Why The Middle Ages Matter Today
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” wrote William Faulkner in Requiem for
a Nun. Faulkner was speaking of the past experiences of one human being. Can his
statement apply to the historical past? Above all, can it apply to a period so far
behind us that it has another name: the Middle Ages? Do the Middle Ages still shape
our world?
To be sure! We can say that universities as we know them “began” in the Middle
Ages; that medieval representative institutions were forerunners of the US houses of
Congress and the Canadian Parliament; and that (giving the question of origins a less
positive spin) the idea of making Jews wear a special marker, so important a feature
of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, goes back to 1215. Today Neapolitans can walk by
the very priory of San Domenico where Thomas Aquinas entered the order of
Preachers, the Dominicans, while Americans in Washington, DC, can ogle
Washington National Cathedral, built in Gothic style.
So medieval history is relevant today. It helps explain our surroundings and the
origins of many of our institutions.
But immediate relevance is not the only reason why the Middle Ages matter. To
put it bluntly: they matter because they are past, yet still familiar. The religions that
flourished then—Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and the many dissidents within these
folds—remain with us, even though they have changed dramatically. This is true as
well of many of our institutions—the papacy, royalty, and towns, for example. The
problems confronting people in the Middle Ages, not just basic problems such as
giving birth, surviving, getting ill, and dying, but sophisticated problems—attempts at
thought control, manipulation of markets, outlets and barriers to creativity—are
recognizably analogous to our own.
Yet much is very different today. This isn’t true just at the level of tools—the
Middle Ages had nothing that was powered by electricity, no instantaneous
communication methods—but also at the level of assumptions about the world. For
example, the Middle Ages lacked our ideas and feelings associated with
“nationalism.” The nation-state, of overriding importance in our time, was unknown
in the Middle Ages, even though medieval history became a discipline precisely to
prove the reality of nations. (That last fact explains the origins of some of the great
medieval primary-source collections undertaken in the nineteenth century, such as the
Monumenta Germaniae Historica, the Historical Monuments of Germany, whose
