A week ago, I gave you, my readers, a challenge to condense the Middle Ages down to seven concepts. I realize that this was a tall order. The medieval period is a thousand or so years of (mostly European) human history, which boils down to less than one concept per century. Looking at what you all had to suggest,* it looks like the most skippable medieval centuries were the sixth, seventh, and tenth, and by far the most popular were the twelfth and thirteenth, with a smaller cluster of entries in the ninth century. Lots of your concepts were transcenturial, of course, and others weren’t datable at all.
So now, according to Got Medieval’s readership, these are the seven things that sum up the Middle Ages:**
- The Black Death (and assorted associated plague paraphernalia)
- Feudalism
- Monasticism
- The Crusades (and individual Crusade milestones)
- Book Making
- Law (and its foundations)
- Religious Potpourri
That would be one hell of a Jeopardy round. If I had to pick my own favorite list from the submissions, on the other hand, it would be:
- slippers woefully lacking in arch support
- monkeys
- weird attitudes toward the Classical past
- those silly plague doctor bird masks
- musical enchiladas***
- apple pie
- The Turk
And finally (and seriously) after a fair amount of thought on my part, these are the seven topics that I think an academic medievalist in America ought to be prepared to give an account of to a lay audience at a cocktail party:
- Feudalism
- The Crusades
- Witches
- King Arthur
- Black Death
- Chivalry
- The Church
Overall, I think my list doesn’t need that much explanation. Witchcraft might raise some eyebrows, as what most people think of as medieval witchcraft is actually Renaissance or early modern witchcraft, nonetheless, most people do think about witchcraft and witch burning when they think about the Middle Ages. King Arthur is accorded the honor of being the only fictional character worthy of inclusion on the list because people are always asking me if he was real or not (in two words: he wasn’t–but most people want more than two words), and because he routinely makes it near the top of those Most Recognizable Characters in Western Civilization lists. I end the list with the church (or, to be pedantic, the Church), because for me, the definition of the Middle Ages boils down to this: the time between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Protestant Reformation, when people in Europe generally conceived of themselves as being united by common citizenship in Christendom.
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*As of today. You’re all perfectly welcome to keep adding your own lists to the original post, which has the longest comments section of any post on this site ever, by far, and that includes my BoingBoinged fanfiction thing.
**I had to make a lot of judgment calls to make this list, so don’t send me angry letters. Also, I left off extremely general references that aren’t particularly confined to the Middle Ages, like the very popular “war.”
***That’s what I though I read when I read “musica enchiriadis,” and I’d be lying if I said I knew what it was before looking it up.