What was different in the medieval world?

In the modern period, most historians’ answers to this question have oscillated between scientism and exoticism. One the one side, economic and social historians applied quantitative methods to measure differences in such fields as yield ratios, climate, transport technology, energy supply, the firepower of weapons, demography and kinship. They also developed techniques of qualitative analysis for the investigation of such matters as attitudes towards birth and death, agricultural work ethics, the relationship between orality and literacy as means of communication, the social organisation of kin and other types of groups, and perceptions of the body and movements in war, sports and dance. On the other side, intellectual, cultural and literary historians dissected medieval culture in layered descriptions of its strangeness and thereby emphasised the alterity of the medieval vis-à-vis the modern world. These historians classed as specifically medieval such cultural features as a cyclical experience of time, beliefs in life after death, the power of ghosts and other supernatural agents, the practice of clumsy rituals and the ubiquity of fantastic images of the world.

Both approaches were born out of cultural self-alienation as a European collective experience. Since the Renaissance, Europeans have learned to look back on their past as a succession of distinct periods that have been lumped together into the notion of European culture as an assemblage of heterogeneous pieces. The notion represented European culture as a mental museum that, like its architectural counterpart, houses objects that are simultaneously in and out. They are in because they are accepted as part of the European cultural heritage. They are out because they are no longer in use. As one part of the assemblage, the Middle Ages are experienced as different not merely because of their remoteness in time but mainly because they appear to have little or no practical significance for or are categorised as odd or even ‘dark’ by people looking back. The very term ‘Middle Ages’ has resulted from the experience of cultural self-alienation and has made explicit the perception of discontinuity to the present day. Ever since the end of the seventeenth century, the term that had been in occasional use before has served as a label for an intermittent epoch separating what has been identified as Antiquity from what has been named the Modern period.