My brother told me abput his history teacher when he was in university telling him that he believed in a theory saying that the middle age should be reconsidered as not ending with the fall of Constantinople or the discovery of America, but rather with the industrial revolution/French revolution. Is this a real thing considered by some historians, or is it some obscure theory from dark places?
The main arguments for this theory are:
-the "renaissance" was mainly in arts and affected a very little part of the population. The peasant would still be a peasant and doing the same things as people did 200, 300 years prior. The fact that upper classes and nobility had statues and well made portraits doesn't change anything to 97% of the population
-untill the industrial Revolution, land organisation (at least in France) was organized around the same systems where lords possess the land and peasants live on It, working for the Lord. The IR changed that and peasants and farmers started having way more rights than they had before
So I wrote about this here many months ago (u/stormtemplar to keep automod off my back), and while nothing I said in it is wrong per se, I do want to add some additional material that comes from more than a year and a half of professional development.
Firstly, what do we mean by "taken seriously"? Certainly, as I said in my earlier answer, most of us are comfortable mostly treading within the lines of ~500-1500, and mostly niggling around the edges, but does that mean the person here is wrong? No, not necessarily, because periodization is more a useful tool we use to break history up into manageable chunks than it a fundamental statement of facts about the world. Nearly no one would dispute that Europe in 1450 was closer to Europe in 1550 than Europe in 600, but we call 600 & 1450 "Medieval" and 1550 "Early Modern," because, well, you've gotta draw a line somewhere I guess.
Furthermore, it really depends on what you're studying! For me as a scholar of literature, the traditional boundary between Medieval and Modern works pretty well. The printing press really is a pretty fundamental sea change in how Europeans engaged with literature (granted, I'll call a few decades into the Press's life "Medieval" because it wasn't widespread yet, but the point stands.). On the other hand, I've seen at least one scholar of urban development work with the period of 1000-1900, because many of the centralizing, urbanizing trends they look at started around 1000, and 1900 is a nice neat stopping point. In another case, Heart of Europe, a history of the Holy Roman Empire, more or less treats the empire as one continuous story from the Early Middle Ages to the Napoleonic collapse.
Are those people "wrong" because they break period boundaries? Of course not. Periodization is useful until it isn't, and it's better to interpret "Modernity" or "Middle Ages" as a useful shorthand, rather than a fundamental truth about the world.
As for some of the specific stuff: There's some truth to the fact that the artistic growth in the "Renaissance" doesn't really change a lot for the average person, and the past 50 or so years have seen a lot of corrective social history that has challenged the focus on things that are more or less the playground of elites, but that also does not mean that the peasantry lived in an never changing stagnation for 1000 years.
Technological change did happen, the development of windmills, the three field rotation, heavy plows and so on increased agricultural production. Patterns of settlement changed multiple times just during the Middle Ages: we see vast land clearances from 1000-1348 as the population grew, and then a retreat as the Black Death meant there were fewer mouths to feed and fewer hands to till the fields. Meanwhile, as I mentioned above, urbanization rates increased at a slow but steady pace throughout most of this period, because members of the rural peasantry moved into the cities to find work. All of those things DID change the lives of average people.
As for the legal framework of landownership, I'm not familiar enough with France to say much more than I'm extremely skeptical there was no change at all for centuries. In England, you see big changes like enclosure ending many communal landholding practices in peasant villages. The expansion of royal and institutional power in the later Middle Ages would have been felt as well, as formal courts began to replace traditional structures and tax burdens increased. All of that is very general, but the fundamental point stands: while it's true that elite culture, which has occupied too much of historian's focus in the past, has less impact on the common person than it has on our collective memories of the time, that does not mean that the idea of an eternal, unchanging peasantry is correct either.
All that is to say, we won't be seeing people suddenly start describing the Middle Ages as 476-1789, but that doesn't mean that historians who look at certain things across traditional period boundaries are wrong either. Indeed, they provide an incredibly important corrective, reminding us of the continuity between time periods that we slice up for our own convenience. If we didn't have people doing that work, our lines in the temporal sand would hide more than they revealed.
I can’t for the life of me find the historian who first said that the Middle Ages started in 476 and ended in 1453 or 1492. I think I’ll never find him… However, the medieval era is commonly defined between the infamous “fall of Rome” (was it a “fall”, really? was it still “Rome”? who could answer such things?), set in 476, and the less notorious “fall of Constantinople” or “second fall of Rome”, set in 1453. Oddly enough 1453 is also the year that marks the symbolic end of the Hundred Years’ War (it was only put to an end diplomatically in 1475) and some historians would also like to make it a big thing. However, other argued that 1492 served as a better moment to mark the “end of an era” or a “new dawn for mankind” since it’s the year Columbus reaches the America—though he thinks at the time he’s found a new way to China; he’ll actually die without knowing that he actually landed on an uncharted continent. 1492 was also a big year for Spain for another reason: it marks the end of the Reconquista. The last Muslim kingdom of Granada falls to the Catholic Kings, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile.
What’s funny with those dates is that they prioritize military achievements and political events above everything else. The invention of the printing press doesn’t serve as a landmark in that discussion. Events from outside Europe are totally ignored. The list could go on for several pages. In the end, the periodization of the Middle Ages is a historiographical legacy. It should be challenged. It should be revised. However, university chairs and editorial directives are now defined by this legacy and it’d be very hard to change anything about it… It’s both a blessing and a curse! It helps us to navigate through history easily but it also blinds us from a lot of different realities.
I distinctively remember my history teacher telling us about the “great” discovery of America by Columbus, in 1492. She said: “Do you think people changed their way of life overnight? Of course not! Why then do we say that 1492 ends the Middle Ages? It’s more a landmark than anything else. People’s life didn’t change all of a sudden. If it did it was through a long process. 1492 is the high note of a long symphony, not some point of no return.”
I recently wrote an answer about the importance given to the 1066 conquest of England by William of Normandy. Back in the eleventh century, 1066 was just another year in the span of a lifetime. It is true that the Norman rule brought a lot of change in the political management of the British Isles. However, those change came slowly and not overnight. It took time to William to assert his authority and deal with the last pockets of resistance. Then he had to know his new kingdom better before he could do anything with it. That’s when the Doomsday Book came to fruition.
The year 1066 became a “big thing” only in retrospect. When 14th and 15th century chroniclers tried to justify the over-expensive and never-ending war led by the kings of England against the kings of France. The latter were defined as a threat for the English people and even as a threat to the English language itself! The Norman conquest of 1066 served as a painful reminder. This was more a construct than anything, though.
Historians still do that when they look back into the past. They elevate a few dates to the level symbolic and meaningful constructs. It becomes a part of their reasoning. A way for them to “make sense” out of the past and put everything into a coherent narrative. In and of themselves, however, dates and years basically mean nothing to the great scale of the universe.
Many have attributed to Petrarch the notion of “Middle Ages”. Theodore E. Mommsen wrote convincingly about it in his article: “Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark Ages’” (1942)—available on JStor. As Petrarch roamed through Rome and its ruins he was flabbergasted by the little knowledge that its inhabitants had of those great historical landmarks. Mommsen writes (p. 232): “Petrarch complains bitterly that the contemporary Romans know nothing about Rome and things Roman. In his opinion this ignorance is disastrous. For he asks: ‘Who can doubt that Rome would rise up again if she but began to know herself?’”
As a matter of fact, Petrarch saw the beginning of the Dark Ages as the moment Rome fell under foreign control. It means that the so-called golden age of the Antonin dynasty marks as the downfall of Rome in Petrarch’s mind. It would backtrack the start of the Middle Ages to the year 96! Again, what was “Rome”? How did it “fall”? Cato the Elder, Cicero, Petrarch and Edward Gibbon would each argue a very different point of view on the matter! I chuckled recently when I read that no one actively sought to destroy the Western Roman Empire. It collapsed on its own. There’s actually nothing inherently wrong in that statement. The Western Roman Empire just… died out.