Periodising the Middle Ages

[Erpingham]

Here's a fun little introduction to the historiography of the Middle Ages. A nice mix of obsolete, useful and new (I confess I'd not met the Islamicate before).

It's a general issue with popular history that it tends to use terms and concepts academic historians have their doubts about or have abandoned completely. It is also the case that such histories give the impression that the way we chop up the Middle Ages now is how those living there thought about things, when that is rarely the case. And things are usually more complicated than our convenient labels allow.

[Keraunos]

Interesting.  I, too, had not come across the Islamicate before, nor the Global Middle Ages.  The latter term seems to me to be Frankenstinian in its ambitions, trying to breath life into a mishmash of ideas that only really make sense in the context of the European Renaissance scholars who first dreamed up the Middle Ages.  I cannot think of anything that equates with  our idea(s) of the Middle Ages in Chinese historiography (though my son may well disabuse me of this  )

[Erpingham]

While I was aware of the Global Middle Ages, I think it is a well-meaning but muddled concept. It really takes the artificial concept a period in European history dated 500-1500 then says "what is the rest of the world doing?" While bits of the Old World may well interact with Europe to a greater or lesser degree, a lot of their development and interactions don't really involve Europe at all.  There are also large bits of the world Europe has no knowledge of or have no knowledge of Europe, so the concept seems overstretched if we want to talk about, say, Early Medieval Mesoamerica.

[Jim Webster]

I wouldn't have thought of the Silk Road as a period

[Erpingham]

I wouldn't have thought of the Silk Road as a period

OK, I admit to being a bit sloppy just to get a working topic title  Feudalism is a concept but is used freely as a period (the Feudal Age). The Norman Yoke is also a concept but is associated with a period of time in England and with the Late Medieval Military Revolution(s), the period places the supposed transformation rather than vice-versa.

[DBS]

Wot?  No Dark Ages?

The point that gets skated over is that a lot of these terms, even the temporal ones, are country or region specific.  Dark Ages is arguably still apt for the British Isles during the fifth to, say, seventh or eighth centuries, but was never apt - or used - for the Mediterranean during that timeframe.  It also misses the argument, for example, made in recent years that the Islamic Conquest should instead be named the Arabic Conquest, as there was probably more ethnic homogeneity than religious commonality under the Prophet and the first Caliphs; there is a suspicion that Islam may have rather whitewashed the role of Christian and Jewish Arabs, expecially in duffing up Zoroastrian Persians and relieving them of their wealth.

[Imperial Dave]

And sequestering their religion

Splitters!