It’s often seemingly hopeless to try to convince people that the Middle Ages was anything other than the caricature often found in popular culture and eighteenth-century commentary. As historian Ralph Raico has noted, other than the Industrial Revolution, there is probably no historical topic in which the general public is more propagandized and more generally wrong than the topic of the Middle Ages. Raico has described how no matter how often he told his students that medieval princes and kings were subject to the law, and constrained in their powers by a variety of religious and political institutions, his students overwhelmingly stated in exams that medieval lords ruled as autocrats.
Although the general public still thinks of the Middle Ages in terms of images from popular culture, actual historians have long since moved on. This is partly why historians virtually never use the term “the Dark Ages” anymore. And if the term is used, it refers only the early Middle Ages, due to the fact that there is a dearth of documentary and textual evidence form that time period. The High Middle Ages—the time of the great cathedrals and urbanization in Europe—was hardly a Dark Age, of course, and the idea that the Middle Ages was a time of unchanging stagnation was jettisoned long ago.
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