World Events during the Middle Ages
400-1100 Monastic period
476 End of Roman Empire
500-1453 Byzantine Empire (4th Crusade ,1204, Fall of Constantinople)
500- Medieval West: Latin Christendom (eventually Roman Catholicism)
507 Visigothic kingdom conquered by Clovis, King of Franks (c. 466 – 511) founder of the Merovingian Dynasty
614 Arabs conquer Jerusalem
751 Chinese prisoners make paper in Samarkand (Uzbekistan)
768-814 Charlemagne, founder of Carolingian empire, crowned emperor by the Pope Leo III
800-900 C. Viking raids in Europe (England & France)
816-7 Benedictine Monastic reform
1000: the Chinese invent gunpowder
1066 Norman Conquest (William of Normandy, battle of Hastings)
1095-1291 The (nine) Crusades straddle the two periods
1100-1300 Secular period
1100–1500 Medieval scholasticism
1100s Paper (plant-based) has replaced papyrus and parchment in Arab world; first paper-making centre in Spain; rag-paper mentioned by Abbot of Cluny (1122-1150); oldest recorded document on paper is deed of King Roger of Sicily dated 1102.
c.1100- Courtly love born in Aquitaine, Provence, Champagne, and Burgundy
1215 King John of England signs the Magna Carta (Great Charter)
1250 The oldest known vernacular manuscript in Scanian (Danish); Epic poems in the vernacular: La Chanson de Roland (1140-1170? Anglo-Norman) The Poem of the Cid (1207? Spanish); Dante’s Divine Comedy (1308-1321, Italian); Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1372?)
1271-1295 Marco Polo’s journey in China
1324-50 Black Death (30 to 60% of European population)
1357 The Travels of Sir John Mandeville
1480 Spanish Inquisition (Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile)
1492 Christopher Columbus reaches North America
1492 & 1501 Jews and Muslims must leave Spain
The Scriptorium and Benedictine Rule:
“[C]opying the Gospels was seen as the highest scribal calling […] in which the scribe became an evangelist by contributing to the process of transmission and, by study and meditation upon the text (ruminatio and meditatio), became a living ark of Scripture and might glimpse the divine (revelatio) (Brown, Companion, 182).
Feudalism: a hierarchical structure
Vassalage (king and vassal & lord and vassal);
Manorialism or squirearchy (lord and serf)
Sites of power
Religious
Rural: monastery (controlled by abbot & monks)
Urban: cathedral, theological college, cloisters (priests)
Secular
Court: palaces (lords)
City: trading centres and shops (burghers)
C) Christianity
Patristic Period (Early Christian writers and theologians)
St Jerome: (327-420)
St Augustine: (354-430)
St Benedict: (480-542)
St Thomas Aquinas: (c.1224–74)
“All medieval thought is characterized, nominally at least, by the conviction that each man has a soul to save, and that, therefore, salvation is the main end of every human being, not a distant ideal, but the most practical duty that is set before us all.” (Coulton 10) [M]an’s first and second and last task is to prepare himself for eternity.” (Coulton 15)
Intellectual and artistic movements
11th– 12th centuries Romanesque style
12th-13th centuries the Gothic style
14th-early 15th C. Renaissance Humanism
D) The book
Shift from scroll to codex (from papyrus to parchment, from parchment to paper)