Rosetta
Review by Walter Cummins
Most of us tend to consider the Middle Ages and those who inhabited those distant centuries victims of an inferior world that we’re fortunate to relegate to the dustbin of history. Many tarnish the period with the benighted title of the Dark Ages, humans wallowing in the slime of filth and ignorance.
Ian Mortimer, British historian and author, sets out to enlighten us in this book. Rather than dismissing a period essentially wasted to history, “… we fail to realise that the way we live today is largely the result of social developments that took place between the eleventh century and the sixteenth. Many of our contemporary concepts, values and priorities originated in the Middle Ages.” Failing to understand that means we fail to understand ourselves.
Early in the book, Mortimer picks Yuval Noah Harari, “a specialist in medieval warfare,” as his foil, citing Harari’s claim that if one of Columbus’s sailors had fallen into a Rip van Winkle sleep in 1492 and awaken in the age of the iPhone, he would have “found himself in a world strange beyond comprehension.” Mortimer blames such a misapprehension to using technology as the measure of achievement. In a wider range of important social and personal ideas our current world can be understood as the product of transformations that took place in the period between 1100 and 1600, culminating in the Age of Shakespeare.
Mortimer divides his chapter subjects into the subtopics that cover several central areas of human experience: Horizons, War, Inequality, Comfort, Speed, Literacy, Individualism. By Horizons he means perspectives such as cityscapes, travel, medicine, law, commerce, education, science, technology, and religion.
Profound changes were taking place in the final centuries of the period Mortimer designates as Medieval. Some historians would overlap that time with what they define as Early Modern European history, about 1500-1800. All that happened in the period that many still call the Renaissance, the 14th to the 17th century, marks the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity in Europe.
Some might argue that Mortimer is repackaging an already acknowledged time of fundamental change and attributing it to the late Middle Ages. But what differs in his approach is his ability to trace a continuity initiated in previous centuries in seeds that flourished in the already acknowledged periods. That is to say, the Renaissance didn’t just happen. It was fulfillment of movements initiated in Medieval beginnings and, from Mortimer’s judgment, waking up there won’t have been as radical a shock to transplanted people from an earlier time.
For example, governmental record keeping can be found to exist with the royal chanceries of France and England in 1190. In England formal taxation records were being kept by 1300, and private households had them by 1400. A century later, “250 printing presses across Europe had produced 27,000 editions of books. … Printing was unquestionably a medieval phenomenon”
Mortimer emphasizes the importance of Biblical translations into vernacular European languages as a source of the growth of literacy and equally as a reason for the flourishing of independent thinking. Able to read the source of the religion that dominated their lives, people developed a variety of interpretations, with Luther’s rebellion the most profound. Although the earliest English version was John Wycliffe’s in 1382, most European translations appeared in the sixteenth century, with Mortimer focusing on Tyndale’s 1534 English version that became the basis of the King James Bible and the language of Shakespeare and all who followed.
Mortimer gives his most thorough attention to the chapter titled “Individualism: The Horizon of the Self,” considering the conception of the concept through a number of Medieval time units, starting with the early eleventh century—when there were “few individual decision-making opportunities” for ordinary people—and culminating with the sixteenth. Here he describes stages of development to show how over five hundred years of the later Middle Ages European humanity came to evolve the understanding of the individual that underlines central assumptions of the twenty-first century.
This is the crux of Mortimer’s argument that the Middle Ages should not be dismissed as a lost chasm of our history but should be recognized as the foundation of today’s world: “By 1600, people of all ranks were mindful of what they were, not just what they did. Almost all saw themselves as free individuals, not mere functionaries. They were ready to question almost anything.”
