Myths About The Middle Ages

Myths About The Middle Ages: The roughly thousand years from about 500 to 1500 are often painted as filthy, ignorant and brutal, but historians point out that many popular 'medieval' beliefs, from a flat earth to the iron maiden, were invented or exaggerated centuries later.

Petrarch: The 14th century Italian poet helped create the idea of a 'dark age' by contrasting the glories of ancient Rome with what he saw as the gloom of the centuries in between.

Washington Irving: His 1828 biography of Columbus helped spread the myth that medieval people believed the Earth was flat, when educated Europeans had long known it was a sphere.

De sphaera mundi: This 13th century astronomy textbook by Johannes de Sacrobosco taught that the Earth is round and was a standard university text for centuries.

Bellifortis: The earliest known drawing of a chastity belt appears in this 1405 military manual by Konrad Kyeser, and many historians think it was a joke; most surviving 'medieval' belts are later fakes.

Iron Maiden: There's no evidence this spiked torture cabinet was used in the Middle Ages; it traces to 18th century writing, and the famous Nuremberg example was assembled in the 19th century.

Jus Primae Noctis: Historians have found no reliable evidence that medieval lords held a legal 'right of the first night,' a story that mostly served later writers attacking feudalism.

Enrico Dandolo: Low medieval life expectancy was dragged down by child deaths, and adults often lived long lives, like this blind Venetian doge who helped lead the Fourth Crusade in his nineties.

Livre des métiers: This 13th century Paris book of trade rules includes regulations for bathhouse keepers, evidence that public bathing was a normal part of medieval city life.

Great Conduit: From the 1240s this system piped fresh spring water into the heart of London, undercutting the myth that medieval people drank only beer because water was unsafe.

Carl Emil Doepler: Vikings never wore horned helmets in battle; the image took off after this costume designer gave them horns for Wagner's Ring cycle in 1876.

Henry V (1944 film): Laurence Olivier's film shows a knight hoisted onto his horse by crane, but real plate armor weighed roughly 15 to 25 kilograms, spread across the body, and knights could mount, run and roll in it.

Malleus Maleficarum: This witch hunting manual appeared in 1486, at the very end of the Middle Ages, and the largest wave of witch trials came in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Mondino de Luzzi: The idea that the medieval Church banned dissection is wrong; this Bologna professor performed public human dissections and wrote an anatomy manual in 1316.

Forme of Cury: This 1390s cookbook from Richard II's kitchen is full of spices, which were a luxury often costing far more than meat, contradicting the myth they were used to hide rotten food.

University of Bologna: Founded around 1088, it is the oldest university in continuous operation, one of several medieval creations, along with Paris and Oxford, that shaped modern higher education.

Robert Grosseteste: This 13th century English bishop wrote on optics, light and the rainbow and stressed experiment, showing medieval thinkers were far from anti-science.

Oxford Calculators: Scholars at Merton College worked out the mean speed theorem for accelerating bodies in the 1330s, centuries before Galileo's related work.

Giordano da Pisa: In a 1306 sermon this friar mentioned that eyeglasses had been invented less than twenty years before, a medieval technology we still use every day.

Salisbury Cathedral Clock: Dated to around 1386, it is often called one of the oldest working mechanical clocks in the world, a product of medieval engineering.

Statute of Labourers: After the Black Death killed a huge share of Europe's population, surviving workers demanded higher wages and moved for better deals, and this 1351 English law was a failed attempt to stop them.

Christine de Pizan: Widowed in her twenties, she supported her family as a professional writer in France around 1400 and argued for women's abilities in The Book of the City of Ladies.

Carolingian Minuscule: The clear handwriting standardized under Charlemagne around 800 became the ancestor of the lowercase letters you're reading right now.

Byzantine Empire: The idea that Rome simply 'fell' in 476 ignores that the Eastern Roman Empire carried on for nearly a thousand more years until Constantinople fell in 1453.

Terry Jones: The Monty Python star, who co-directed the mud caked Holy Grail, was also a serious medieval scholar whose book and series Medieval Lives took apart many of these very myths.