That’s not even….partially, sort of, kind of true. That’s not true in any sense of the word.
Traditionally, the “Middle Ages” refers to the 5th century to the 15th century, i.e., the “fall” of the Roman Empire in 476 A.D. through to the rise of Renaissance humanism in the 1400s. Despite the blatant insanity of labeling 1,000 years as a dark age, it’s extra insane to claim that that…written history didn’t exist in the period of time which led to the creation of the university, the establishment of the modern Roman Catholic Church, and even just the finicky, complex transition from late-Imperial Roman government to the rise of Byzantium and the Eastern Roman Empire—in competition with “barbarian” non-Roman tribes.
(”Barbarian” being a label adopted by the Late Republic-Early Imperial Romans to describe…anyone who wasn’t Roman, and eagerly embraced by the Catholic Church for labeling non-Christians. It wasn’t as though these people moving westward and challenging the Roman Empire were any less sophisticated, or that their culture, law, societies, religions, were any less complex. Be careful who you listen to, when people talk about history…)
I mean, you’re also talking about a period that played host to some of the most significant pre-Enlightenment European thinkers, including but not limited to those individuals who provided the foundation for Renaissance humanism. There’s no European philosophy without Thomas Aquinas, who lived in the 13th century and wrote in Latin because it was the language of scholarship, the language all men of learning spoke in order to converse with one another and with God. Scholasticism as an entire movement, that defined all subsequent Catholic and Christian theology. Maimonides, a fundamental Jewish philosopher, was writing at the same period. Writing. Not speaking. It was a society of letters, maintained in the Christian world by an intense network of literate monks and nuns, their various enclaves where they inscribed the Bible, the theologies of the Church Fathers, and painted the manuscripts in gold. (St. Benedict of course having written the Regula Benedicti, the guiding rules for religious orders, in the 6th century; leading to the great flowering of religious orders—men and women devoted to a communal life, serving their god.)
It was a period that involved the promulgation of sophisticated legal codes—not only the Code of Justinian, which gave rise to the term “Byzantine” meaning “unnecessarily complicated.” Even among the invading barbarians, law was complex and often quite modern in its attitudes. (Famously, the Merovingian law divided its subjects by their ethnic background—you were governed by the traditional law of your tribe, as determined by precedent and interpreted by rachimburgs. There were no “new” rights under Merovingian law, only new interpretations. You might recognize this as more than resembling the current basis for interpreting the American Constitution by the US Supreme Court.) Even to this day, we have about 2,000 surviving charters and 40 surviving law codes, attesting to the workings of the witan, the Anglo-Saxon English lawmakers. It wasn’t just nobility or lawyers who understood them either—by in 1381, English peasants revolted, and knew enough about the law to burn just those documents holding them in debt for unpaid poll taxes.
I mean, for Jesus’s sake, the entirety of Arthurian legend is medieval—excepting perhaps Thomas Malory, with his 15th century synthesis of the Vulgate and post-Vulgate tradition. The admixing of the Norman Invasion with the leftover legends of the Britons and the Celts created that! People were writing poetry, and sailing it across the English Channel to one another! It was a profoundly literary age: Andreas Capellanus was insisting on the courtly “the rules of love” while the Beowulf poet had already transcribed the West Saxon dialect of Old English, and stirred it with a bit of Christianity for flavor.
And if you’re willing to extend the historical imagination to those fields we don’t recognize today, that was flourishing too—alchemy with Abelard and Anselm, the mystical writings and music of Hildegard of Bingen. The French sang the Romantic chanson de geste, the songs of heroic deeds, while Pope Gregory commissioned trained singers to travel through the Holy Roman Empire and teach his clerics Gregorian chants, which they in turn, carefully wrote down as part of ars antiqua—the written, sacred polyphonic music of the Notre Dame school.
Don’t get me wrong, I would have accepted that there was less of a historical record, due to the emphasis on oral tradition found in cultures that largely usurped Roman power—especially that dip in the record between the 5th century and the 10th. You could have talked about, for example, the Scandanavian lawspeaker versus the Roman emphasis on the 12 tablets, and how early medieval universities relied on the teacher orating while students memorized, with very few notes, much like Plato once conducted his lessons. (They didn’t exactly sell notebooks at the Dollar Store yet.) But claiming that in 476 A.D., writing died in Western Civilization, and wasn’t resurrected until 1400, is both an egregious misreading of history, and fundamentally incompatible with the historical record as it exists.
To quote T.H. White, himself an inveterate medievalist: “Do you think that they, with their Battles, Famine, Black Death and Serfdom, were less enlightened than we are, with our Wars, Blockade, Influenza and Conscription? Even if they were foolish enough to believe that the earth was the centre of the universe, do we not ourselves believe that man is the fine flower of creation? If it takes a million years for a fish to become a reptile, has Man, in our few hundred, altered out of recognition?”
