When Did the Medieval Period End?
I agree with the authors&#x27; comments that the Medieval Period never really ended abruptly and that progress to the next era was one of evolution over a much longer period than most history books state. Similarly, evidence suggests that our common stereotypical perception of history is overly simplistic and the actual historical record is much more complicated and nuanced than we usually believe or accept. Whilst I accept this modern reappraisal is both correct and makes logical sense, it seems to me that we shouldn&#x27;t abandon our old view of history altogether, instead we should try to integrate these different approaches into a common path. I&#x27;ll endeavor to qualify this comment below.<p>People of different regions often have different cultural expectations to each other, their cultures often move forward at different paces and in different directions; thus, these historical differences have often resulted in conflict. Given that certain parts of today&#x27;s interconnected world are still so culturally disparate from one another, one must assume that it was always ever thus. As the modern era&#x2F;internet age has demonstrated, the world&#x27;s population as a whole has never been at one uniform point of development with respect to culture and technologically, and it still isn&#x27;t today. We have only to witness the tragic war in Ukraine and Crimea, and in recent years in the Caucuses, to know that what we&#x27;ve traditionally considered as Medieval attitudes and behaviour is being played out before us in our own era.<p>In this sense the Medieval Period is still with us: it&#x27;s alive and well as the war in Ukraine demonstrates—with this war we are witnessing a vindictive brutal viciousness to the violence that&#x27;s well outside the modern rules of engagement. There, we&#x27;ve observed wayward behaviour that&#x27;s far more in keeping with—and which bears a remarkable similarity to—the violent culture of the Medieval Crusades of the Middle Ages of 11th Century and onward.<p>I would never want to live in the period of history that&#x27;s been traditionally deemed to be at the intersection of the Middle Ages&#x2F;Medieval Period and the start of the Early Renaissance—that of the late 14th and early 15th Centuries—even if I were to have then lived a very privileged lifestyle for the very reason that life back then would have been just too different to the world of today that I&#x27;m used to. Essentially, leaving the advantages of modern living aside, cultural differences between today and the early Renaissance are so vast that a modern person would have considerable difficulty in adjusting to living in that era (it would be a horrible existence).<p>However, if Dr Who&#x27;s Tardis spirited me forward by some 150 to 200 years from the Early Renaissance to the Age of Enlightenment—the mid 17th Century to the late 18th Century—to some place in Western Europe then the situation would be significantly different. Living back then even in privileged circumstances certainly would be no bed of roses for a modern person, but one could learn to adapt reasonably well, methinks. For instance, I reckon I could survive quite well if living a privileged lifestyle in London say between 1700 and ≈1790, for by then Enlightenment attitudes and lifestyles were distinctly much more modern from our perception than they would have been during the early Renaissance. I&#x27;d posit that if we were transported back to that time then we&#x27;d be whingeing continuously about the horrible conditions but we would nevertheless understand the then zeitgeist. That wouldn&#x27;t be so for the early Renaissance.<p>If transported back to living during the early to mid 1700s, I would easily recognize the coffeehouse culture that began some 50–70 years earlier, ready access to daily newspapers, the availability of literary journals like the <i>Tatler</i> and <i>Spectator</i> and so on.  Also, I&#x27;d already be familiar with the literature of the time: the works of essayists, novelists and writers such as Samuel Johnson, Richard Steele, Joseph Addison, Henry Fielding of <i>Tom Jones</i> fame, Oliver Goldsmith, Abbé Aubert, Pierre Beaumarchais, Denis Diderot, Voltaire and many, many more—people who are still household names today. Moreover, these literati would soon pave the way for the next generation who followed in their footsteps, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb and Mary Wollstonecraft, <i>et al.</i><p>In science and mathematics I&#x27;d be familiar with the works of Issac Newton, John Dalton, Thomas Malthus, Thomas Bayes (of Bayes&#x27; theorem), Gottfried Leibniz, Jean d&#x27;Alembert, Leonhard Euler, Antoine Lavoisier, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Joseph Fourier, Joseph-Louis Lagrange and many others. In philosophy, by the mid to late 17th Century, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke had set the scene for modern philosophy, they were followed in quick succession by Enlightenment philosophers such as George Berkeley, David Hume, Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant and others. In music, we have many notables such as Corelli, Vivaldi, J.S.Bach, W.A. Mozart, François Couperin, Franz Joseph Haydn, Muzio Clementi, Johann Hummel, Antonio Salieri and dozens of other important composers of the era whose works we still regularly perform today. Last but not forgotten, there are famous artists such as Francisco Goya, Thomas Gainsborough, William Blake, Turner, Canaletto and that famous painter of horses—George Stubbs. In many ways, the Enlightenment is an extremely familiar world to a modern reasonably well-educated person (in others, hygiene, etc. no doubt it would likely be quite horrible).<p>At least in the West, compared to several centuries earlier, changes to society and the many advancements made across so many fields between about 1650 and 1800 were nothing short of spectacular. The famous Enlightenment personalities mentioned above are no strangers to most of us today, their names just roll off our tongues with considerable ease because of the huge contribution they&#x27;ve made to our present-day lives. That so many of them are still highly relevant to us today also signals the fact that the era in which they lived ranks in similar importance.<p>In my opinion, rather than throw way our long-held notions of historical periods completely we should instead correct and refine them to be in alignment with historical fact. We should then immediately proceed to correct educational curricular to reflect our more accurate historical perspective (with kids, getting the facts straight before the rot sets in is a key aspect of proper training).<p>I base this view on what I have said above in my comparison of the Late Medieval Period and the Enlightenment. Whilst it&#x27;s clear these historical periods overlap one another in many areas and that there is no clear junction in time that separates them, there are nevertheless critically important cultural and political aspects about each that widely separate them in a specific cultural sense.<p>The Medieval Period was far from being a true &#x27;Dark Age&#x27;—in fact, it was an historical period with ideas and a creative productivity that many of us still vastly underestimate†. However, the spark that ignited the beginning of the Renaissance and quickly blossomed into the enormous plethora of intellectual and philosophical ideas that define the Enlightenment has never before been equaled across all of human history—that is, until the present era. Enlightenment ideas and ideals not only built upon those from Ancient Greece and elsewhere, but also they covered a multitude of disparate disciplines: literature, science, art, philosophy including the concept of modern government and the rule of law, just to mention a few. That <i>Age</i> conceived not only many new ideas but also traditional ones were reinvented in ways that led to the Industrial Revolution and modern society as we know it today.<p>Nevertheless, we should not lose sight of the fact that the Medieval Period not only encroached upon the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment but in some ways it actually penetrated them through into the present era—as the authors of this article forcefully argue. That said and with that notion still in mind, we must note that each era has not only made its own special contribution to human history—and some would argue none more so than the Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment—but also it must be said that every historical era is coupled inextricably to both those that came before it and to those that it precedes.<p>It&#x27;s not a matter of examining each historical period either as separate or combined entities but rather as bifurcated strands of a whole continuum that has common roots and whose threads intersect one another.<p>___<p><i>† The Medieval Period was anything but a &#x27;Dark Age&#x27;. Arts and skilled trades not only flourished but did so in ways that, at their best, were simply outstanding. Even now, we still have difficulty in comprehending how artisans of that era achieved such a high level of technical skill. Not only is the workmanship given to some objects truly exquisite but it&#x27;s of such a high standard that replication thereof would challenge all but the most talented craftspeople of today. Moreover, their remarkable craftsmanship has produced some of the most beautiful objects I have ever seen. This link is to the Sutton Hoo Burial hoard that dates to the Early Medieval Period (625-630 AD). I&#x27;d suggest that to get the best view of the remarkable and intricate craftsmanship involved that you click on and enlarge the images of the shoulder clasps, buckle and purse: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sutton_Hoo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sutton_Hoo</a>.</i>