(Given a rant in a footnote, I think he was driven to write this book because of Catholicism's portrayal in the Da Vinci Code.)
As far as it goes, his overall argument is correct -- with the Renaissance, persecutions of heretics, Jews, and homosexuals rapidly increased, and the position of women slipped somewhat. The church also acted as social services in the days when governments weren't interested in such things. Christianity was a massive improvement for women in the Mediterranean. This is all true and well-established now.
Some of his particulars, though, bother me. He's writing very much from a Catholic perspective -- something that's not immediately obvious, but which gets more and more obvious throughout the book, culminating in the last chapter with a liberal Catholic's rant against John-Paul II and Pope Benedict.
Not surprisingly -- because of this bias -- he gives short shrift to Paganism in any of its flavours. He has more respect for Classical Paganism, but describes it as "exhausted," and just eager for something new. Except for a single page in his first chapter, he glosses over inter-religious violence in Europe, an omission which seems to suggest that everyone up there was just sitting around, waiting for this wonderful new religion to come along so that they could get rid of their own.
It's the northern Pagans -- those Celts, and Germanics, and Slavs -- where he's particularly obnoxious. They're just animals, predatory monsters who descend on Christendom, wreak havoc, rape and pillage. They have no art, no spirituality, no poetry -- in short, no humanity -- until they accept Catholicism and become wonderful.
Cahill has written books about how Irish, and the Jews, and the Greek contributed to civilization. I'd like to see that same scholarship-presented-plain-English directed toward the pre-Christian Celts, Norse, or the Slavs. But Cahill won't write that book.
Still, I highly recommend it. Overall, it's a good introduction to how the mediaevals thought, and it's written in a way that people without a background in history can read.
Cahill's built a career as the optimist's historian. What interests him aren't the wars, political struggles, glories, and evils, but the remarkable, positive moments -- like how Irish Catholic monks copied and preserved technically heretical Classical texts so as to keep them alive and in memory.
Mysteries is kind of a random sampling of the people and places he finds interesting, and which tend to get forgotten in the modern view of the Middle Ages as a sterile and superstitious age. He covers the City of Alexandria, the first universities, Hildegaard of Bingen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Francis of Assisi, Dante, Giotto, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Héloïse and Abelard, among others.
He argues that the Middle Ages was less brutal than the Renaissance, that people weren't mindless sheep of an evil church, and that the Medieval Church could be a positive force in human lives, even if the papacy was hopelessly corrupt.
(Given a rant in a footnote, I think he was driven to write this book because of Catholicism's portrayal in the Da Vinci Code.)
As far as it goes, his overall argument is correct -- with the Renaissance, persecutions of heretics, Jews, and homosexuals rapidly increased, and the position of women slipped somewhat. The church also acted as social services in the days when governments weren't interested in such things. Christianity was a massive improvement for women in the Mediterranean. This is all true and well-established now.
Some of his particulars, though, bother me. He's writing very much from a Catholic perspective -- something that's not immediately obvious, but which gets more and more obvious throughout the book, culminating in the last chapter with a liberal Catholic's rant against John-Paul II and Pope Benedict.
Not surprisingly -- because of this bias -- he gives short shrift to Paganism in any of its flavours. He has more respect for Classical Paganism, but describes it as "exhausted," and just eager for something new. Except for a single page in his first chapter, he glosses over inter-religious violence in Europe, an omission which seems to suggest that everyone up there was just sitting around, waiting for this wonderful new religion to come along so that they could get rid of their own.
It's the northern Pagans -- those Celts, and Germanics, and Slavs -- where he's particularly obnoxious. They're just animals, predatory monsters who descend on Christendom, wreak havoc, rape and pillage. They have no art, no spirituality, no poetry -- in short, no humanity -- until they accept Catholicism and become wonderful.
Cahill has written books about how Irish, and the Jews, and the Greek contributed to civilization. I'd like to see that same scholarship-presented-plain-English directed toward the pre-Christian Celts, Norse, or the Slavs. But Cahill won't write that book.
Still, I highly recommend it. Overall, it's a good introduction to how the mediaevals thought, and it's written in a way that people without a background in history can read.