Critique de Medieval Horizons par Josh

Medieval Horizons is history with an axe to grind. The history is largely that of England from 1100 - 1600. The axe is that Mortimer is fascinated with the middle ages and like all people with strange obsessions he thinks everyone else should be equally fascinated with it.

The difference between grinding an axe and being an enthusiastic oddball is partially of one of resentment. The oddball pities people for ignorance of the VERY IMPORTANT THING they care about, while the axe grinder resents them.

In every chapter of the book Mortimer complains about the woeful ignorance of people today about the enormous changes that took place in the middle ages. It frustrated him to no end that some people see these as a dark age when people mostly just sat around being smelly and ignorant and sometimes dying of plague. As Mortimer amply demonstrated they did much more than that.

It also frustrates him that some people treat the period as static. As emblematic of this view he cites Yuval Noah Harari who wrote in Sapiens:

"Were, say, a Spanish peasant to have fallen asleep in AD 1000 and woken up 500 years later, to the din of Columbus’ sailors boarding the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria, the world would have seemed to him quite familiar. Despite many changes in technology, manners and political boundaries, this medieval Rip Van Winkle would have felt at home. But had one of Columbus’ sailors fallen into a similar slumber and woken up to the ringtone of a twenty-first-century iPhone, he would have found himself in a world strange beyond comprehension. ‘Is this heaven?’ he might well have asked himself. ‘Or perhaps – hell?"

Mortimer argues that the world in 1500 would have seemed just as foreign, if not more so to someone born in 1000 than the world of 2025 would to one born in 1500. Barring unforeseen advances in time travel we'll never know who's right, but it doesn't really matter since the quote is more of bitter point of embarkation than a claim meant to hold up to detailed scrutiny.

At times, Mortimer's points are well taken. Medieval people are often seen as ignorant because they didn't know the things modern people know, such as how to read. But, he points out, they knew many things modern people don't know. They observed the natural world far more closely than the vast majority of modern people and knew all of the plants that grew near them and animals that lived nearby.

They also knew techniques of production that are no longer relevant and hence largely forgotten in the modern world. Chartres Cathedral was completed in 1220 and clearly required great skill and knowledge to design and build. How many modern people could plan and build something comparable with no equipment or computers? Not to mention no knowledge of math or science from the last 800, or evidence that such a structure was even physically possible.

Mortimer overstates his case for the importance of the Middle Ages, he argues that only by understanding this period can we understand the modern world or the future. That seems rather hyperbolic to me. The hyperbole and axe grinding is really only a small part of a generally interesting book though. Unlike Mortimer I don't think you everyone must know more about England c. 1100 - 1600, but if you want to this is fine a starting point.