The Bright Ages

[Kamaji]

The Bright Ages

Anti-Christian bias leads modern historians of the Middle Ages into some hilarious gaffes.

By MICHAEL WARREN DAVIS
MARCH 24, 2022

Book Review - The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe, by Matthew Gabriel and David M. Perry, (HarperCollins: 2021), 336 pages.

Around the year 849, a group of Byzantine monks paid a young woman to accuse the Patriarch of Constantinople, Methodius I, of seducing her. His defense ought to be studied by every law student on the planet. At his trial, Methodius lifted his robes, triumphantly exposing himself to the court. They gasped. The Primate’s manhood was shriveled almost beyond recognition.

Methodius explained that, as a young priest, he’d asked St. Peter to save him from lustful urges. St. Peter obliged, and the result was now plain for the whole Empire to see. The Primate was acquitted and eventually canonized. The monks were excommunicated.

No story, in my opinion, better captures the medieval “thing.” The Middle Ages are full of magical, mystical happenings. We all know the bit in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle where dragons appear in England, a portent of the Viking invasion in which “heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy-island, by rapine and slaughter.” Still, Thronies may be disappointed by the dearth of dragons in medieval history. Withered genitalia is more usual.

That’s why we love the Middle Ages. That’s what makes John Julius Norwich’s facts more enchanting than George R. R. Martin’s fiction. It’s so plausible. Even the miracles are a little pedestrian. You hardly notice them at all. It’s as if they were commonplace in medieval Europe. And who knows? Maybe they were.

Whether you believe in miracles or not, one thing is clear. A history of the Middle Ages may be anything but boring. At least I thought so until I read Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry’s new study The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe.

Most of what makes the book so tedious is the book’s political agenda. And to be fair, the authors are upfront about that agenda. They wrote The Bright Ages, they explain, because medievalism is bound up with ultraconservative politics. “Sometimes symbols of the Middle Ages are used approvingly by the far right,” they write, “emblazoned on shields in Virginia, fluttering on flags as the U.S. Capitol is stormed, or peppered across the screed of a mass murderer in New Zealand.”

The only way to cure these fifteen or twenty teenage boys of their delusion is to declare an all-out war on history. The authors state their opposition to “whiteness,” which they call “a modern idea with medieval roots.” The myth of whiteness is also used to prop up “the fiction of Europe and the invented concept of Western civilization.” In other words, white supremacism is wrong because white people haven’t done anything to be proud of. Actually, white people don’t even exist. Feel stupid yet, bigot?

Academics love to play these little word games. Meanwhile, the rest of us know that it’s okay to be proud of the achievements of one’s ancestors. Nobody really thinks I’m racist because I, Michael Warren Davis, have more of an affinity for the British Isles than I do for the Andean Mountains or the Great Steppe. But Gabriele and Perry make a truly heroic effort to defend their point. The authors say of these white supremacists, “They looked into both the medieval and classical European past and imagined they found white faces, like theirs, looking back at them. They were wrong about all of this.”

You’ll have to take my word for it, but there’s no context for this remark. The authors seem to be arguing that whiteness doesn’t exist because 10th century Europe was actually full of black people. If so, that would certainly take the wind out of the alt-right’s sails, though I’d really like to see their proof.

Over and over, this obsession with “debunking white nationalist myths” leads them to ridiculous, ahistorical conclusions. For instance, they recall how Pope Gregory the Great decided to launch his mission to England. According to the Venerable Bede, Gregory was strolling through the Roman slave markets when he saw a group of boys with fair skin and blonde hair being sold as chattel. He was shocked to learn that the boys were not Christians and immediately resolved to send missionaries to their homeland. Gabriele and Perry omit the part of the story where Gregory asks what their people are called: Angles. Gregory says the name is fitting since they’re as beautiful as angels. (You see what he did there.) Gregory sends a monk named Augustine to establish a new mission in England.

The authors declare: “This story is apocryphal, deeply unlikely to be true.” Well, no. It’s actually likely, even deeply likely, to be true. We know that English slaves were sold in Rome during Gregory’s reign. In fact, it’s unlikely that a pope would have encountered the Angles in any other way. As for the pun, Gregory probably wasn’t the first person to compare small children to angels and he certainly wasn’t the last.

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Source:  https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-bright-ages/