HIST 210 - The High Middle Ages

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Ignorant barbarians or knights in shining armor? Dark Ages or Age of Faith? We in the twentieth century are heir to two contrasting images of the Middle Ages. One, the legacy of the Renaissance, sees the medieval era as the “Dark Ages”: centuries of gloom, barbarism, ignorance, and filth. The other is the creation of the nineteenth-century Romantics, who, reacting against the rationalism and classicism of the Enlightenment, saw new value in medieval culture. From the Romantics we get our picture of the Middle Ages as a time of knights and ladies, castles and cathedrals. Both these sets of images compete in our minds. But as scholars, we must attempt to get past these inherited preconceptions and discover the Middle Ages for ourselves. We will spend most of our time on the period around 1200, during the papacy of Innocent III (r. 1198 - 1216). Innocent III had his hand in most of the important developments of this period, from the growth of papal power to the suppression of heresy to new religious movements like the Franciscans to the Crusades to Magna Carta. We will explore each of these subjects using primary sources.