Ian Mortimer, Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter, The Bodley Head, 2023.

Reviewed by Charles Freeman

When do the Middle Ages begin and end? I think AD 500 is a good starting point, following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476. Many studies do not get going until 1000 or 1100 and Ian Mortimer, a distinguished medievalist, adopts this approach in his Medieval Horizons. Many scholars, as Mortimer acknowledges, see the 15th century as marking an essential transition, yet he extends his story up to 1600. I shall challenge this at the end of this review.

Traditionally medieval Europe has been described as stagnant and superstitious compared to the chronological bookends of the Graeco-Roman Empire and the Renaissance. Mortimer is an ardent defender of the vitality and diversity of the Middle Ages and this thoughtful book deploys his arguments. An analysis of the historiography of the period adds to the quality of the text. His sources are mainly from England (as have been those of his earlier books). There are good sections on the improvements in English homes, especially with heating through chimneys; and speed of travel, which Mortimer calculates (largely again from English sources) as rising some five miles per hour on horseback. Mortimer does discuss the technological advances of medieval Europe: the amazing complexity of the Gothic cathedrals, the replacing of vellum with paper and the development of the clock. However, if he had included more from mainland Europe he would surely have made his case for the Middle Ages stronger. In terms of the economic vibrancy of urban life, the technological achievements of the northern Italian cities outshone those of England. I would also have expected more on the impact of the revival of Roman law and its adaption to the challenges of the city states of Northern Italy, the emergence of the universities (they are only briefly mentioned) and the attempts to find constitutional solutions both for monarchies and for republics such as Florence and Venice. The substantial costs of the wars of the Middle Ages had an important effect in encouraging popular involvement in government. Monarchs had to call parliaments to approve levies and these became a fixture, not only in England. The arrival of Greek texts through the prism of Arab philosophers were crucial in embedding the works of Aristotle into the European curriculum.

There are drawbacks, of course, of extending the survey to Europe. Although Mortimer argues persuasively that violence was decreasing by the 15th century, the devastation caused by the French invasion of Italy in 1494 is not mentioned nor the atrocities of the French wars of religion. His chapter on inequality is a model of how a topic with virtually no statistical back-up can be addressed. He notes the end of serfdom and slavery in England but he does not mention Venetian and Genoese trade in slaves nor Pope Nicholas V’s bull of 1452 authorising King Afonso V of Portugal to subjugate any ‘enemies of Christ’, a religious justification for slavery.

Vernacular texts had freed readers from having to know Latin and so, not least, from clerical authority. Using Tyndale’s Bible (1526), Mortimer notes the importance of this translation in the quality of the English which gave it a lasting readership. He contrasts it with the English of 400 years earlier, which would have been incomprehensible to later generations. Yet as early as the beginning of the 14th century, one of the great masterpieces of European literature, Dante’s Divine Comedy, had been written in Italian and other European authors followed suit in a variety of vernacular languages. In this case, England was much later in the game.

How does one measure individualism in a society? I wonder whether an objective assessment is possible. Here Mortimer is more responsive to European examples. He cites the appearance of spiritual awareness, highlighting Abelard’s Know Thyself and History of My Calamities—although I find the letters of his lover Heloise more revealing of a self-aware personality. (Nothing, of course, could compare for self-awareness with the 4th-century Confessions of Augustine.) An expanding economy, not least in the range of delicacies and dress that it created, allowed an elite to present themselves in exotic ways. The reappearance of mirrors allowed people to see themselves as they really were and, of course, in a technological advance, the Florentine Brunelleschi effectively used mirrors to define perspective in art. The Black Death must have reinforced human beings’ sense of helplessness but the economic opportunities it gave appear to have opened new vistas. I would have dwelt more on the entrepreneurial skills of merchants and bankers in trade, shipping and finance. The choices and judgements they had to make was surely a mark of individualism. I finished this chapter only partially convinced by Mortimer’s argument. Compared to other periods and societies, is individualism really a dominant feature of medievalism?

I would also disagree with Mortimer’s extension of the medieval period to 1600. There were significant changes in the 15th century that ushered in a new age. I believe that medievalism is associated with a pre-Reformation, uniform Christendom. Medieval philosophy was inseparable from the dominance of a single creator God and there was a plethora of theories as to how He could or could not act. This limitation acted as an intellectual straitjacket which was loosened by Humanism, the new emphasis on Classical sources. The German scholar Johannes Fried in his The Middle Ages talks of the arrival of Humanism. ‘Humanism spread to become the dominant intellectual movement of the 15th century. It promulgated not just a new ideal mode of education, but also a whole new image of mankind which posited the intellectually autonomous human being as the focus of its attention.’ I think that this is a valid assessment.
If one takes the 15th century as the point where the Middle Ages ended, one could argue that there were limitations to its achievement, certainly when compared to the 16th century. There were the attacks (as early in the 14th century by Petrarch) on the obscurity of scholasticism, the method of argument used in the universities. Texts could only be copied by hand (inevitably with errors), until the invention of printing enormously expanded a critical readership. It meant that a corrected printed text was authoritative, with important implications for science and mathematics. This is surely a turning point. While European merchants had reached China through the Mongol Empire in the 13th century, surely the European discovery of the Americas was not only a geographical event but led to a revolutionary appraisal of alternative societies. The Copernican revolution was also crucial. When the vast majority of the population laboured in the fields, however, any argument for transition must be cautious. The 15th and early 16th centuries surely saw a new world and to claim Erasmus, Copernicus, Vesalius and Shakespeare as ‘medieval’ (as Mortimer does) is contentious. Nevertheless, with this caveat in mind, this is an impressive and immensely readable summary of change and diversity between the period 1000 and 1600. While it is fine to assert that ‘the European character had changed profoundly’ in the Middle Ages, I feel that it is restrictive to rely so much on English sources for this conclusion.