Musings of an aging fan

I've ticked the 'Some other date' to say that the impression I gained as an Oxford history undergraduate was, that in the Oxonian tradition, they begin in 285 when Diocletian divides the Roman Empire into east and west, and end in 1517 as Martin Luther nails the Ninety-Five Theses up in Wittenberg. (I can still hear the hammer-blows.)

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bunn.livejournal.com

I think I'll go for around 600, with the arrival of Augustine and the re-establishment of the Roman church in Britain, and 1453, the fall of Byzantium.

But I think it's one of those 'how long is a piece of string' questions. I'm not sure there is a correct answer.

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Although it depends what contect you're talking about. My kneejerk answer to 'the end of the middle ages' is 1450, which is based on German linguitsic history! I had to check 1485 was Bosworth, as I have very little knowledge of English medieaval history (other than a smattering of literary stuff) after the Normans turn up and spoil things for everyone....

(It's funny: I spend most of my time in the thirteenth century, but I'm a pre 1100 girl at heart.)

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1517 is a good end date, though I think, with all due respect to Oxford, that 258 is far too early (I'd tend to 476, too, though this is obviously very Western of me). In purely English terms, there's a god cas for a caseura with Augustine's mission, but again this doesn't work for Scotland (or, indeed, anywhere else).

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king-pellinor.livejournal.com

The start is tricky. I'd say the sequence is Romans, followed by Successor states (Goths, Vandals, Angles, Saxons, Charlemagne, Alfred) all milling around, followed by Mediaeval states (when the successors settle down to larger states with more modern boundaries, like France), followed by Renaissance.

So I'd say the start is either 400s, when Rome falls apart (although you could take 285 for that, with the Western empire being the first of the successors of Rome proper), counting the post-Roman mess as being Early Mediaeval; or 900s, when England and France and other kingdoms are pretty much together, counting the post-Roman period as being Dark ages rather than Mediaeval.

The end is fairly clearly 1400s sometime, and 1453 makes for a nice symmetry if you want to put a hard date on it. But it's fuzzy.

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I'd agree with 285 being far too early - it's classical snobbery towards 'Late antiquity', which wasn't taught as part of 'ancient history' in Oxford.

What would be an alternative to 476 from an Eastern (European) perspective? We could be looking at a seventh-century date, such as the loss of Syria or Egypt to the Caliphate, so 637or 639.

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malaheed.livejournal.com

Pretty certain that no one alive during any of those times suddenly said "gosh it's the middle ages"......

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pellegrina.livejournal.com

Vague memory of school textbooks causes me to peg the start of the Middle Ages around 750-800 AD, around Charlemagne time, but I will happily move that date back a century or two in response to suggestions. And anything much later than 1400 is beginning to feel a bit "rinascimentale".

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segh.livejournal.com

The Museum of London has an interesting timeline, which adds to the debate perhaps rather than resolving it.

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A case could be made that the middle ages ended earlier in Italy than they did in more northerly countries.

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purplecat

I ticked 1066 because I always thought the Dark Ages came between the Classical period and the middle ages (so would classify the middle ages as "when people started writing significant amounts of stuff down again"). 1066 is probably rather late for that - when was Alfred? and, of course, they weren't nearly as dark in more civilised bits of the continent.

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Well - I'm not a Byzantinist, although I went to an interdisciplinary seminar on Byzantium once (and got glared at for asking a stupid question by an Austrian Byzantinist!) Either of your dates seem a good possibility, or you could take 610 and the beginning of the Heraclian dynasty (adoption of the term 'basileos' for the emperor) and, more generally, the 7th century as a period of transition - territorial loss (though less bad than it might have been), combined with a lot of administrative reform, the emergence of Bulgaria as a regional power, and various theological crises (because it wouldn't by the Eastern Empire without a political crisis centring on the nature of Christ...) culminating in the iconoclasm.

On the whole, though, I get the impression that Byzantinists think 'the Middle Ages' is a very Western construct, and that you might as well say that Late Antiquity carries right on, at least until 1204, and possibly until the final fall of the Empire to the Turks - after which the modern era begins. Or that the only useful label is, in fact 'Byzantium' (must get to that exhibition!)

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And, of course, after that, the Russian Tsar claimed to have undertaken a translatio imperii (shades of Charlemagne), and Moscow as the New Rome.

Which I suppose means that Medvedev could just about claim to be the successor of Augustus, if he wanted to be tendentious!

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helflaed.livejournal.com

I found it hard to give an anser as I tend to differentiate "the Middle Ages" from "The Mediaeval Period" which in my eyes really starts to run from around the time of St Augustine of Canterbury (ish) to about Henry VII (ish)but somehow I can't really think of the Middle Ages starting much before the time of Edward the Confessor. Which makes no sense...

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bunn.livejournal.com

Oh the Dark Ages is a terribly non-U term. We don't like to admit to them. Or if we do they are confined to the British Isles and definitely over by the Synod of Whitby...

Actually, it might be fun to argue for the period directly after the Norman invasions, and also for the Stephen and Mathilda mess as dark ages, both periods when galumphing barbarians wandered around wrecking stuff and making it more difficult to get a good picture of what went on beforehand...

I feel the need to mention randomly that when I signed up to a special subject on the Carolingian Renaissance, I accidentally got assigned to the 16th century Renaissance special subject instead, and had to stand up embarrassingly in the middle of the first session and declare myself to have landed about seven hundred years too late! I suspect that the tutor responsible, a modernist, thought of everything before about 1600 as darkness perforated by moaning wails. :-D

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gramarye1971

Charlemagne (800 CE) and Martin Luther (1517 CE) are my bookends for the 'Middle Ages' -- which is not exactly the same thing in my mind as the 'mediaeval period'. There's some leeway on either end, depending on specific country circumstances.

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arda-unmarred.livejournal.com

start: 476
end: start of the Rennaissance, about 1300-1400

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I'd not realised Heraclius's significance as the arch-Hellenizer, though it was a policy with mixed results.

I think that there are Welsh historians who argue that Late Antiquity continues until 1283, though this is contentious (though I suspect that it would be a notion which pleased the ninth-century princes of Gwynedd who patronised 'Nennius').

The Byzantium exhibition looks a must - I can't pass up the chance to see the Holy Grail...

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I remember hearing that Nikolai Tolstoy was mocked as a young man for claiming that he would one day travel to Russia under a passport showing the Imperial Eagle. In the 1990s he was able to do so.

As for Medvedev, considering the power his predecessor still wields, perhaps he should be regarded as Tsar Pseudo-Demetrius IV...

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wemyss.livejournal.com

But accepting it for these purposes, I cannot put any end to it save 29 May 1453.

As for who opened the bowling and when.... I'm half-inclined to accept Late Antiquity as stretching to the last oecumenical council in 787; if it ended before that, it ended - and these so-called Middle Ages began - with the death of Mohammed and the crescent expansion of Islam.

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colinbj.livejournal.com

The teaching of history back when I was a schoolboy would have been greatly improved if the terms 'The Dark Ages' and 'The Middle Ages' had been banned. They really supported the prejudice that the sequence of history was:

1. The grandeur of the ancients, Greece and Rome, compared to which we moderns should feel inferior.
2. An enormous gap of which almost nothing was known, or cared about.
3. An mainly uninteresting period following the Norman Conquest.
4. Britain started getting Great from the Elizabethan era onwards.

I know it's straight out of "1066 And All That" (do read it if you haven't). But I was taught literally nothing about the Eastern Roman Empire, the rise of Islamic culture, and suchlike things. Which I greatly regret.

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I'm not sure what that makes Putin, though. There were loads of sinister powers behind the throne, but they were very rarely ex-emperors!

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The first to spring to mind is another seventeenth-century example, Metropolitan Filaret, the father of the first Romanov tsar, Mikhail.

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Personally, I think English literature went off no end after 1066.

Alfred is late 9th century; but really, the Anglo-Saxons produced some very fine scholars apart from him. It wasn't as barbaric as people think (nor as remote from 'civilisation' - after all, Charlemagne's court intelligentsia had a high proportion of Anglo-Saxons, like Alcuin).

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Ah. NOw I really don't know anything about Russia, other that a little bit from Alexander III to the Revolution that we did in school...

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el-staplador.livejournal.com

It was invented so the Renaissance Men could feel smug.

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bunn.livejournal.com

and there's the truth!

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muuranker.livejournal.com

I don't think I can say 'when' without saying 'where'.

The Middle Ages in Canterbury were different to those in Helsinki, to those in Thessaloniki to those in Salamanca.

In some places it starts when you look back and go 'damn, where's that Empire? I sure I was part of one, and now I can't see it - when did I last see it?'. In others, it starts when Christianity arrives. In others, it's another point (or rather region of fuzziness), which separates the 'before' from 'the Middle Ages'.

Stopping ... well, for Protestant Europe, stopping-being-Catholic is often a proposed date. Except people do shilly-shally about becoming Protestant, at an individual, balance-of-population, and national level.

I quite like the establishment of a bourse/exchange, if one has to pick one. Capitalism being _slightly_ more characteristic than Protestantism of 'modern'.

I think that in most places, the Middle Ages started before the Roman period (or late Iron age) ended, and finished after the modern period started.

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dreiviertel.livejournal.com

Well, if you want a really sinister example, Ivan the Terrible would occasionally get one of these 'I am too sinful to rule' moods, whether sincere or not, and proclaim his fool or one of his current minions to be the new Tsar. I bet they were not too comfortable about it, given that his moods were all to likely to change to 'I am beset by traitors, let's boil some alive' moods.

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dreiviertel.livejournal.com

I'd go for the traditional fall of Rome to c. 1500 timeframe, although the late Middle Ages (12-15th cc.) are far less exciting, practically modern times. ;-)

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arda-unmarred.livejournal.com

As a Victorianist I feel I ought to speak out in defense of my subjects :) Some of the most prominent Victorian historians were ardent Anglo-Saxonists (Edward Freeman was probably the most famous, earlier on there were people like Kemble, and I'm not even mentioning the philologists). In fact, celebration of the Anglo-Saxons was often a prerequisite for imperialism (rather than the other way around), certainly in the popular history taught in schools, and Victorian racism often consisted precisely in their pride in their Anglo-Saxon (rather than Latin or Celtic) origins.

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Which gave them problems when they wanted to make a hero out of king Arthur, who was Romano-British ...

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purplecat

I shall never trust Sir Gawain again. He said, of the Dark Ages, "boy were they dark", and as the resident expert on history and Arthurian literater when I joined the Arthurian Society, I always assumed he knew what he was talking about.

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purplecat

*mutters darkly about Sir Gawain leading her astray*

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purplecat

It seems I have been lead astray by people who *should* know more about history than I.

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Eeep! That works surprisingly well - good job this is just a silly intellectual game.

Probably.

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Well, to be fair, we don't know much about what happened between the Roman withdrawal and the arrival of the missionaries in 600, so that bit is dark in the sense of 'obscure or hidden'. But I love Old English literature and culture - it's a fascinating and rich period which has been obscured by later writers who were either ignorant or had axes to grind. Bloody Normans. And bloody Renaissance, too.

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Yes: the whole 'Dark Ages' or 'Middle Ages = bad' idea is really a renaissance trope, because they thought that the only bit of the past that counted was the classics. Mdiaevalists owe an awful lot to the Victorians (and their predecessors in the Romantic moevement, although I think that's more a factor in German mediaevalism).

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There was a question somewhere recently - ?University Challenge? - about the last Roman Emperor. The answer was that this was one of the titles of the Tsars.

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Those were my answers, too.

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