Courtney McGrailTen books that caused controversy in their analyses of the Middle Ages are put under the spotlight on medievalists.net.
Stephen Greenlat’s award-winning 2011 book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, which addresses the end of the Middle Ages and the beginnings of the Renaissance, is identified as a book disliked by medievalists “partially because Greenblatt portrays the Middle Ages as a period of uneducated religious fanatics who knew nothing of ancient literature or even how to have a good time”.
Identifying how readers can sometimes have no idea of how wrong an author can be, the site points out that many readers would probably not know that the ancient text around which the book revolves was, far from being unknown for a thousand years, as Greenblat essentially presents it, “actually known in the Middle Ages, with manuscript copies of it dating back to the 9th Century”.
Flattery
Jim Hinch’s review from The Los Angeles Review of Books is cited as describing the book’s principal achievement as the flattery of “like-minded readers with a tall tale of enlightened modern values triumphing over a benighted pre-modern past”, and pointing out that far from being a work of history, the book “is a salvo in the culture wars; an effort to lend an aura of historical inevitability to the idea that religious faith has no place in a modern democratic society”.
Lynn Townsend White Jr’s 1962 Medieval Technology and Social Change, sometimes called “the most stimulating book of the century on the history of technology” is singled out as a book that was initially controversial for its thesis on the importance of technological development in the history of the Middle Ages, with many early reviewers scorning the idea that technological development could have as deep an influence on society as the book argued. Many of the book’s ideas have, however, since been built on.
John Boswell’s Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe caused storms when it was published in 1994, when the gay Catholic medievalist claimed to have found evidence that the Catholic Church was – at least in the early Middle Ages – accepting of same-sex unions, even to the point of celebrating them liturgically.
Audience
The book has found a sizeable mainstream audience, even influencing debates on same-sex marriage, but most historians have found for a range of reasons that Boswell’s interpretation of the liturgical evidence was wrong, and that they almost certainly related to ceremonies of sworn brotherhood rather than an otherwise unknown form of marriage.
Time for Christians to change their strategic thinking
Over at ‘Eidos’ on the Patheos site, John M. Reynolds claims that Christians need to change their strategic thinking.
Arguing that “we should not retreat from the culture or pretend the culture is friendly”, he says that “Christianity is true and the fads of this century will soon be dated”, and that “the time has come to build a new city, develop a better alternative culture and compete with ideas”.
Recalling how the Emperor Constantine faced an empire in terminal decline and opted, rather than trying to resolve the insuperable problems of the old capital, to build a new Rome, he ventures: “The culture war as it is framed at present is win or lose and we are losing. The high ground is held by the opponents of traditional Christianity. We do not control popular or elite opinion making institutions. Providentially, technology is going to allow us to circumvent the old systems.”
Suggesting that film, networks, schools, music and art can be made “while bypassing the old gatekeepers”, he says that while the immediate results of a Constantinian option will look like retreat, we should be willing to accept that “the new city will start empty and small”.
Arguing that “we must replace ‘empire’ with a global community”, he reminds us that however things may look locally for us, “Christianity is booming globally. Secularism is dying”.