sullivan-end of middle ages

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The End of the Middle Ages: Decline, Crisis, or Transformation?Author(s): Donald SullivanReviewed work(s):Source: The History Teacher, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Aug., 1981), pp. 551-565Published by: Society for History EducationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/493689 .Accessed: 04/05/2012 10:39

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The End of the Middle Ages: Decline, Crisis, or Transformation?

DONALD SULLIVAN University of New Mexico, Albequerque

IT IS A TRUISM of historical scholarship that a given past should be studied not only through contemporary sources, but also through perspectives provided by subsequent generations. Both are deemed essential to understand more fully what happened and why. Yet, modern interpretations of the period ca.1300-1500, conventionally identified as the late Middle Ages in trans-alpine Europe, have received little seri- ous attention. This lack of interest can be attributed partially to a long evident tendency to represent the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as, at best, only the background or preparation for such climactic events as the Renaissance and the Reformation. While modern historiography has exhaustively examined the "Renaissance Problem" the compara- tive neglect of the late medieval period stems largely from four centuries of viewing it primarily in relation to what was seen as more appealing or more significant eras, whether preceding, following, or overlapping it.

I

Renaissance humanists, for example, often described the millenni- um after the first Christian Roman Emperor Constantine, as one of

DONALD SULLIVAN earned his Ph.D. at the University of Colorado, Boulder and has published articles on late medieval reform and historical methodology. He is completing a book on the late Middle Ages in historical thought.

552 THE HISTORY TEACHER

unrelieved cultural decadence; an epoch scarcely worthy of further differentiation into sub-periods. The later medieval centuries, overlapping in part with the Renaissance, were considered as merely a benight- ed backdrop to the revival of classical civilization in fourteenth century Italy.

The early humanist Petrarch went further by alleging that medieval cultural barbarism still existed in his time. Writing in 1344, he could "only foresee worse things from day to day, although worse than now I can hardly imagine." Yet, he was convinced that "when the darkness breaks..,. generations to come may find their way back to the clear splendor of the ancient past."'

Protestant reformers also found little of inherent interest or worth in the immediately preceding era. Both Luther and Calvin attributed a perceived deterioration in medieval society to the growth of a diaboli- cal papal power within the Western Christian Church, which in turn pervaded medieval life. This theme of progressive spiritual decline in the Middle Ages found fullest embodiment after 1550 in the massive Magdeburg Centuries of the Lutheran historian Flacius Illyricus, and was confirmed more concisely two generations later by the Calvinist scholar Jean Daill6. For Daill6 the Church began to decline as early as the second century when it drew away from the authentic Biblical message, and then degenerated steadily throughout the medieval centuries "until ultimately it sank to the last stage of corruption and depravity where [The Protestant Reformers] struggled to expose it."2 In short, the mainstream Protestant tradition considered the time just before the Reformation as the spiritual nadir of religious history and of European civilization. The Enlightenment movement of the eighteenth century only echoed the hostility of humanist and Protestant reformer toward the medieval world in general.3

Even after 1790, when the medieval period in its early and central phases began to attract the sympathetic interest of Romantics and patriots, its latter portion continued to remain unappreciated for other reasons. Many early nineteenth century German scholars became so inspired by the imperial glories discovered between the tenth and thirteenth centuries that they either ignored the subsequent period, or portrayed it as remarkable only for witnessing the pathetic decline of a political golden age.4

Meanwhile, under the spell of Romanticism, other writers had idealized the unifying principles of a single religious faith and of a vigorous chivalric culture which apparently flourished best in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In comparison with this resplendent era of peace and harmony, the post 1300 period seemed increasingly

END OF THE MIDDLE AGES 553

chaotic and materialistic, and hence of little positive value. The Ger- man poet-essayist Novalis in 1799 set the tone for this fresh evaluation of the central Middle Ages: "Those were fine, magnificent times ... when one Christendom inhabited this civilized continent... [and] one sovereign [the papacy] joined the nations together."5 But according to Novalis subsequent generations lacked the maturity and the discipline to sustain this organic Christendom. It began to dissolve before the mundane pressures of late medieval commercial life and the bitter strife that accompanied it. The Reformation completed the process of disintegration.6 While Novalis inverts the Protestant apotheosis of the Reformation, he is at one with Protestant scholar, Renaissance humanist and Enlightenment philosophe in his disparagement of the period 1300-1500.

What is evident, then, is that the period of the late Middle Ages was from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century regarded as without real significance or intrinsic merit. The vast majority of nineteenth century writers would concur. Jacob Burckhardt's seminal work on the Italian Renaissance in 1861 simply reinforced the prevailing view of the matter. Thus, the late medieval period remained a kind of stepchild of historical thought.7

The clear beginnings of a change appear discernible only in the latter nineteenth century with the expanding influence of Leopold von Ranke's contention (pace Herder)8 that each historical age should be appraised on its own terms and considered to have its own unique value. Still, by the 1870s, only a few reputable historians were prepared to consider the end of the end of the medieval era as more than a mere anticipation of greater ages to come, or something more than the decline of chivalry and Gothic splendor, or of the disintegration of the Holy Roman Empire and of an ideal spiritual unity. Late medieval history could evoke an affirmative response of its own, particularly in national studies.9 Yet, as late as 1932 an English scholar could preface his carefully nuanced history of the age by lamenting that it had "often been treated slightingly. It was, we are commonly told, a time of general decadence."'0

In fact many still perceive the late Middle Ages as an epoch characterized principally by decline and disintegration. In this respect Johan Huizinga's Waning of the Middle Ages, published in 1919, remains the classic description of the cultural death of a civilization. Noting that decay is as prominent in cultural history as revival and growth, Huizin- ga amassed ample evidence of a widespread creative languor and insta- bility in late medieval society, especially in France and the Netherlands. For him, in short, the expiring Middle Ages in Northern


Europe witnessed the progressive enfeeblement and dessication of cultural forms as diverse as literature, art, feudal chivalry, theology and the modes of popular religion. But Huizinga did not seek the deeper causes of the phenomenon he so memorably described, nor did he extend his attention much beyond the cultural expressions of the time.

Even so, a number of works have since appeared that do offer detailed explanations of late medieval decline. These interpretations are sometimes broadened to include virtually the whole spectrum of medieval life. Certainly among the more vivid and controversial of these accounts is that of the American medievalist Norman Cantor. In a widely read text, (sub-titled The Life and Death of a Civilization), Cantor dated the onset of a fatal decay in medieval society in the latter thirteenth century: "Medieval civilization received its mortal wound between 1270 and 1325 and there remained only the long death agony of chaos and malaise during the next 150 years.""'

According to Cantor this seizure affected all the major areas of medieval life. The decisive cause of civilization's demise he believed to be psychological in origin: a failure of will among the leading thinkers, politicians and churchmen of the era. More specifically, he diagnosed a deep-set "social neurosis," evident in the failure of the various elites to preserve the tenuous set of political, spiritual and intellectual syn- theses bequeathed them.12

The burden of maintaining what Cantor called the "subtle web of compromise", established by the two previous generations, thus proved intolerable to the leaders of the new generation maturing after 1300. The result of their disaffection was the embrace of simplistic extremes in politics, philosophy, and religion, and the unravelling of the distinctive organizing principles of medieval society. These leaders, seemingly infected with a subconscious death wish regarding the old order, yearned for the swift end of a system whose basic values they had ceased to support.'3 Cantor thus combined Freudian categories with a moderate version of the romantic "great man" approach to history.

Although Cantor later supplemented this psychological explanation by affirming the role of material forces, such as inadequate trans- portation technology and severe overpopulation, his main theme remained the death of a civilization. Explicit is the assumption that the old society had in some sense to expire before a new phase of history could be born: "The collapse of medieval civilization probably made possible the eventual construction of the modern world."'5

Cantor's thesis, however stimulating and dramatically stated, has aroused considerable skepticism, resting as it does on assertions that are difficult to substantiate. As one critic observed, the late Middle


Ages witnessed "not the decline of a civilization, for medieval civilization is simply the earliest expression of our own Western civilization. Much less does the process represent ... the decline of a collective organism obsessed by a death wish."'16 Yet the questioning or discredit- ing of one version of the "decline" thesis does not preclude the viewing of certain late medieval institutions, like the Church or the manorial economy, as deteriorating from earlier, healthier conditions. There are also a number of more comprehensive treatments that concentrate on breakdown and decay in the period."7

II

Especially since 1945, however, the trend in scholarship has ceased to portray the late Middle Ages as simply a time of retrogression. One alternative has been to employ concepts and expressions considered less judgmental and value-laden. The idea of"crisis" for example, has been adapted from more general contexts to apply to the timespan 1300- 1500.18 According to a noted French economic historian, "crisis is the word that comes immediately to mind [regarding] the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,..,. not necessarily a crisis as... regression, absence of creative thought, initiative..,. and audacity, but essentially a break in equilibrium. The end of the Middle Ages was not only a time of decadence but..,. of preparation, of search for new solutions to endur- ing problems."'9 This more neutral defining of the term as simply a predicament or possible turning point in the late Middle Ages has, as noted, only become generally prevalent since World War II.20

The crisis concept has received its most extensive application in the field of economic history, and probably nowhere more influentially than in the work of the English historian Michael Postan. Over a scholarly career of nearly a half century Postan has advanced fundamentally current understanding of England's medieval economy, particularly in agrarian and demographic history. After marshalling the limited evidence to support a picture of agricultural stagnation and crisis in late medieval Europe, he assigns prime responsibility to a catastrophic decline in population.

Postan perceived this demographic slump as a kind of inexorable Malthusian reaction to several centuries of population surge that im- pelled people to expand onto agriculturally marginal lands. But, as reserves of virgin acreage receded in the late thirteenth century, the demand for food exceeded the supply. The result was widespread hun- ger. Yet for Postan the population crisis became fiercest only in the fourteenth century, "ushered in by the high mortalities during the bad


harvests of 1317-19, drastically accelerated during the plagues of [the] mid-fourteenth century, and further sustained by the recurrent plagues of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and perhaps also by the recurrent effects of agrarian crisis."21 In short, "a fortutitous combina- tion of adverse events ... was sufficient to reverse the entire trend of agricultural production and to send the population figures tumbling down."22

Yet, Postan departed significantly from classical Malthusian theory, and incidentally from an unqualified "decline" position, by arguing that the "fall of population in the fourteenth century did not wholly reverse the preceding trends."23 In fact Postan detected certain areas of growth within a general epoch of contraction. He cited evidence, for example, that indicated a considerable redistribution of wealth after the drastic fall in agricultural productivity. The peasant's lot in a time of manpower shortages and consequent higher wages apparently improved substantially, even as the rise of an impressive new cloth industry in England and parts of the Netherlands compensat- ed somewhat for losses suffered in other sectors of the economy.24 For Postan, nonetheless, the net outcome remained one of stagnation and decline.

In sum, Michael Postan identified a profound crisis of subsistence in late medieval rural society, a severe economic downturn rooted above all in a lack of manpower, but also entailing lesser crises in abandoned villages and extreme fluctuations in prices and wages that would deeply affect the surviving lords and peasants. Many other spe- cialists in the field tend to agree with Postan's essentially demographic approach.25

Yet, Postan endorsed only tentatively the idea of a general shrinkage or stagnation of the late medieval economy, that is, a crisis in industry, commerce, and agriculture. While he recognized the strong likelihood that an extended crisis in one economic sector like agriculture, that generated some 90 percent of the total income, might also adversely affect trade and industry, he suggested this conclusion principally by inference. It is only the loss of population, common to both town and countryside, that might link the two areas in any direct sense, though even here he is prepared to offer only "working hypotheses which ought not be considered conclusive."26 Postan preferred, then, to limit his writing to clear, precise technical descriptions of the individ- ual economic trends and crises, principally in agriculture. He allowed others to apply the crisis concept more inclusively to the diverse phenomena of the late Middle Ages.

Another Briton, Perry Anderson, has recently made a notable at-


tempt at such a socio-economic synthesis, drawing heavily on Postan as well as on Marxist theory. After carefully examining the possible causal interrelations between the economic and social events described in such detail by Postan and others, Anderson discovered a massive general crisis that affected virtually all areas of European society, beginning as early as the thirteenth century.27 In the process he draws together the principal themes that have individually engaged the spe- cialists.

Anderson attributed this total crisis of a society to a paralysis in the feudal mode of production, a seizure that occurred when the traditional economy reached a stage both in its rural and urban sectors when it could no longer regenerate itself. For Anderson the dwindling of new land for cultivation during the thirteenth century precipitated a crisis when the feudal economy "eventually overreached the objective limits both of terrain and [of] social structure."28

As population increased the crop yields on marginal lands dimin- ished, precipitating a demographic crisis. Also, the diversification of the feudal economy, achieved earlier through international trade, led regions to ignore wheat in favor of more lucrative export commodities such as grapes for wine and wool for textiles. Poor harvests put these regions at the uncertain mercy of grain imports at inflated prices.29

Anderson's debt goes much further than Postan, professing to see in the chains of interacting economic factors the essential components of a full-scale "structural crisis" in the late medieval rural economy, a threatened general breakdown in the feudal economy itself. The deli- cate ecological balance of the rural economy was decisively tipped through the unhappy conjunction of overpopulation with a series of crop failures and famines in the early fourteenth century. This set in motion still further troubles for medieval society.3o

Anderson described similar pressures besetting an urban economy closely linked to the ready availability of fresh silver supplies. Here a documented scarcity of money, dating from the early fourteenth century, can be traced directly to drastic declines in the quantities of silver ore produced by the mines of Central Europe. Anderson ascribed this shrinkage primarily to a failure in technology, specifically the miners' inability to sink deeper shafts after the ore lying closer to the surface became depleted early in the fourteenth century. As in the rural sector, then, certain "objective" limits to urban industrial productivity were reached,31 with consequent crisis in the towns stemming from the de- basement of the coinage and the spiralling inflation that followed. This in turn induced a widening gap between urban and agricultural prices. With fewer people the demand for the subsistence commodities of the


manorial estates declined; prices for farm products plummeted after 1320.32

Yet, the feudal lords earning this diminishing income still had to continue to pay the prevailing high prices for urban commodities. Some, unable to balance these expenses with their manorial income, turned to plunder, unleashing fresh cycles of violence and war. In this respect economic crisis engendered social crisis. Finally, the structural crisis that gripped agriculture, industry, and the feudal aristocracy from within was exacerbated by an external catastrophe: the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century fell with devastating impact upon a Western society already reeling from internal crises.33

Anderson contends, however, that no general crisis in a mode of production was ever simply a vertical decline. Much more than Postan would concede, Anderson found new economic and social forces generated by the crises of the fourteenth century, even as new relations between these forces and existing forces had to be forged, especially in the countryside where emancipated serfs began to make their presence felt.34

Non-Marxist scholars have also sought to interpret the events of the late medieval period in terms of a general crisis.35 But however fruitful and satisfying the crisis-concept has proven to some, particularly in social and economic history, many others believe that the full complexities of the late medieval period cannot be adequately com- prehended either by theories of decline or of crisis when applied exclu- sively.

III

A third approach, one which emphasized the gradual transformation of medieval society over several centuries into something definably different, has developed. Skeptical of theories of abrupt or sudden change, this view postulated instead a long period of transition between more clearly structured historical ages. In such transitional or inter- mediate periods, traditional elements tended to merge with new forces in ways that still preserved something of the old in the emerging new world. This gradualist approach rejected emphatically the premise that a civilization must "die" or be destroyed before its successor can appear. It also sought to encompass a broader range of time and experience than the "crisis" technique.

Ironically it was Johan Huizinga, cited earlier for his theory of late medieval decline, who also provided an early stimulus to the gradualist


position. In an essay published after his Waning of the Middle Ages, he suggested that the process of cultural change was 'not that of one revolution of a great wheel but that of a succession of waves onto a great beach, each of them breaking at a different point at a different mo- ment."36 But Huizinga did not pursue this insight and his published work placed almost exclusive emphasis on the passing of a traditional world. Thus the transition thesis, like the crisis view, has only crystal- ized since 1945.

Some argue that the length of the transition between the medieval and modern eras should include the three centuries, 1300-1600. The conventional Renaissance and Reformation periods are thereby linked with the old medieval order in an ongoing, intimate relationship that stresses continuity and interaction over cataclysmic break or decline, or even crisis. In this sense the late Middle Ages are associated with the move toward modernity.

Among the best known and most representative of the transition thesis is the Canadian scholar Wallace Ferguson. A noted specialist in Renaissance studies, Ferguson elaborated his views in a series of publi- cations between 1940 and 1962. Building upon Burckhardt's insights relating to Renaissance Italy, Ferguson has expanded the geographic range to include trans-Alpine Europe as well from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. But, he has also heeded two generations of medievalist criticism of the Burckhardt thesis by affirming the underlying continuity of the post-1300 era with the preceding age. Finally, Ferguson sought to embrace the full spectrum of human experience, combining the socio-economic focus of the "crisis" analyses with Burckhardt's concern for the political and cultural aspects.

Ferguson's view of late medieval economic history differed in char- acteristic ways from that of the "crisis" model. While he did not dispute the importance or utility of the demographic and economic evidence adduced by the "crisis" school, he cautioned economic historians against drawing too much from often inadequate late medieval statisti- cal data. And, while he acknowledged the fundamental role of the economic element in human affairs, Ferguson appeared more intent to integrate it as a conditioning ingredient in a broader organic process that encompassed the social, political and cultural aspects as well. What mattered most to him was not the quantitative aspect of overall levels of wealth, nor again long-term economic trends in production and exchange; it was rather qualitative considerations such as who pos- sessed the wealth, and what he did with it, as in the extensive financial support given art in Renaissance Italy, despite a condition of general economic depression. Ferguson therefore tended to envelop the quan-


titative socio-economic emphasis of the "crisis" approach within more comprehensive patterns that involved the qualitative transformation of late medieval society as a whole.37

In effect Ferguson moved beyond the notions of decline and crisis to link in close causal interconnection the complex phenomena of late medieval life. He defined the period 1300-1600 as "the age of transition from medieval to modern civilization, a period characterized primarily by the gradual shift from one fairly well co-ordinated and clearly defined type of civilization to another, yet ... possessing in its own right certain distinctive traits and a high degree of cultural vitality."38 Post 1300 Europe was transformed from an essentially rural, hierarchical society based upon the otherworldly values of a dominant single Church to a preeminently urbanized and less structured society orient- ed to a plurality of values, among which the tenets of the old Church constituted only a diminishing part. In this formulation the Middle Ages can be seen to end at various points where the pressure of dynamic new elements like capitalism, urban life, and a secular-minded merchant class began to overwhelm elements of the feudal and ecclesiasti- cal past. By the early fourteenth century the shift was becoming perceptible.39

Ferguson's interpretation has taken a prominent place among a rising number of periodization theories that reject completely the decisive break of European history at 1500.40 And in most of these new schemes the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries take on a heightened interest and importance. Yet, the transition thesis has itself evoked strong criticism. The Italian Marxist Delio Cantimori raised two objections to the Ferguson thesis that would apply to the transition approach generally. Cantimori's main contention, that every age is one of transition, would render this idea virtually meaningless as a tool of historical analysis. He further suggested that Ferguson's conception of a late medieval transition to the modern world tended to be merely descrip- tive and lacking in intrinsic unity because it tried to embrace too many disparate elements.41 William Bouwsma has recently rekindled the assault on Ferguson's "age of transition," which he considers both con- fusing in concept and unwarranted in its basic assumption that two well-defined entities, the medieval and the modern, could support so "unsteady" a construction as Ferguson has devised. For Bouwsma the two conventional periods remain "too amorphous" [and] unintelligible to provide any stable mooring for such a bridge.42

Defenders of the transition thesis responded that some ages may be more intensively and demonstrably transitional than others, and that the late medieval era was a case in point. As to the approach


lacking intrinsic unity, its proponents recognize their obligation to define more precisely the mix of elements, traditional and novel, that entered into the process of transformation. Bouwsma's objections proved more difficult to meet, particularly the view that the medieval and modern eras lacked a unique and identifiable character as such, and could therefore provide no context within which a transitional age would make sense. But few others were willing to go as far as Professor Bouwsma in declaring the meaning of "medieval" and "modern" to be indeterminable.43

IV

In conclusion, three distinct lines of interpretation have evolved in the continuing effort to grasp the nature and significance of the late Middle Ages. Advocates of a thesis of late medieval decline tended by definition to focus upon those aspects of the oeriod that could be inter- preted as a deterioration from a condition of vitality or equilibrium so commonlY associated with the High Middle Ages. There was often too the implication that the Middle Ages represented a basically distinct civilization with a life cycle that had to run its course before the modern world could begin. In any case, a clear break was placed between the medieval and modern periods, generally around 1500.

On the other hand, the crisis approach, whether in its special or its general forms, reflected a certain empirical suspicion of the kinds of value judments evident in the traditional "decline" hypothesis. The definition of crisis as simply a point or event that involved the possibil- ity of significant historical change allowed its user to study a given phenomenon without viewing it necessarily as a regrettable departure from some norm, stated or implied. Yet, those with strong ideological commitments, could also shape the crisis mode to their purposes, as in the neo-Marxist presentation of Perry Anderson. Further, more adop- tion of a theory of crisis in this technical sense does not of itself suggest a common date when the Middle Ages "became" the modern world.

Those, finally, who embraced one or another version of the transition thesis looked toward a much broader interpretive framework than was provided by the other hypothesis. In this regard, the "decline" and "crisis" approaches appeared too limited in their orientation to encompass the great diversity and complexity of the late medieval centuries. Here, decline became only one among several characteristics, perhaps less significant than certain elements of modernity detectable during the same era, such as the rise of the centralized state, capitalism, an increasingly aware merchant class, and of a secular outlook on the


world. The transition thesis also blurred the customary sharp division

between the Middle Ages and modern times and thereby pushed the roots of the modern era deeper into the Middle Ages. From this perspec- tive, medieval civilization did not simply decay: it underwent metamor- phosis over the 200 or 300 years after 1300. What the theory of the great transition created, then, was a kind of intermission period, a long interlude between two more or less clearly defined phases of Western civilization.44 Yet, as in Ferguson's version, this transition era pos- sessed a positive value of its own. It was no longer a mere deteriorating appendage of medieval civilization. As a synthesis concept the transition theory was also broad enough in some versions to incorporate the ideas both of decline and of crisis. In this sense, there could be crisis and decline within transformation. Given the breadth of the transition model and its flexibility, it was perhaps not surprising that it emerged as the dominant interpretation among many scholars.45 But it is also evident that historians following each of the three interpretations have found substantial inspiration for their accounts of late medieval change outside their specialties, as in the respective uses made of Freud, Mal- thus and Marx.

The need has long been recognized for "an adequate historical language to decribe the balance of continuity and change."46 The con- ceptions examined here illustrate the imaginative vigor with which students of late medieval history have pursued this task over the past generation. Scholars will, of course, continue to make valuable contri- butions to the field without conscious adherence to a particular thesis. Yet, the problem of periodization will continue to intrude whenever questions of the larger significance and interrelations of events are raised. A modest range of explanatory devices and strategies can now be drawn upon to further the study of the period and illuminate various aspects of it.

What will happen to modify the present situation depends closely on the body of monographic studies which feed and sustain speculation on the issues of periodization and interpretation. As scholars seek to understand these phenomena new interpretive perspectives will doubt- less emerge along with fresh combinations of existing approaches.47 It is plain in any event that the late Middle Ages is no longer a neglected stepchild of historiography, even as the riddle of its meanings and dimensions can now be pondered with more clarity and confidence.


Notes

1 Epistulae Familiares, II.72; ed., V. Rossi (Florence, 1937). Africa, IX, 456-57; ed., N. Festa (Florence, 1926). Petrarch's view closely approximates what Arthur Lovejoy has identified as a "theory of progressive degeneration." For its early history as a form of decline, see A. O. Lovejoy & George Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, I, (Baltimore, 1953), 1-2 and passim.

2 De Usu Patrum ..., (Geneva, 1656), 307. 3 See, e.g., Voltaire, Oeuvres complete..., 12, (Paris, 1878), 123; 277. 4 the romantic-nationalist veneration of Germany's past found passionate expression

in the works of a number of pre-Rankean German historians. See, e.g., Heinrich Luden, Geschichte des deutschen Volkes, 12 vols., (Gotha, 1825-27); it culminated after 1859 in the celebrated Giesebrecht-von Sybil-Ficker disoute over the significance of the medieval German empire. See R. Herzstein, ed., The Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages, (Boston, 1966).

5 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenburg), Schriften, ed., E. Holborn, v.II, (Berlin, 1901), 399.

6 Ibid., 400-401. A few years before, the neo-Romantic French historian Michelet branded the years 1300-1500 outside Italy as "times of iron and of lead." See his Histoire de France, v.VII, (Paris, 1855), lxvi. William Stubbs concluded similarly in his Con- stitutional History of England, v.II, 4th ed., (London, 1896), 654-56.

7 F. Graus, "Das Spaatmittelalter als Krisenzeit", Mediaevalia Bohemica 1(1964), 4.

8 J. G. von Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, ed., F. Manuel, (Chicago, 1968), xvii; 5; 118.

9 See, e.g., Johannes Janssen, Geschichte des deutschen Volkes ..., v.I (Freiburg, 1875); also, J. R. Green, History of the English People, vols. I-II, (London, 1877).

10 W. T. Waugh, A History of Europe, 1378-1494, (London, 1932), 1. 11 Cantor, Medieval History, 2nd ed., (New York, 1969), 504. 12 Loc. cit.; also 547. 13 Ibid., 503-506; 547. 14 Cantor, The Meaning of the Middle Ages, (Boston, 1974), 250-56. 15 Ibid., 249. 16 Jeffrey Russell, Medieval Civilization (New York, 1968), 556. 17 M. Scott, Medieval Europe, (New York, 1969), 419. Other prominent examples of

the "decline" thesis would be: Rudoloh Stadelmann, Vom Geist des ausgehenden Mit- telalters, (Halle, 1929), and J. R. Trevor-Roper, The Rise of Christian Europe, (New York, 1965), 15; 161-63; 175-85; 195.

19 Leopold Genicot, "Crisis: From the Middle Ages to Modern Times," in: Cambridge Economic History, ed., M. M. Postan, v.II, 2nd ed., (Cambridge, 1960), 660.

20 E.g., Eduard Perroy in: Peuples et Civilisations, ed., L. Halphen & P. Sagnac, v.VII,pt.I, (Paris, 1931), 1-2; also, W. Abel, Agrarkrise und Agrarkonjunktur in Mit- teleuropa..., 1st ed., (Berlin, 1935).

21 Cambridge Economic History of Europe, ed. M. M. Postan, v. I, 2nd ed., (Cam- bridge, 1966), 570.

22 Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture and Related Problems of the Medieval Economy, (Cambridge, 1973), 14. (Orig. pub., 1950).

23 Postan and J. Hatcher, "Population and Class Relations in Feudal Society," Past and Present 78 (1978) 29.

24 See, e.g., Essays, 26-27. 25 See David Herlihy in Mediaevalia et Humanistica, new ser., 5 (1974), 239-41. 26 Essays, 22-27.


27 Anderson, Passages from Antiquity, (London, 1974), ch. 5, entitled "A General Crisis" and espec. 197, n.1.

28 Ibid., 197. 29 Ibid., 198-99. 30 Ibid., 199. 31 Ibid., 199-200. 32 Ibid., 200. 33 Ibid., 200-201. For an introduction to the extensive literature on the effects of

the Plague on medieval society, see W. Bowsky, ed., The Black Death, (New York, 1971), 1-64.

34 Anderson, 197, n.l; 204-205. But Anderson diverges from orthodox Marxism in refusing to give primacy of place to class conflict as the motor of late medieval change. For a more conventional Marxist analysis of the late medieval "crisis" see R. Brenner, "Agrarian Class Struggle and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe," Past and Present 70 (1976), 30-74.

35 See R. S. Lopez, The Birth ofEurope, (New York, 1967) and L. Genicot, op. cit. 36 Huizinga, "The Problem of the Renaissance," in his Men and Ideas, (New York,

1959), 281-82. (Orig. pub., 1920). 37 Ferguson, "Recent Trends in the Economic Historiography of the Renaissance,"

reprinted in his Renaissance Studies, (New York, 1970), 55-71. (Orig. pub., 1960). 38 Ferguson, "The Interpretation of the Renaissance: Suggestions for a Synthesis,"

in his Renaissance Studies, 128. (Orig. pub., 1951). See also Ferguson, Europe in Transi- tion, (Boston, 1962).

39 Ferguson, The Renaissance, (New York, 1940), 8. 40 Prominent among modern historians who have found unacceptable the conven-

tional medieval-modern division inherited from the Renaissance and codified in the seventeenth century are Geoffrey Barraclough, Herbert Butterfield and the late Erwin Panofsky. According to Barraclough, "the real question about the so-called later Middle Ages, from about 1300, is whether they should be grouped with the Middle Ages at all". Barraclough, History in a Changing World, (Oxford, 1957), 58.

41 Cantimori, "La Periodizzatione del Rinascimento," in: Relazioni Internazionale del Scienze Storiche, (X Congresso Internazionale), v.IV (Florence, 1955), 18.

42 Bouwsma, "The Renaissance and the Drama of Western Civilization," American Historical Review 84 (1979), 4-5.

43 Yet the prevalent view of a high medieval achievement of effective synthesis and social harmonies against which late medieval decline could be effectively gauged has itself been challenged. See, e.g., Karl Morrison, Europe's Middle Ages, (Glenview, Ill., 1970), 3-8, and passim; also, Richard Sullivan, "The Middle Ages in the Western Tradi- tion," in: B. Ladner, ed., Essays in Medieval Civilization, (Austin, Texas, 1978), 3-31. See too the work of Heiko Oberman on late medieval philosophy and religion, especially The Harvest of Medieval Theology, (Cambridge, Mass., 1963).

44 From the Annales school in France has come a notable variant of the transition thesis, one that construes the whole period ca.1300-1700 as one in which the European masses shared a common blight of economic and social stagnation. The transition to the modern world is thus only very gradual, even as such cultural and religious events as the Renaissance and Reformation are dwarfed by the impersonal material forces that repressed the levels of population and productivity over those four centuries. See espec. Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie, "L'Histoire immobile," Annales E-S-C, 29 (1974), 672-92.

45 One index can be found in recent Westei-n and world civilization textbooks, where examination of 32 published between 1964 and 1979 reveals 18 (more than 56 per cent) adopting the transition! transformation explanation of late medieval change. Only four (12?2 per cent) view the "crisis" position as providing the best account. Only one author discusses the period primarily in terms of decline: G. P. Cuttino, in: J. R. Majors, et al.,


Civilization in the Western World, v.I, (Phila., 1967), 357; 398. 46 Arthur J. Slavin, ed., The "New Monarchies" and Representative Assemblies:

Medieval Constitutionalism or Modern Absolutism? (Boston, 1964), xv. 47 E.g., the Harvard historian Steven Ozment has recently devised a significant

refinement of the transformationist thesis. Broadening considerably the theological per- spective of his mentor Heiko Oberman (see note 43 above), Ozment perceives the late Middle Ages in general as a time less of decline, crisis or simple transformation than as a "creative breaking up," a concurrence of"unprecedented chaos" with "bold new beginnings" best captured in the double connotation of"harvest" as "something...dying away [even as] ripe fruit and seed grain were also being gathered in." See Donald Kagan, et al., The Western Heritage, v.I, (New York, 1979), 313.

sullivan-end of middle ages

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