I imagine that you are being glib, and I am not offering an opinion on the following point of view, but in the article Lucy Parker, postdoctoral researcher at Christ Church, Oxford, says: “If we define the Middle Ages in terms of prejudice and intolerance, then we must accept that we are still living in them today.”
William of Ockham (of Ockham's Razor fame), and an important advocate of Nominalism, died in 1347. Surely you're not suggesting that the Medieval Period ended then?
So the cyclical periods and the exponential periods are interwoven. And never does the exponential look more predictably exponential, into the future, than at the end of the exponential. Equally so, the cyclical, sinisoidal, looks the most sinusoidal at the absolute end of the sinusoidal. So what's happening is we're forever doubting which of the two we're in, and what we believe percolates into everything we do, the products we buy and therefore make, the sufferings we contend with and those we postpone.
So there was a lot of talk about the "markets are cyclical" at the end of 2019 and early 2020. So at that point, nobody thought "this time is different". Everybody thought "this time is not different." That made that time different. Simple as that. Now, in this bear market, where stocks are conforming to the cyclical and people care nothing at all for the things they cared about in the exponential, this time is not different, because people believe "this time is different." Back to the cyclical.
The fire didn't entirely go out for centuries for everyone after Rome (if you wanna call that 'fire'). One example is Isadore of Seville's Etymologiae [0], a compilation of information from hundreds of classic sources he worked on from 600-625. 20 books, quoting over 400 authors. It grew so popular and was copied so often that about a thousand copies still survive.
And it wasn't 'dark' everywhere; the 'Islamic Golden Age' lasted from about 750-1250.
While some might disagree, many historians associate Petrarch’s rediscovery of Cicero’s letters as the start of the renaissance and the end of the Middle Ages.
I’d recommend anyone study Cicero as he was a sole source for many of the “best practices” stolen from antiquity; his writings are the basis for the US government (for example)
IMO as the ancient age ended with the fall of the Western Empire, the middle ages ended with the Fall of Constantinapole: to some degree it triggered art and philosophy renessance, geographical discoveries in the West.
on the other hand the right question is when did the Medieval Period End where?
like the Stonehenge was built after the great pyramids, the former considered belonging to the prehistoric age, the latter to the ancient one.
> 31 October 1517, the day on which Martin Luther supposedly nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg.
This was the moment that deviation from Roman orthodoxy was finally allowed, and opened up a space where atheists could do science and share rational thoughts. It wasn't all at once, but where before there was no space, now you could at least masquerade as a weird Protestant.
When I'm looking for the end of the medieval period, I'm just looking for a time during which atheists could tell the truth without being killed. Even if they had to do it in code, just the ability to be truthful at all made rapid scientific and cultural advancement inevitable.
I agree with the authors' comments that the Medieval Period never really ended abruptly and that progress to the next era was one of evolution over a much longer period than most history books state. Similarly, evidence suggests that our common stereotypical perception of history is overly simplistic and the actual historical record is much more complicated and nuanced than we usually believe or accept. Whilst I accept this modern reappraisal is both correct and makes logical sense, it seems to me that we shouldn't abandon our old view of history altogether, instead we should try to integrate these different approaches into a common path. I'll endeavor to qualify this comment below.
People of different regions often have different cultural expectations to each other, their cultures often move forward at different paces and in different directions; thus, these historical differences have often resulted in conflict. Given that certain parts of today's interconnected world are still so culturally disparate from one another, one must assume that it was always ever thus. As the modern era/internet age has demonstrated, the world's population as a whole has never been at one uniform point of development with respect to culture and technologically, and it still isn't today. We have only to witness the tragic war in Ukraine and Crimea, and in recent years in the Caucuses, to know that what we've traditionally considered as Medieval attitudes and behaviour is being played out before us in our own era.
In this sense the Medieval Period is still with us: it's alive and well as the war in Ukraine demonstrates—with this war we are witnessing a vindictive brutal viciousness to the violence that's well outside the modern rules of engagement. There, we've observed wayward behaviour that's far more in keeping with—and which bears a remarkable similarity to—the violent culture of the Medieval Crusades of the Middle Ages of 11th Century and onward.
I would never want to live in the period of history that's been traditionally deemed to be at the intersection of the Middle Ages/Medieval Period and the start of the Early Renaissance—that of the late 14th and early 15th Centuries—even if I were to have then lived a very privileged lifestyle for the very reason that life back then would have been just too different to the world of today that I'm used to. Essentially, leaving the advantages of modern living aside, cultural differences between today and the early Renaissance are so vast that a modern person would have considerable difficulty in adjusting to living in that era (it would be a horrible existence).
However, if Dr Who's Tardis spirited me forward by some 150 to 200 years from the Early Renaissance to the Age of Enlightenment—the mid 17th Century to the late 18th Century—to some place in Western Europe then the situation would be significantly different. Living back then even in privileged circumstances certainly would be no bed of roses for a modern person, but one could learn to adapt reasonably well, methinks. For instance, I reckon I could survive quite well if living a privileged lifestyle in London say between 1700 and ≈1790, for by then Enlightenment attitudes and lifestyles were distinctly much more modern from our perception than they would have been during the early Renaissance. I'd posit that if we were transported back to that time then we'd be whingeing continuously about the horrible conditions but we would nevertheless understand the then zeitgeist. That wouldn't be so for the early Renaissance.
If transported back to living during the early to mid 1700s, I would easily recognize the coffeehouse culture that began some 50–70 years earlier, ready access to daily newspapers, the availability of literary journals like the Tatler and Spectator and so on. Also, I'd already be familiar with the literature of the time: the works of essayists, novelists and writers such as Samuel Johns...
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 48.3 ms ] threadAn iteration over the "monkeys with nuclear weapons" parable.
So there was a lot of talk about the "markets are cyclical" at the end of 2019 and early 2020. So at that point, nobody thought "this time is different". Everybody thought "this time is not different." That made that time different. Simple as that. Now, in this bear market, where stocks are conforming to the cyclical and people care nothing at all for the things they cared about in the exponential, this time is not different, because people believe "this time is different." Back to the cyclical.
And it wasn't 'dark' everywhere; the 'Islamic Golden Age' lasted from about 750-1250.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymologiae
https://ourfakehistory.com/index.php/season-4/episode-88-are...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrarch
I’d recommend anyone study Cicero as he was a sole source for many of the “best practices” stolen from antiquity; his writings are the basis for the US government (for example)
on the other hand the right question is when did the Medieval Period End where? like the Stonehenge was built after the great pyramids, the former considered belonging to the prehistoric age, the latter to the ancient one.
This was the moment that deviation from Roman orthodoxy was finally allowed, and opened up a space where atheists could do science and share rational thoughts. It wasn't all at once, but where before there was no space, now you could at least masquerade as a weird Protestant.
When I'm looking for the end of the medieval period, I'm just looking for a time during which atheists could tell the truth without being killed. Even if they had to do it in code, just the ability to be truthful at all made rapid scientific and cultural advancement inevitable.
People of different regions often have different cultural expectations to each other, their cultures often move forward at different paces and in different directions; thus, these historical differences have often resulted in conflict. Given that certain parts of today's interconnected world are still so culturally disparate from one another, one must assume that it was always ever thus. As the modern era/internet age has demonstrated, the world's population as a whole has never been at one uniform point of development with respect to culture and technologically, and it still isn't today. We have only to witness the tragic war in Ukraine and Crimea, and in recent years in the Caucuses, to know that what we've traditionally considered as Medieval attitudes and behaviour is being played out before us in our own era.
In this sense the Medieval Period is still with us: it's alive and well as the war in Ukraine demonstrates—with this war we are witnessing a vindictive brutal viciousness to the violence that's well outside the modern rules of engagement. There, we've observed wayward behaviour that's far more in keeping with—and which bears a remarkable similarity to—the violent culture of the Medieval Crusades of the Middle Ages of 11th Century and onward.
I would never want to live in the period of history that's been traditionally deemed to be at the intersection of the Middle Ages/Medieval Period and the start of the Early Renaissance—that of the late 14th and early 15th Centuries—even if I were to have then lived a very privileged lifestyle for the very reason that life back then would have been just too different to the world of today that I'm used to. Essentially, leaving the advantages of modern living aside, cultural differences between today and the early Renaissance are so vast that a modern person would have considerable difficulty in adjusting to living in that era (it would be a horrible existence).
However, if Dr Who's Tardis spirited me forward by some 150 to 200 years from the Early Renaissance to the Age of Enlightenment—the mid 17th Century to the late 18th Century—to some place in Western Europe then the situation would be significantly different. Living back then even in privileged circumstances certainly would be no bed of roses for a modern person, but one could learn to adapt reasonably well, methinks. For instance, I reckon I could survive quite well if living a privileged lifestyle in London say between 1700 and ≈1790, for by then Enlightenment attitudes and lifestyles were distinctly much more modern from our perception than they would have been during the early Renaissance. I'd posit that if we were transported back to that time then we'd be whingeing continuously about the horrible conditions but we would nevertheless understand the then zeitgeist. That wouldn't be so for the early Renaissance.
If transported back to living during the early to mid 1700s, I would easily recognize the coffeehouse culture that began some 50–70 years earlier, ready access to daily newspapers, the availability of literary journals like the Tatler and Spectator and so on. Also, I'd already be familiar with the literature of the time: the works of essayists, novelists and writers such as Samuel Johns...