It was a time of clerical tyranny and extreme despotism. Freedom of thought was non-existent and science was never allowed to progress. Brooding gothic cathedrals, malevolent popes and kings, browbeaten farmers, a repressed working class, the Black Death, famine—all of these swirled into the great blight of history. It was the worst of times. It was medieval times.

This is the common view of the “Dark Ages,” as it is commonly put forward —indeed, as young students are indoctrinated to believe—by the enlightened education specialists and public intellectuals of our day. According to my dictionary, the Dark Ages refer to “the period from about AD 476 to about 1000, broadly.” That word in italics (not mine, but the dictionary’s) allows, of course, for extrapolation. The time period can be expanded to include any time or trend with which the institutional Catholic Church was involved, up to about the time of the Reformation. Needless to say, the term “Dark Ages” is usually used in a deprecating manner. The modernist catalogue of terms employed to delineate the principal aspects of life in the Middle Ages reads: obscurantist, totalitarian, ignorant, superstitious, stagnant, millenarian, and so forth.

But this is certainly not the view taken by the historian of the French National Archives, Régine Pernoud, author of Those Terrible Middle Ages! Debunking the Myths. Originally published in French in 1977, the book has now been brought out by Ignatius Press in an English translation. Pernoud exposes much of the misinformation and explodes many of the clichés associated with the Middle Ages—the traits which are commonly ascribed to that era, and emphasized in the sort of polemical tone that is characteristic of a mother who is angry at her children. Pernoud’s analysis spans across the broad spectrum of medieval culture and society: arts and letters, language and literature, feudalism and slavery, the role of women, law, architecture, music, and the study of history itself. Interspersed with personal reflections and experiences, she provides the scholar and general reader alike a sobering assessment of a 1000-year period in history—an era whose contributions have been largely overlooked in school textbooks and contemporary cultural commentary.

A scholarly heritage
The Renaissance era, it is commonly said, was a time of emancipation from the stranglehold of the Catholic Church. It was a period of learning and a return to the wellsprings of Greco-Roman antiquity. In fact, says Pernoud, the Renaissance “could not have occurred if the ancient texts had not been preserved in manuscripts recopied during the medieval centuries.” The vaunted Arabic transmission of classical culture after the fall of Rome had only a minimal impact on the dissemination of ideas, she observes. The translations of classical works were principally done and made available in the Latin language by medieval scholars.

It is within the context of medieval Latin, claims Pernoud, that the new genre of the novel—unknown to classical antiquity—was developed. The musical scale was unveiled. A new type of theater formed, which involved everyone (unlike exclusivist modern productions). It was during the late medieval era that the book came into existence, replacing the scroll and eventually paving the way for the introduction of printing. She asks:

Is it possible that there were a thousand years without any poetic or literary production worthy of that name? A thousand years lived by man without his having expressed anything beautiful, profound, or great about himself? Who could believe this?

Workers and slaves
If the knowledge possessed by those specialists were widely recognized, the feudal system of the medieval era might be properly understood. Viewed through the ideological prisms provided by the French Revolution and Karl Marx, that system has generally been characterized as defining a period when the proletariat was subjugated. It was not so, says Pernoud. In actuality, the very framework of feudalism permitted for social mobility and the rise of the middle class. She notes:

The birth and expansion of the bourgeoisie coincide exactly in time with the great expansion of the feudal system . . . and it was during the actual feudal period . . . that the creation of new towns, the establishment of rural districts, the compilation by towns of their statutes, and so on, took place.

Another unhappy social phenomenon commonly associated with medieval feudalism is slavery. However, Pernoud takes pains to clarify the difference between slavery and serfdom. The slave of classical Roman society was considered a thing, void of rights. He could not marry or raise a family, was under absolute control by a master, and could be bought or sold on a whim. On the other hand, the serf of medieval times was considered a human person, with the prospect of gaining property rights. Indeed, once he had obtained necessities of life, the serf inevitably felt the desire for freedom. So serfs began to become engaged in commerce and travel—a development that coincided with the expansion of cities.

Pernoud makes two other interesting points about the differences between slavery and serfdom. First, slavery as an institution gradually disappeared during the medieval era, whereas it was predominant in the Roman Empire. Second, slavery was revived in the 16th century, especially in the Americas, when Roman law re-emerged in judicial and cultural frameworks. Slavery also regained prominence at a time and in places where the influence of the Church was on the wane. The credibility of the state and its laws was then gauged and guided by colonial expansion and commercial development, rather than morals and ethics. So in spite of the humanistic philosophy that dominated that era, slavery burgeoned throughout the world.

Women’s roles
But the real slaves of the Middle Ages, feminists will contend, were women. “Wrong again,” Pernoud might say to them. In sharp contrast to their position in classical times, women in the medieval era had political and administrative functions. Some were doctors, copyists, binders, and schoolmistresses. They voted in urban assemblies and parish councils. The first known treatise on education was written by a woman, circa AD 841-843. The Church even fought against the custom of arranged marriages; as Pernoud observes, “everywhere progress in free choice of a spouse accompanied progress in the spread of Christianity.” The hackneyed prejudice suggesting that women were deemed subhuman vassals without souls clearly exasperates Pernoud. She contests that notion by referring to many ancient women who were widely revered as saints, the veneration of the Blessed Virgin, and the stirring vision of St. Joan of Arc leading the French army into battle. And she does not neglect to mention that during those hundreds of years, without ado, the Catholic Church administered her sacraments to women.

These few thoughts provide for only a sampling from the cornucopia of Pernoud’s arguments in defense of medieval society. In addition, her notes on the Inquisition and her chapters on the philosophy of history are essential reading. Readers of this book will be grateful to Pernoud for her diligent labors. Along with Christopher Dawson, and in more recent days Father Stanley Jaki, she has helped to revive interest in the civilization that was the Middle Ages without any sense of triumphalism, showing that this “intermediary period”

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