In fact, though, modern historians regard these centuries as the cradle of the modern age, a time when many elements of our society which we value – democracy, industrialisation, science and so on, had their roots. We still get an echo of this in the ideas surrounding the term “Gothic” – dark, gloomy, foreboding. In fact, the term was coined by later historians, and means “Middle Ages”, which might today be rendered as “in-between times” – that period which came after the high civilizations of the Greeks and Romans, and before the high civilization of the Renaissance: an age of barbarism, ignorance, illiteracy and violence. The period of European history which we call “Medieval” is usually regarded as consisting of the thousand years or so between the fall of the Roman empire in the west (in the 5th century), through to the period of the Renaissance in the 15th century. Fetteresso Old Inn (now a private house) / Photo by Russ Hamer, Wikimedia CommonsĮxploring the thousand-year long period of western Medieval Europe.
0 kommentar(er)
