The Middle Ages

by Johannes Fried

translated by Peter Lewis

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015

Johannes Fried's magisterial 2009 work Das Mittelalter has finally been given a clear and fluid English-language translation (by Peter Lewis) and a solid, very pretty hardcover by the Belknap Press, so one of the greatest works of popular history written in the young 21st Century gets a second lifetime. It very much deserves such an audience; Fried's The Middle Ages is a happily impressive work, at once supplanting all the previous one-volume studies of the thousand years between the final end of Classical civilization to the dawn of the Renaissance (in its far-ranging modern research it supersedes Norman Cantor's classic The Civilization of the Middle Ages, for instance, and in the elegance Lewis so neatly captures it makes every bit as captivating reading as Susan Wise Bauer's The History of the Medieval World).

Fried manages to cover an eye-opening range of subjects in what is, given the enormity of its subject, a fairly svelte 500 pages. All the customary subjects in any history of Medieval times – the warring of kingdoms, the disease, the sieges, the feudal castes, the scholastics of monasticism – are here and well-covered, and in every case the author matches exhaustive research with seemingly offhand eloquence, as when he's briefly discussing the prevalence of torture (reminding us that confession under torture was considered “the queen of all proofs”) and notes: “Yet the Inquisition and torture could do nothing to heal the wounds that had been inflicted upon people's expectation of salvation. Nor could the heresies, which continued to escalate, heal them in the long run either.”He nicely delineates the sometimes agonizingly divisive mind frames of the long eras of his subject, perhaps most conveniently epitomized in the figure of the famous poet Petrarch, who called God the “Lord of Learning,” but who could rant against the strictures of Aristotelian scholasticism while at the same time uttering cautions Fried quite rightly characterizes as backward-looking:

The writer in him took exception to the long-winded, unwieldy language of scholastic philosophers, while the Christian Petrarch bridled at their remoteness from everyday life and lack of religion and the moral vacuity of their utterances. He railed particularly vehemently against contemporary philosophers who displayed insatiable curiosity; Petrarch's humanism warned against investigation that knew no boundaries: “Seek not what is above you and search not out things above your strength,” he warned humanity, true to his great mentor and guide Saint Augustine. “The things that God has commanded to you, think thereupon always and be no inquisitive in His many works; for it is not necessary for you to behold what is hidden.”

Necessarily, Fried's story has more darkness than light in it. These could be exceptionally savage times, and our author doesn't shy away from the worst of it. The Middle Ages were characterized by unceasing warfare, by the often barbaric exultations of the Christian Church (“Time and again,” Fried writes, “promising new life through the Gospels but visiting death upon certain communities, Europe's Latin Christendom revealed itself to be a 'persecuting society'” - and he quotes Froissart: “The Jews were seized and burned at the stake everywhere, throughout the entire world, and their property confiscated”), and, as the expected dark highlight of the chronicle, the advent of the Black Death, which struck Europe with a first wave of cataclysmic energy, revealing in the most pitiless way imaginable the limited extent of the West's existing medical knowledge:

Doctors in the Middle Ages had no remedy; some advised sufferers to wear amulets. At least contemporaries found out that direct contact and exhalations when speaking appeared to spread the infection. Yet others speculated that it could be spread by the “evil eye,” that is, a look that could convey death. In any event, the interpretive model of “contagion” was first devised at this time, with scholars somewhat helplessly referring to it as an epydimie.

As his epic narrative draws to its close, Fried watches the growth of humanism and the first tentative beginnings of mass literacy and the Italian Renaissance. He knows that his readers know the conclusion to his story: a new dawn in Western civilization will dispense with some of the worst aspects of the so-called Dark Ages, and the imminence of this new world brings out Fried's playful side, which is never very far beneath the surface of his narrative. “Are we, then, justified in seeing this period as the decline of the Middle Ages?” he asks. “Its autumn, so to speak, when all that it sowed would be reaped? The entrance of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, perhaps?”About that new age, which, as Fried quite rightly puts it, “transcended all previous boundaries,” this big book has little to say except by implication, but, delightfully, there's a full-bodied defense of what came before. Readers who've never put much faith in the simplistic characterization of the Middle Ages as “dark” will smile at the way Fried champions his chosen period in the fullest possible terms:

Not least, then, freedom – political and social freedom, and freedom of thought – may be counted as a signal achievement of those much-maligned centuries of the Middle Ages, for they laid the theoretical foundation of such a concept through their recourse to the notion of “free will,” in just the same way as proponents of the Enlightenment.

Not so dark, then, and a rich seed-bed for all that's best in modern times. This is a history of the Middle Ages that the best, bravest thinkers and dreamers of that long era would recognize with wry affection.