Europe in the Middle Ages by Ierne Lifford Plunket

Author:Ierne Lifford Plunket [Plunket, Ierne Lifford]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: anboco
Published: 2017-03-09T23:00:00+00:00

Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. 368–73.

Pope Alexander III

1159–81

Emperor Philip II

1197–1208

Emperor Otto IV

1197–1215

Fourth Lateran Council

1215

The Sixth Crusade

1228–9

Battle of Cortenuova

1237

Death of Conradin

1268

XV

LEARNING AND ECCLESIASTICAL ORGANIZATION IN THE MIDDLE AGES

The word ‘progress’ implies to modern men and women a moving forward towards a perfection as yet unknown, freshly imagined indeed by each generation: to the Middle Ages it meant rather a peering back through the mist of barbarian invasions to an idealized Christian Rome. Inspiration lay in the past, not merely in such political conceptions as the Holy Roman Empire, but in the domain of art and thought, where too often tradition laid her choking grip upon originality struggling for expression.

The painting of the early Middle Ages was stereotyped in the stiff though beautiful models of Byzantium, that ‘Fathers of the Church’ had insisted, by means of decrees passed at Church councils, should be considered as fitting representations of Christian subjects for all time. Less impressive but more lifelike were the illuminations of missals and holy books, that, in illustrating the Gospels or lives of the Saints, reproduced the artist’s own surroundings—the noble he could see from the window of his cell ride by with hawk or hounds, the labourer sowing or delving, the merchant with his money-bags, the man of fashion trailing his furred gown.

Vignettes such as these, with their neat craftsmanship of line and colour, their almost photographic love of detail, lend a reality to our glimpses of life in Europe from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries; yet great as is the debt we owe them, the real art of the Middle Ages was not consummated with the brush but with the builder’s tools and sculptor’s chisel.

Mediaeval Architecture

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