How do you view the Middle Ages?

[Aenlic]

I tend to favor Terry Jones views, as written and as expressed in some of his wonderful TV shows.

The Middle Ages have gotten a very bad rep for all of the wrong reasons. They are seen as some sort of backwards period of history, full of violence and ignorance and suffering. While such things were indeed part of Middles Ages life; they were no more prevalent than at other times.

There was as much violence before and after the Middle Ages as during the period. The wars before and since the Middle Ages were just as bloody and common. A case could be made, perhaps, that politically the period was stagnant; but the feudal systems of the period gave rise the political advances which came later.

Economically and culturally, the Middle Ages were as just as vibrant as the Renaissance. The Champagne Fairs, the great trading concerns like the Hanseatic League, the trading empires of Genoa, Pisa and Venice, the great trade empires of the Silk Road and more were much more robust than anything that had come before.

The great universities were established during the Middle Ages, not so much by the Church itself as by the religious orders like the Dominicans and Cistercians (who were often rather obviously independent of official Church decree, thus allowing otherwise prohibited scientific exploration). Even before that, the spread of the teaching monks from the Irish monasteries into Western Europe set the foundations for the great teaching and educational orders.

As was pointed out, the whole idea of the Middle Ages as being a deep dark hole from which mankind had to climb is just an artifact of the often over-simplified and unwarranted reverence for a "lost" classical era of the Greek and Romans. I blame the romanticists of the Victorian era. So much nonsense originated during that period; and some of it is still rampant today.