There is even a self-assembly kit: a cupboard cut out of a sheet of soft metal, instead of the plastic that would be used today. The finds also include toys that girls might have liked: little cups, plates, and jugs, some sturdy enough to heat up water by a fireside. It probably circulated among the families of merchants, shopkeepers, and craft workers, as well as those of the nobility and gentry. The toy knight was made from a mould, and produced in large numbers. An adult made this toy and another adult bought it for a child, or gave a child money to buy it. Then as now, adults cared for children and encouraged their play. Then as now, they had a culture of their own, encompassing slang, toys, and games. Then as now, children liked playing with toys. It was manufactured in about 1300, and illustrates several facets of medieval childhood. They were aware-as the medievals themselves were-of a much larger, round globe.This toy knight comes from a rich harvest of archaeological finds, made in the mudbanks of the River Thames in London during the last 30 years. They reveal the permeable nature of the interwoven cultures of Europe but were not constrained to Europe. The Bright Ages contain the beauty and light of stained glass in the high ceilings of cathedrals as well as the blood and sweat of the people who built them the golden relics of the Church and the acts of charity and devotion by people of deep faith, but also the wars fought over ideas of the sacred, the scorched flesh of the heretics burned in the name of intolerance and fear. Medievalists are complicit in the creation of the idea of the Dark Ages and how the medieval world is used in the service of hateful ideologies even today, but are also acknowledging mistakes and trying to tear that scaffolding down. We’ve learned about medieval ideas of tolerance, but also the formation of ideas about racial difference and hierarchies. Medievalists have built and then torn down the construct of feudalism as a system and replaced it with ideas of complex networks of affinity and hierarchy that morphed and flowed with big ideas and hyperlocal tradition our colleagues and mentors have helped place Europe into broader global systems of trade, religion, movement of peoples, and disease. But we’ve also, been blessed by the work of hundreds of scholars who have shaken loose the old stories of the Dark Ages to reveal a much more complicated, much more interesting picture of the period. We are both historians of medieval Europe, having spent years with primary sources producing our own research. Here’s Why Medieval Scientific Progress Still Matters Read more: The Idea of the ‘Dark Ages’ Is a Myth. They looked into both the medieval and classical European past and imagined they found white faces, like theirs, looking back at them. They looked outside themselves and saw barbarism. These modern thinkers used the fiction of Europe and the invented concept of “Western Civilization” as a thread to tie the modern world together. They found the proto-nations of the Middle Ages useful as a past to point to for their modern origins, pointing to both medieval connections to Greece and Rome and the independence and distinct traditions of medieval polities. Later, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, imperialist European powers and their intellectuals sought a history for their new world order to justify and explain why whiteness-a modern idea, albeit with medieval roots-justified their domination of the world. What is clear is that people in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy, frustrated with the political chaos and warfare of their ugly era, decided to draw nostalgic links to the worlds of ancient Rome and Greece, using the distant past to sever their connection to the previous thousand years of history. The peoples, the plague, the art, the governments, and the wars all belong to the medieval world. The French Revolution was possible only because medieval people experimented with democratic representation, oftentimes at a small scale, and had a long history of anti-authoritarian revolt. The Ottoman Turks emerged out of generations-long interactions between steppe and city, a people fully steeped in an intellectual culture that shuttled competing interpretations of both scripture and Aristotle from Persia to Iberia, a people carrying the same luxury goods and bacteria across regions. The plague arrived because of connections between Asia and Europe that had been established across centuries. Ultimately, none of these moments are satisfactory.
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