Ultimately, periodisation is merely a device used by historians to structure their research and teaching. As Lord Blackadder memorably quipped to his servant: ‘To you, Baldrick, the Renaissance was just something that happened to other people, wasn’t it?’ But how much did the Renaissance really transform society? Bound by traditional social and economic structures, the lives of most of Europe’s inhabitants changed little. Renaissance monarchs introduced new styles of kingship and there was a remarkable flourishing of art, architecture and music. Humanist scholars certainly thought themselves to be living in a new age, set apart from the period of darkness that had followed the fall of Rome. The intellectual and cultural movement known as the Renaissance perhaps constituted another watershed. And it was not the newly formed Protestant churches but Catholic religious orders that shaped the other defining event of the age: European exploration and conquest. The deeply conservative Luther did not challenge the social or political status quo that was left to his unruly spiritual offspring, the radical reformers. Luther’s protest crystallised resentments that had been brewing for decades and there was much about his Reformation that was profoundly medieval. Moreover, the German Reformation came of age alongside the printing press. Luther’s protest against the practices of the Catholic Church led to the splintering of western Christendom, to more than a century of religious warfare and, via some very circuitous routes, to the rise of religious toleration. ‘Humanist scholars certainly thought themselves to be living in a new age’īridget Heal, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of St AndrewsĪs a historian of Reformation Germany, I’m duty bound to say that the medieval period ended on 31 October 1517, the day on which Martin Luther supposedly nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg. In the Iberian Peninsula, Christian armies had pushed south through modern Spain and Portugal beginning in the 8th century, graduating expelling the Moorish caliphate that had taken hold in the years following Rome’s withdrawal from the region.‘The medieval persists’: stained glass depicting two minstrels c.1885, attributed to James Egan, a former employee of William Morris. Intellectualism also began to prosper, with the advent of the printing press in 1439 allowing the masses ready access to new ideas and mass communication for the first time. In Italy, the 14th century saw the beginning of the cultural explosion known today as the Renaissance, with painting, sculpture, and architecture seeing marked advancement. The closing years of the medieval period were marked by discovery, be it technological, artistic, or territorial. It was also during this time that plague stalked the continent, with the Black Death taking the lives of an estimated 75 to 200 million people across both Europe and Asia between 13. Image credit: Public Domain, via Wikimedia CommonsĪt the same time as waging costly wars against the French, England also fought a series of conflicts against the Kingdom of Scotland, including the famous Battle of Stirling Bridge in 1297, when Scottish armies led by Sir William Wallace defeated numerically superior English forces. ![]() Jean Froissart: Battle of Crécy between the English and French in the Hundred Years’ War. ![]() The Hundred Years’ War, fought between England and France from 1337 to 1453, exemplified this phenomena, as royal families grappled for control of Europe’s borders. Dynastic warsīoth the high period of the medieval era and the subsequent Late Middle Ages were marked by the rise of organised militaries and international conflict. The rise and dominance of the Catholic Church was a hallmark of the medieval epoch, and shaped the next period of the era – the High Middle Ages – in dramatic fashion.įrom 1000 to 1250 AD, the church sanctioned the seismic military pilgrimages known as the Crusades, which saw thousands of Europeans flock to the Middle East, ostensibly to win back Christian holy sites from Muslim hands.Ĭatholicism also came to govern daily life for many of the common people across Europe, as low literacy rates and poor medical provisions saw peasants turn to the church for education, comfort, and salvation.ĭuring the High Middle Ages, universities gradually began to prosper however, and the scholastic movement, spearheaded by figures such as Italian philosopher Thomas Aquinas, grew rapidly. Cat Jarman ventures out into ancient Selwood Forest in Wiltshire with art historian Amy Jeffs.
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