education in the middle ages essay

Education of the Middle Ages

This essay about the Middle Ages describes how education was a transformative force in medieval Europe. It highlights the role of monasteries, cathedral schools, and universities in promoting knowledge, despite the exclusivity of learning opportunities limited by social barriers. Key figures like Hildegard of Bingen and Christine de Pizan are noted for challenging these barriers. The essay also explores how education permeated everyday life through apprenticeships and market exchanges, emphasizing the era’s enduring quest for knowledge and its impact on society.

How it works

During the Middle Ages, education emerged as a powerful force amidst the complexities and transformations characterizing medieval Europe. Monasteries, city streets, and scholarly gatherings became vibrant centers of learning, deeply influencing societal structures with their enduring impact.

The landscape of medieval education was a diverse blend of knowledge sources. Monks in the seclusion of monastic scriptoria devoted themselves to transcribing ancient texts, ensuring the survival of classical wisdom. They engaged deeply with the trivium and quadrivium, enlightening young minds in the dim glow of candlelit rooms.

Outside these quiet monastic spaces, the bustling life of medieval cities offered other rich educational venues. Cathedral schools thrived under the shadows of grand cathedrals, where teachers and students participated in dynamic exchanges of knowledge. However, the development of universities in places like Bologna, Paris, and Oxford marked the zenith of medieval education. These institutions became hotbeds of intellectual exploration, tackling profound theological, philosophical, and scientific questions.

Despite its grandeur, medieval education was also marked by significant exclusivity, with access limited by class, wealth, and gender barriers. Nevertheless, figures like Hildegard of Bingen and Christine de Pizan broke through these barriers, challenging societal norms and inspiring future scholars.

Education extended beyond academia into the daily lives of artisans and craftsmen, where apprenticeships provided practical training. Marketplaces buzzed not only with the trade of goods but also with the exchange of ideas, enriched by tales and knowledge from distant cultures.

Ultimately, the Middle Ages showcased the unquenchable human desire to learn and adapt. Despite facing considerable obstacles, the era’s pursuit of knowledge lit up the dark times, proving the unyielding power and appeal of education. This period highlighted that even in the deepest shadows of ignorance, the quest for enlightenment and understanding could never be fully suppressed.

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Shaping Lives, Shaping Culture: The Story of Liberal Arts Education in the Middle Ages 1

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Education in Middle Age Essay Sample

In the U.S., education is a fundamental right to which all citizens are entitled, regardless of their age. In this sample, we will explore how middle-aged people in America can pursue their educational goals and what they need to know about accessing higher education.

Essay Sample On Education In Middle Age

Thesis Statement – Education In Middle Age Essay
Introduction – Education in Middle Age Essay
Propagation of Education in the Middle Ages
Accessories of Education in the Middle ages
The true nature of the education system in the Middle Ages
Women Education in the Middle Ages
Conclusion – Education In Middle Age Essay

Thesis Statement – Education In Middle Age Essay In the Middle Age, education was a privilege of the wealthy and the church. Introduction – Education in Middle Age Essay Education refers to the process of acquiring knowledge and skills through learning, memorizing, and understanding. It is very important for people in order to build a strong country: “A country’s future rests in good part on how it organizes and manages its schools”. From this perspective, there is no doubt that education is an essential factor that determines a person’s social status as well as his contribution to the development of society. In the Middle Ages, however, education was not recognized as an important factor for success or social growth. In fact, only wealthy children could get access to information from books because literacy was restricted by class and left most medieval adults with little more than their own experience of life. Get Non-Plagiarized Custom Essay on Education In Middle Age in USA Order Now Main Body – Education In Middle Age Essay Propagation of Education in the Middle Ages The mode of imparting education during the Middle Ages was generally done by the Churches. A large number of Cathedrals impart education among young boys. They were provided free education in the usual educational institutions. But when it comes to educating the girls, they were taught only basic reading and writing at home only. Some of the most popular subjects taught to the students are Liberal Arts, Latin, Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Astronomy, Philosophy, and Mathematics. If you compare the education system of the middle ages with that of the darker ages, students were taught practical experiences of hunters, poachers, wildlife, livestock, and agriculture from the farmers. Monks, priests, and bishops of all religions took up the task of teaching and imparting education and its pattern was mainly religious. Accessories of Education in the Middle ages During that time, there were no modern pen and paper to write as seen in today’s education system. Students and Scholars used bone or ivory for writing their notes on tablets made up of wood. These tablets were coated with green and black wax. The teachers and propagators of education have first written books through their own hands. In those times, parchments were used as papers. These parchments were made up of animal hides which were dried before making the parchments. Moreover, a special type of ink was used to write, these inks perfectly set on the parchments which were made from animal hides. During those times, Quill pens were used to write and this is generally made up of bird’s feathers. These handmade pens were perfectly manufactured and are regarded to be one of the best inventions during that period of time. The true nature of the education system in the Middle Ages During the Middle Ages, Bishops, Monks, and Priests were the main educators. They prefer to educate the upper-class students while the lower-class students were rarely educated. This was because the entire society was based upon the feudal system of society. Most of the lower class people and peasants work for the upper-class people for their living, They even engage their young children at work and this proves that in the middle ages education was also meant for the upper-class students and the children belonging to the peasant class were unable to reap the benefits of education. Moreover, during that period, it is advantageous to have education only for the ruling class, since they were able to rule over the lower class people. The educational institutions kept the poor class people away from having education so that they get subdued by the ruling class people. Moreover, the tuition fees charged for education were very high and it was impossible for the poor class people to even afford it. As a whole, the education system of the Middle Ages was meant to keep the poor class people uneducated and poorer. Educating people during the middle ages was quite a tough task because during the time of wars and battles, the classes were disturbed in monasteries, churches and thus studies were stopped during a particular period of time. Women Education in the Middle Ages The feudal system during the middle ages lays emphasis on men’s authority over womenfolk. Women have little or no chance at all to attain education. The young girls from the upper class and ruling class were taught the basics of reading and writing at home only. When upper-class girls were limitedly taught, it is unfeasible for the girl and woman from a peasant background to learn how to read and write. The education imparted to the upper-class women is very limited and it is controlled by the authority of the Church. During the middle ages, women were not encouraged to get better education since they were seen to have lower strata than that of the menfolk. In Medieval history, women were given a position lower than the men in society. Whatever education women got was just to be a good householder and was given the training to be a good wife and good mother in the future. Thus, this was the position of education at that time. But due to modern thoughts, education was open to all strata of life in modern times. Buy Customized Essay on Education In Middle Age At Cheapest Price Order Now Conclusion – Education In Middle Age Essay In conclusion, in the Middle Age, only wealthy children could get access to information from books because literacy was restricted by class and left most medieval adults with little more than their own experience of life. Furthermore, due to the fact that the church was the only available source of education most medieval citizens did not have any knowledge or abilities that differed from their peers. Finally, it is impossible to assess literacy rates in Middle Ages since no reliable statistics are available. Hire USA Experts for Education In Middle Age Essay Order Now

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AP®︎/College Art History

Course: ap®︎/college art history > unit 5, introduction to the middle ages.

Christianity, an introduction for the study of art history
Architecture and liturgy
The life of Christ in medieval and Renaissance art
A New Pictorial Language: The Image in Early Medieval Art
Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome
Basilica of Santa Sabina, Rome
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Jacob wrestling the angel, Vienna Genesis
Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well, Vienna Genesis
A beginner's guide to Byzantine Art
San Vitale, Ravenna
Justinian Mosaic, San Vitale
Hagia Sophia, Istanbul
Theotokos mosaic, apse, Hagia Sophia, Istanbul
Hagia Sophia as a mosque
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The Lindisfarne Gospels
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The Bayeux Tapestry - Seven Ages of Britain - BBC One
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Chartres Cathedral
Bible moralisée (moralized bibles)
Saint Louis Bible (moralized bible)
The Golden Haggadah
Röttgen Pietà
Giotto, Arena (Scrovegni) Chapel (part 1)
Giotto, Arena (Scrovegni) Chapel (part 2)
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Teaching Essay | Race in the European Middle Ages

This essay is the third in the Book Channel's Teaching Essays series, which aims to help teachers and instructors incorporate the latest research into their classroom curricula. It is also a response to ongoing debates within medieval scholarship about race and diversity — debates which have been covered extensively by outlets from Salon to the Chronicle of Higher Education (note: behind a paywall). Heng's essay provides practical guidance for educators seeking to integrate discussions of racial and religious diversity in their courses on the European Middle Ages, as well as a bibliography of recommended readings. Readers will also find links to online versions of many of the recommended primary sources throughout the essay. Geraldine Heng is the Perceval Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, where she also teaches in Middle Eastern Studies and Women's Studies. She is the founder and director of the Global Middle Ages Project ( G-MAP ). Currently, Dr. Heng holds an ACLS fellowship to begin work on her fourth book, Early Globalities: The Interconnected World, 500-1500 CE . Her newest book, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages , comes out from Cambridge University Press on March 8, 2018. –Assistant Editor Adrienne Tyrey

When I was a graduate student, I was taught (believe it or not) that women hardly featured or mattered in European medieval literature: this was a literature written by men, about men, and for men.

Fast forward a couple of decades, and we see women everywhere in medieval literature and history: we see that they mattered, a lot . And not just women: college courses today highlight medieval sexuality and sexual identity; the politics of physical disability and disease; ecology and the environment; Jews, Muslims, and colonized peoples; peasants and social class—an ever-expanding list.

What about race in the Middle Ages? For generations, race studies taught us that race was a concept with meaning only for the modern era. Originally defined in biological terms, race was thought to be determined by skin color, physiognomy, and genetic inheritance. The more astute scholars, however, soon realized that race could also be a matter of cultural classification, as Ann Stoler’s 1977 study of the colonial Dutch East Indies makes plain:

Race could never be a matter of physiology alone. Cultural competency in Dutch customs, a sense of “belonging” in a Dutch cultural milieu,… disaffiliation with things Javanese,… domestic arrangements, parenting styles, and moral environment … were crucial to defining … who was to be considered European. [1]

Yet even after we saw that people could be racialized through cultural and social criteria, the European Middle Ages was still seen as outside the history of race (I speak only of the European Middle Ages since I am a euromedievalist—it is up to others to discuss race in Islamic, Jewish, Asian, African, and American premodernities).

My book, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (appearing March 8, 2018), suggests that such thinking has been overly influenced by the era of scientific racism (in the so-called Age of Enlightenment) when science was the magisterial discourse of racial classification.

But today, in news media and public life, we see how religion can also function to classify people in absolute and fundamental ways — Muslims, who hail from a diversity of ethno-races and national origins, have been talked about as if their religion somehow identified them as one homogenous people.

Invention of Race thus puts forward an understanding of race more apposite to our time, as well as medieval time:

“Race” is one of the primary names we have—a name we retain for the commitments it recognizes—that is attached to a repeating tendency, of the gravest import, to demarcate human beings through differences among humans that are selectively identified as absolute and fundamental, so as to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups. In race-making, strategic essentialisms are posited and assigned through a variety of practices: This suggests that race is a structural relationship for the management of human differences, rather than a substantive content. [2]

Rather than oppose premodern “prejudice” to modern racisms , we can then see the vilification of medieval Jews—who were fantasized as possessing a fetid stench, a male menses, subhuman and bestial qualities, and a congenital need to ingest the blood of Christian children whom they tortured and crucified to death—as more than mere “prejudice.” We can acknowledge that their mob exterminations, legalized murder by the state on the basis of community rumors and lies, tagging with identifying badges, and herding into specified towns in England were racial acts , which today we could possibly call hate crimes, of a sanctioned and legalized kind.

In this way, we would bear witness to the full meaning of acts and events in the medieval past, and understand that racial thinking, racial practices, and racial phenomena can occur before there is a vocabulary to name them for what they are.

How, then, would we teach medieval race?

In art history, scholars have identified a multitude of images, objects, and architectural features that can be productively studied by students in classes on race. Volume 2 Part 1 of The Image of the Black in Western Art: From the Early Christian Era to the “Age of Discovery” by Jean Devisse (recently reissued with a new introduction by Paul H. D. Kaplan) offers an extraordinary array of images for investigation—from grim black African executioners of John the Baptist and black African torturers of Christ to the enigmatic Black St. Maurice , a martyr who after a thousand years was suddenly depicted as a black African at Magdeburg Cathedral in Germany, where he was (and still is) the patron saint.

Paul Kaplan’s The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art gives us a point of entry for thinking about how blackness and Africa serve the story of Christianity, while Madeline Caviness tells the other side of the story—how whiteness ascended to primacy in defining Christian European identity from the mid-thirteenth century on. By focusing not on black but on white as the key determinant of identity, Caviness’s article, “ From the Self-Invention of the Whiteman in the Thirteenth Century to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly ,” rounds out how to think about color as a medieval racial project.

Debra Higgs Strickland’s Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art and Ruth Mellinkoff’s Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages show us the implications of the iconography that visualized Jews, Muslims, Mongols, and monstrous humans for medieval audiences. Strickland reminds us that the human freaks depicted in art, cartography, and literature—often celebrated as wondrous and marvelous—should not teach us that medieval pleasure is pleasure of a simply and wholly innocent kind. The “Monstrous Races tradition,” she urges, “provided the ideological infrastructure” for understanding “other types of ‘monsters’, namely Ethiopians, Jews, Muslims, and Mongols” (42). This is a lesson to heed—and pass on—in how to think about medieval race.

In literature , courses examining anti-black, anti-Semitic, and Islamophobic stories are growing in number. My first book, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy , drew attention to texts little-noticed a decade and a half ago, like the Middle English romances Richard Coer de Lyon and The King of Tars . Reading the former, students are riveted by how the crusader King Richard, an aggressive imperialist, becomes a lip-smacking cannibal through a joke that turns the “Saracen” Muslim enemy—black-skinned, with white, grinning teeth—into delicious food, stewed in a dish that looks like the first iteration of the colonial mishmash later known as curry. This romance can be taught as early colonial literature that gleefully propagandizes on race and religion.

The King of Tars , which teaches how religion is so supreme that it can reconfigure race, can also be taught in religious studies classes. Here, a black, “loathly” Muslim king turns spotless white at his baptism, and a lump of flesh—the fetal issue of this black king and a lily-white Christian princess—transforms into the fairest child ever born, again at baptism. Medieval literature teaches that Christian sacraments are powerful race-makers.

There’s more. Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival has a fair-skinned Arthurian knight from Christian Europe venture into a heathen African country of black folk, where he sires a piebald son on a black African queen before abandoning her. This parti-colored son, Feirefiz, later marries the radiantly fair Grail maiden, and the polychromatic nuptial pair move to India, where they become the birth parents of Prester John (thus supplying the earlier, twelfth-century epistolary legend of Prester John with a luminous backstory), and Feirefiz evangelizes India by writing letters, like the apostles Peter and Paul. I leave readers to decide what this literary fantasy of global race relations means.

In the Dutch romance Moriaen , the plot arc is reversed. A black African knight from Moorland visits Arthurian Europe in search of his father, a knight of King Arthur’s who had promised, but failed, to marry the young knight’s mother. This exquisite, little-taught text has a unique innovation: the African knight is piously Christian and superior in every chivalric way to the knights of the Round Table. Moriaen even gives us an inner view of what it is like to be shunned and abhorred because you are black, and contemplates conditions under which epidermal differences should be ignored.

Texts like Mandeville’s Travels , the Croxton Play of Sacrament , Jewish boy murder stories (Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale , the Anglo-Norman ballad of Hugh of Lincoln , miracles of the Virgin tales like The Christian Boy Killed by Jews ), and the Siege of Jerusalem are rich repositories of anti-Semitic content. Islamophobic texts are also not hard to find. My favorite teaching texts include the Sultan of Babylon and the Song of Roland , but Muslims are targeted more than we realize. Read Marco Polo’s Description of the World again, with a watchful eye to how Muslims are described and what stories are told about them, for eye-popping revelations.

The Vinland Sagas have a lot to say about Native Americans, and crow over exploitative trade relations with indigenous people half a millennium before Columbus. Gerald of Wales’s twelfth-century excoriations of the Irish demonstrate how even fellow Christians can be racialized—portrayed as quasi-human, savage, infantile, and bestial in the propaganda projects of settler-colonization. Read with students Gerald’s views of the Irish alongside, say, Edmund Spenser’s views four hundred years later, to see what, if anything, has changed in racial strategy toward the Irish from the medieval to the early modern period.

Chronicles, ethnographies, travel texts, and letters are of course also the subject matter of historians. History courses can introduce students to how Urban II’s crusading address at the Council of Clermont in 1095 depicts Muslims as an unclean, polluting, infernal race from whom Christians must wrest the Holy Land. Bernard of Clairvaux’s treatise on the Templars, In Praise of the New Knighthood , goes further: it announces that killing a Muslim is not really homicide at all but malicide —the extermination of incarnated evil, not the killing of a person.

Race-making in the crucible of international war takes different forms, and centuries of holy war produced a multitude of teachable documents. An eyewitness chronicle of the First Crusade, the Gesta Francorum ( Deeds of the Franks ) shows how desecration of dead Muslims through piecemeal decimation of their bodies dehumanizes humans into thinghood. The First Crusade’s eyewitness chronicles also register crusader cannibalism that transforms dead Muslims into edibles, food. One chronicle, Raymond d’Aguilers’ , even conceptualized the multifarious, chaotic hordes of crusaders as a single race, melded together by their religion, Christianity. Christians, it seems, are a race, too.

Historians can also scrutinize canon law and state legislature with students: to see how Canon 68 of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 installed racial law in the Latin West by ordering Jews and Muslims to mark themselves by a difference of dress. Students can go on to track how English law and statutes elaborated on this “badge of shame,” and constricted the freedom of Jewish subjects more and more—till the 1275 Statute of Jewry created de facto residential enclaves by forbidding Jews from living among Christians. Was this the beginning of the ghetto? By 1290, of course, parliamentary law drove Jews from England altogether, marking their first permanent expulsion from a European country.

Courses can teach the history of peoples like the Romani (“Gypsies”), a dark-skinned race of migrants from India in the eleventh century, who in moving westward, were enslaved in southeastern Europe. They can survey the fortunes of the Cagots , an abject people living on either side of the western Pyrenees who were shunned and abhorred. Or they can explore whether the treatment of heretics and peasants, the diseased and the disabled, ever amounted to racialization.

The possibilities are endless, and I hope that, like courses on medieval women and medieval sexualities, teaching on medieval race will soon become common.

[1] Ann Laura Stoler, "Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth." Political Power and Social Theory 11 (1997): 191.

[2] Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018, 3.

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Medicine in the middle ages.

Sarcophagus with a Greek Physician

Ampulla (Flask) of Saint Menas

Processional Cross

Reliquary Casket with Scenes from the Martyrdom of Saint Thomas Becket

Reliquary Pendant with Queen Margaret of Sicily Blessed by Bishop Reginald of Bath

Arm Reliquary

"Physician Preparing an Elixir", Folio from a Materia Medica of Dioscorides

'Abdullah ibn al-Fadl

The Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux, Queen of France

Jean Pucelle

The Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg, Duchess of Normandy

Attributed to Jean Le Noir , and Workshop

Shoe Reliquary

Manuscript Illumination with the Birth of the Virgin in an Initial G, from a Gradual

Don Silvestro de' Gherarducci

Pilgrim's Badge of the Shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury

Pharmacy Jar with the Arms of the Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala

Apothecary jar (orciuolo)

perhaps workshop of Giunta di Tugio

Saint Fiacre

Martyrdom of Saint Agatha in an Initial D

Sano di Pietro (Ansano di Pietro di Mencio)

Pendant Capsule in the Form of a Tau Cross, with the Trinity and the Virgin and Child

Saint Anthony Abbot

Attributed to Nikolaus von Hagenau

Saints Christopher, Eustace, and Erasmus (Three Helper Saints)

Tilman Riemenschneider

The Miraculous Communion of Saint Catherine of Siena

Giovanni di Paolo (Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia)

Sigrid Goldiner Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

January 2012

In the second century, Origen wrote, “For those who are adorned with religion use physicians as servants of God, knowing that He himself gave medical knowledge to men, just as He himself assigned both herbs and other things to grow on the earth.”

The practice of medicine in the Middle Ages was rooted in the Greek tradition . Hippocrates, considered the “father of Medicine,” described the body as made up of four humors—yellow bile, phlegm, black bile, and blood—and controlled by the four elements—fire, water, earth, and air. The body could be purged of excess by bleeding, cupping, and leeching—medical practices that continued throughout the Middle Ages.

In 65 A.D. , Dioscorides, a Greek, wrote his Materia Medica ( 13.152.6 ). This was a practical text dealing with the medicinal use of more than 600 plants. In the second century, Galen synthesized much of what has been attributed to Hippocrates. To further his understanding of bodily functions, he performed animal and even human dissections and was able to demonstrate that the arteries carried blood rather than air. Galenic theories had great longevity, prevailing in western Europe until the sixteenth century.

The Arabs were the great translators and synthesizers of medical texts. Many Greek texts were translated first into Arabic and then into Hebrew. Consequently, Arabs and Jews were renowned for the practice of medicine, and Arabic and Jewish doctors were often employed by kings (for example, James II of Aragon [died 1327]).

One cannot overestimate the importance of medicinal plants in the Middle Ages. Although the original text of Dioscorides is lost, there are many surviving copies. His texts formed the basis of much of the herbal medicine practiced until 1500. Some plants were used for specific disorders, while others were credited with curing multiple diseases. In many cases, draughts were made up of many different herbs. No monastic garden would have been complete without medicinal plants, and it was to monasteries that the sick went to obtain such herbs. Additionally, people might have gone to the local witch or to the apothecary for healing potions .

By the twelfth century, there were medical schools throughout Europe. The most famous was the school of Salerno in southern Italy , reputedly founded by a Christian, an Arab, and a Jew. A health spa as early as the second century, Salerno was surprisingly free of clerical control, even though it was very close to the famous and very powerful monastery of Monte Cassino. The medical faculty at Salerno permitted women to study there.

The medical school at Montpellier traces its roots back to the tenth century, though the university was not founded until 1289. Count Guilhem VIII of Montpellier (1157–1202) permitted anyone who had a medical license to teach there, regardless of religion or background. By 1340, the university at Montpellier included a school of anatomy .

In 1140, Roger of Sicily forbade anyone from practicing medicine without a license, indicating that doctors were clearly under some form of regulation. In the late Middle Ages, apothecary shops opened in important towns. Interestingly, these shops also sold artists’ paints and supplies, and apothecaries and artists shared a guild—the Guild of Saint Luke.

Physicians were trained in the art of diagnosis—often shown in manuscripts holding a urine flask up for inspection ( 54.1.2 , Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux , marginal illustration, fol. 143), or feeling a pulse. In fact, in the sixth century, Cassiodorus wrote that “for a skilled physician the pulsing of the veins reveals [to his fingers] the patient’s ailment just as the appearance of urine indicates it to his eyes.” Observation, palpation, feeling the pulse, and urine examination would be the tools of the doctor throughout the Middle Ages.

Surgery such as amputations, cauterization, removal of cataracts, dental extractions, and even trepanning (perforating the skull to relieve pressure on the brain) were practiced. Surgeons would have relied on opiates for anesthesia and doused wounds with wine as a form of antiseptic.

Many people would have sought out the local healer for care, or might have gone to the barber to be bled or even leeched. Midwives took care of childbirth ( 21.168 ) and childhood ailments. For the sick and dying, there were hospitals. Although many large monasteries did have hospitals attached to them—for example, Saint Bartholemew’s in London and the Hotel Dieu in Paris—and all would have had at least a small infirmary where sick and dying monks could be cared for, it is unclear just how much time the monks dedicated to care of the sick. The medicus in a monastery would have devoted himself to prayer, the laying on of hands, exorcizing of demons, and of course the dispensing of herbal medicine. The hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena was initially administered by the canons of the cathedral ( 23.166 ; 16.154.5 ). It was renowned for its efficient administration and, supported by wealthy patrons, was richly endowed with works of art ( 1975.1.2488 ; 32.100.95 ). Many communities had hospitals to care for the sick that were independent of monasteries.

Some of the most notorious illnesses of the Middle Ages were the plague (the Black Death), leprosy, and Saint Anthony’s fire. From 1346, the plague ravaged Europe, and rich and poor alike succumbed with terrifying speed ( 69.86 ). Pneumonic plague attacked the lungs and bubonic plague produced the characteristic buboes; there was no cure for either form. The only hope for those who escaped the dread disease was prayer or pilgrimage. While leprosy ( 54.1.2 , Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux, Louis Feeding the Lepers , fol. 123v) was very disfiguring and therefore sufferers were feared and kept apart, in fact, leprosy has a very slow incubation period and may not have been as contagious as it was believed. Lepers were obliged to live outside a town or village and to carry a bell to warn people of their approach. Many medieval parish churches in England have leper “squints” that allowed a leper to see the Mass and even receive the sacrament without coming into contact with other parishioners.

Sufferers from St. Anthony’s fire were afflicted with burning extremities. As the disease, caused by the ingestion of tainted rye, progressed, the bright red extremities—hands, feet. and whole limbs—could become gangrenous and fall off. There were many Antonine hospitals to which patients flocked ( 1990.283a,b ). These hospitals, dedicated to Saint Anthony Abbot ( 1988.159 ), gave patients a mixture called Saint Vinage. and cooling herbs such as verbena and sage were applied to soothe the burning heat. Amputations of the affected limbs were also performed.

Many people died of much less dramatic diseases. Women often died in childbirth or succumbed to postpartum infections. Children frequently did not live into adulthood. Laborers must have had multiple problems, such as accidents, osteoarthritis, and fractures. Kidney disease, dental problems, hemorrhoids, and heart disease would have been common. Battle-related injuries were frequent and often fatal.

The most important exemplar for any healer was Jesus himself. The Gospels recount that Jesus healed the blind, caused the paralyzed to walk, cast out devils from the possessed, healed a woman with an issue of blood, and even raised the dead. The healing touch was appropriated by English and French kings, and many miraculous cures were attributed to the royal laying-on of hands. In England, for example, the King’s Touch was believed to heal scrofula, a form of tuberculosis. Prayers to Christ, the Virgin, and saints were always considered the most efficacious form of help. Saint Margaret was invoked for help in childbirth ( 47.101.65 ); Saint Fiacre ( 25.120.227 ; 17.190.353 ) for relief from hemorrhoids. Pilgrimage to a shrine might also lead to miraculous healing. Often these sites and the relics they displayed were related to specific diseases and to specific saints .

Objects associated with the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket attest to the importance of Canterbury as a pilgrimage site where many sick people received miraculous cures. Becket was described as “the best physician of virtuous sick people” and the thirteenth-century windows at Canterbury provide a vivid record of miraculous cures of blindness, leprosy, drowning, madness, and the plague. At Canterbury, the saint’s blood was believed to be particularly beneficial—ampullae containing blood mixed with water were distributed at the shrine ( 2001.310 ). Canterbury seems to have been a particularly important pilgrimage destination for people suffering from bleeding disorders—perhaps because of the blood shed by Thomas at his martyrdom ( 17.190.520 ).

Pilgrims arriving at their destination would be able to touch the relics and even carry home with them secondary relics—perhaps a piece of cloth that had been applied to a reliquary, or an ampulla of liquid that had been poured over a tomb ( 17.194.2291 ). These secondary relics could then be used to heal those who were too ill to make the journey. Ultimately, the power of faith was potent medicine for the sick in the Middle Ages.

Goldiner, Sigrid. “Medicine in the Middle Ages.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/medm/hd_medm.htm (January 2012)

Additional Essays by Sigrid Goldiner

Goldiner, Sigrid. “ Art and Death in the Middle Ages .” (originally published October 2001, last revised February 2010)

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Arabian Peninsula, 1–500 A.D.
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Relief Sculpture
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Giunta di Tugio
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Power and Identity in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Rees Davies

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This volume celebrates the work of the late Rees Davies. Reflecting Davies' interest in identities, political culture, and the workings of power in medieval Britain, the chapters range across ten centuries, looking at a variety of key topics. Issues explored range from the historical representations of peoples and the changing patterns of power and authority, to the notions of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ and the relationship between local conditions and international movements. The political impact of words and ideas, and the parallels between developments in Wales and those elsewhere in Britain, Ireland, and Europe are also discussed.

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Middle Ages

The Middle Ages, the medieval period of European history between the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the Renaissance, are sometimes referred to as the "Dark Ages."

Knights Duelling On Foot In A Tournament 19th CenturyKnights duelling on foot in a tournament, 19th century. Plate 1 from The History of the Nations by Vincenzo Gazzotto, Vincenzo. Artist G Lago. (Photo by Historica Graphica Collection/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

People use the phrase “Middle Ages” to describe Europe between the fall of Rome in 476 CE and the beginning of the Renaissance in the 14th century.

Knights Templar

Who Were the Knights Templar? After Christian armies captured Jerusalem from Muslim control in 1099 during the Crusades, groups of pilgrims from across Western Europe started visiting the Holy Land. Many of them, however, were robbed and killed as they crossed through Muslim-controlled territories during their journey. Around 1118, a French knight named Hugues de […]

Hundred Years’ War

The name the Hundred Years’ War has been used by historians since the beginning of the nineteenth century to describe the long conflict that pitted the kings and kingdoms of France and England against each other from 1337 to 1453. Two factors lay at the origin of the conflict: first, the status of the duchy […]

Pandemics That Changed History

In the realm of infectious diseases, a pandemic is the worst case scenario. When an epidemic spreads beyond a country’s borders, that’s when the disease officially becomes a pandemic. Communicable diseases existed during humankind’s hunter-gatherer days, but the shift to agrarian life 10,000 years ago created communities that made epidemics more possible. Malaria, tuberculosis, leprosy, […]

How did the real history of the Knights Templar become intertwined with the mysterious object known as the Holy Grail? Historian Dan Jones traces the medieval origins of the myth linking the cup of Christ to Crusader knights.

What Were the Crusades?

Christian knights waged a religious war against the Muslims in Jerusalem in an attempt to reclaim the Holy Land.

In the Middle Ages, the bubonic plague ravages Europe in one of the most deadly pandemics in human history.

Heavy Cavalry of the Middle Ages

See how the elaborate battle armor worn by medieval knights developed and evolved.

6 Surprising Discoveries From Medieval Times

The Middle Ages have yielded a series of amazing archaeological discoveries, from medieval swords to buried castle remains to evidence of zombie fears.

An ancient fresco of the Danza Macabra (Dance of the Death) and Trionfo della Morte (Triumph of the Death)

7 Mysterious Mass Illnesses That Defied Explanation

From a dancing plague to a laughing epidemic, the symptoms were clear—but the culprit was not.

Eight Knights Who Changed History

Well-trained, heavily-armored knights represented a triumph of military might during the Middle Ages.

Print depicting a doctor practising bloodletting on a patient. (Photo by © Historical Picture Archive/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

A Brief History of Bloodletting

Find out more about this ancient treatment’s long history.

This Day in History

Joan of Arc is born

This Day in History Video: What Happened on November 27

Peasant army marches into london, pope urban ii orders first crusade, black death is created, allegedly.

How the Middle Ages are being revisited through Indigenous perspectives

PhD Candidate in English Literature, Dalhousie University

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Brenna Duperron does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Dalhousie University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation CA.

Dalhousie University provides funding as a member of The Conversation CA-FR.

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The seemingly fantastical world of the Middle Ages has held western popular culture in fascination since (at least) its nostalgic reimagining by Victorian antiquarians .

European medieval imagery or narratives, partly popularized in the early to mid-20th century, with works like J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings , still permeates popular culture. “The medieval” is used to evoke both magical stories for all ages, and mature stories featuring senseless violence .

Unfortunately, there is also a sinister side to our collective love affair with knights and dragons of yore. White nationalist and alt-right groups have taken up the stories, imagery and histories of what is popularly imagined in the West as the Middle Ages to visualize the existence of a homogeneous white Europe , whether imagined as fully Christian or neo-pagan Europeans.

Read more: Understanding the Crusades from an Islamic perspective

Revisiting the meaning of the Middle Ages, and how medieval imagery and narratives are appropriated and understood today, is therefore necessary for an accurate snapshot of the European and global historical period, and its misuses .

As a scholar raised as a member of the Métis Nation in B.C. (though my current documentation is insufficient for citizenship), some of my work has been concerned with what it means to decolonize medieval studies. With literature professor Elizabeth Edwards, I have examined how medieval studies can gain insight from Indigenous worldviews and perspectives .

Here, I consider the impact of white supremacy on historical and contemporary scholarly and popular understandings of the Middle Ages, and focus on how scholars are shifting the narrative with critical race and Indigenous approaches.

White nationalism

Critical race scholars like Dorothy Kim and Eduardo Ramos have highlighted the colonial histories of medieval studies and its associated myths and stereotypes.

As critical race literature scholar Matthew X. Vernon notes in The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages , white supremacist theorists have seen medieval England as “available for being imaginatively constructed as an era of racial purity and military subjugation on ‘foreign peoples.’” Such “extrapolations of the Middle Ages” have served to “racializ[e] bodies and then fi[x] horizons of expectations for what a race could achieve.”

Medievalist scholars Mary Rambaran-Olm and Erik Wade note that some American and English writers rebranded “Anglo-Saxon” to include false narratives around white racial superiority . This use has perpetuated false ideas of what it means to be “native” to Britain, and by extention to claim special “white” belonging and rights in settler colonial societies.

Indigenizing approaches to the Middle Ages

The idea of the Middle Ages is arguably tightly interwoven with settler colonial ideology . Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars with a decolonial focus have begun to understand the European medieval period through global historical and Indigenous perspectives .

How have Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars approached the Middle Ages from a decolonial lens?

1. Red Reading

“Red Reading,” a form of literary analysis that uses Indigenous approaches and methodologies to read non-Indigenous texts, was first coined by Jill Carter (Anishinabek), and simultaneously developed by Scott Andrews (Cherokee) .

In my own work, I read texts like The Book of Margery Kempe , a fifteenth-century text of a mystic’s life and personal relationship with Jesus Christ, to understand how authors incorporated elements of oral storytelling into their written work, not as a an accident of progress but as a purposeful, artistic choice.

2. Examining settler colonialism emerging in premodern history

Tarren Andrews (Bitterroot Salish), a literature scholar, revisits origins of colonial narratives . Her scholarship examined male heterosexual and patriarchal control over women in the English poem of The Wife’s Lament written around the 10th century, and how this cultural impulse would manifest in the sexism of the 1867 Indian Act .

Read more: Disenfranchising Indigenous women: The legacy of coverture in Canada

She’s focussed on legal and literary artifacts from before 1100 from the North Atlantic alongside stories or documents from Turtle Island (North America).

3. Deconstructing Norse contact on Turtle Island

The field of medieval studies had long considered itself immune to the need for decolonial work, as it imagined itself to exist prior to European contact with Indigenous societies beyond Europe — other then a brief interaction between the Indigenous peoples of Newfoundland and the Norse.

This contact was immortalized in the archaeological site of L’Anse-Aux-Meadow in Newfoundland, now a national historic site , and sagas (such as the Greenlander Saga and the Saga of Erik the Red). Literature scholars like Geraldine Heng have examined interactions in the saga to interrogate how notions of race were developed and depicted in pre-modern times.

Christopher Crocker, a Qualipu Mi’kmaw scholar of medieval and modern Icelandic literature, notes how the fascination with Norse contact dominates Newfoundland tourism and historical research — at the expense of pre-colonial Indigenous studies and representation.

People seen around a tipi at a celebration, including a woman in a headscarf.

4. How colonial rhetoric imagined Indigenous Peoples as “medieval”

Some scholars, like sociologist Daniel S. Goh or post-colonial medievalist scholar Helen Young, examine how discussing and framing Indigenous people as “medieval” (backward) has been key to colonial projects . Medievalism was used to justify racist colonial projects as necessary to allow the “medieval” Indigenous societies to “catch up” with supposedly superior European societies .

5. Indigenous adaptations of medieval literature

English literature scholar Jonathan Hsy’s Antiracist Medievalism highlights how Indigenous poets have appropriated medieval poetry styles, as part of decolonial literary movements.

Hsy showcases the work of Osage medievalist, Carter Revard, who studied, translated and wrote in the Old English Riddle style . This style was a popular form, written from the perspective of an object, such as a sword or book, to reveal itself to the audience.

Alongside his translations, Revard wrote some riddles from the point of view of an eagle fan or birch canoe, as an act of reclaiming both halves of his identity — the Osage and the European.

Shifting the public perception

Work related to decolonizing the study of the Middle Ages is beginning to take root .

I hope this thinking, and the thinking of other scholars, can inform what is taught in classrooms. This can help students carry forward new understandings as they both create and consume medieval-themed images, games, videos and narratives.

Middle Ages
Medieval history
Anglo Saxons
White supremacy
Newfoundland
Critical race
Turtle Island
Settler colonialism
medievalism

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