The forgotten flowering of the medieval mind

For those who imagine the medieval period along the lines of Monty Python and the Holy Grail — knights, castles, fair maidens, filthy peasants and buckets of blood and gore (you know, all the fun stuff) — Johannes Fried’s version may come as something of an aesthetic shock. His interests lie in the more rarefied world of theologians, lawyers and philosophers. So while the kings and emperors of the Middle Ages are afforded largely thumbnail sketches, it is the likes of Thomas Aquinas, Dante Alighieri, William of Ockham and Peter Abelard that attract Fried’s closest attention in his study of the ‘cultural evolution’ of the Middle Ages.

Fried, the éminence grise of German medievalists, takes a typically Teutonic approach to history in pursuing a big idea. He is well known (and a little controversial) in his native land as a proponent for the study of history as a ‘cognitive psychology’ and ‘life science’ and for championing ‘neuro-cultural history’. His preface to The Middle Ages is a little choked with some indigestible slabs of relativism:

Our focus… is therefore a construct, necessarily subjective…. It is a hypothesis, whose plausibility is conditioned by unprovable premises, our own subjective experiences, and familiar structural patterns…. Likewise, the simultaneity of events also defies any authoritative account, since once such an account has been given, it is forever consigned to posterity, and is only capable of sequentially considering, combining, or describing things that in actual fact had a concurrent effect and were contingent upon one another and intermeshed in their impact.