W. Robert Godfrey

Now, you think that would be a relatively easy thing, wouldn't you?

When were the Middle Ages?

Well, one history of the Middle Ages begins at the year 300.

Another begins at the year 1100.

That's a fair distance between the two

Most histories begin around the year 500 or 600, as historians see a significant shift taking place between the world and culture and thought forms of what we call the ancient period in the West and what comes to be known as the Middle Ages or the medieval period.

When we look at the Middle Ages, we ask, where are we going to study?

What part of the world are we going to study?

And most Western courses in medieval history focus on what today we call Western Europe.

That's understandable.

That's where a lot of the action eventually did take place in medieval history.

But it is somewhat distorting because for the people who lived through those early centuries of the Middle Ages, their thoughts went at least as much to the eastern part of the Mediterranean as they did north from Italy.

The thought world of the early medieval world, even in the western part of the Mediterranean, still was very much oriented to the east.

There was still an eastward look.

The recent Ligonier cruise some of us were on, I was really reinforced in the reality of that, that for centuries Venice, for example, remained largely a port looking east in the Mediterranean.

in contact with people in the East.

And so as we go along, although we'll often be looking more on a north-south axis in Western Europe, the truth is the reality of the medieval world, especially in the earlier part, is still very much east-west as well as north-south.

But the most important question, of course, is what were the Middle Ages?

What was the character of them?

In textbooks maybe a hundred years ago, they were often referred to as the Dark Ages.