The Medieval Mind

So for a little fun reading when I have a few minutes I’ve picked up A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance by William Manchester. I don’t know squat about medieval history and I thought a book by Manchester would be a nice place to start. Manchester is the author of the fabulous Last Lion series of biographies about Winston Churchill which I loved.

I thought I’d blog this passage as it’s a pretty mind bending point of view about what life was like for medievil peasants.

In the medieval mind there was also no awareness of time, which is even more difficult to grasp.

Inhabitants of the twentieth century are instinctively aware of past, present, and future. At any given moment most can quickly identify where they are on this temporal scale – the year, usually the date or day of the week, and frequently, by glancing at their wrists, the time of day.

Medieval men were rarely aware of which century they were living in. There was no reason they should have been. There are great differences between every day life in 1791 and 1991, but there were very few between 791 and 991. Life then revolved around passing of the seasons and such cyclical events as religious holidays, harvest time, and local fetes.

In all of Christendom there was no such thing as a watch, a clock, or apart from a copy of the Easter tables in the nearest church or monastery, anything resembling a calendar.

Generations succeeded one another in a meaningless, timeless blur. In the whole of Europe, which was the world as they knew it, very little happened. Popes, emperors, and kings died and were succeeded by new popes, emperors, and kings; wars were fought, spoils divided; communities suffered, then recovered from, natural disasters. But the impact on the masses was negligible.

This lockstep continued for a period of time roughly corresponding in length to the time between the Norman conquest of England, in 1066, an the end of the twentieth century

Wow.