List of common misconceptions about the Middle Ages

The <a href="/facts/Middle_Ages/RqzEKB9v">Middle Ages</a> is a traditional division of <a href="/facts/Western_Europe/YmWlV59w">Western European</a> history that roughly lasted from the 5th to the 15th centuries. After the <a href="/facts/Collapse_of_the_Western_Roman_Empire/EjUtGSJm">collapse of the Western Roman Empire</a>, civilization in different parts of Western Europe receded at different rates and at different times. Eventually, the <a href="/facts/Carolingian_Empire/kyp74kXx">Carolingian Empire</a> was established in the 9th century and reunited much of Western Europe, but the entity itself collapsed and fractured into a number of states. State fragmentation and competition characterized much of the history of medieval Western Europe, and that trend would remain true for a long period of history afterwards. 
Even as the Middle Ages become increasingly well documented; historians increasingly focus on writing literature addressing some of the primary misconceptions about medieval history; and other historians take the alternative approach of highlighting many of the intellectual, scientific, and technological advances that took place during the period, such ideas remain prominent in the public sphere and continue to dominate conceptions about the Middle Ages as a whole. A prominent misconception is related to the <a href="/facts/Dark_Ages_(historiography)/hbavBnAk">Dark Ages</a> itself, a term that its traditionally used as a synonym for the Middle Ages to emphasize its <a href="/facts/Barbarian/k61mm4mC">barbarity</a>, its intellectual ignorance or the supposed lack of sources by which the period is thought to be characterized although all of those characterizations have failed to withstand scholarly criticism.
Critical analysis of the Middle Ages has instead revealed it to have been a period of momentous change and, in many areas, tremendous progress. While people traditionally associate the <a href="/facts/Renaissance/4D9Bc6KU">Renaissance</a> with post-medieval intellectual rebirth, the Renaissance is now seen to have initiated in different times in different places across Europe and to have itself begun during the <a href="/facts/Late_Middle_Ages/XNtcJjrU">Late Middle Ages</a>. Furthermore, a number of periods of intellectual rebirth took place throughout the medieval period, including the <a href="/facts/Carolingian_Renaissance/6JFPzI29">Carolingian Renaissance</a> in the 9th century and, more importantly, the <a href="/facts/Renaissance_of_the_12th_century/aGnEkJnf">12th-century Renaissance</a>. Furthermore, despite some early debates, Christians quickly came to accept and adopt the cultural learning of the Greeks and the Romans, and they further decided that philosophy and science were handmaidens and precedents to acts of higher Christian learning. 
Advances in many fields were made, and among the most critical developments were the rise of the <a href="/facts/University/skaJt2Io">university</a> in the late 12th to the 13th centuries out of the prior <a href="/facts/Cathedral_schools/WgA14Vmc">cathedral schools</a>, which had been established during the <a href="/facts/Carolingian_renaissance/6JFPzI29">Carolingian renaissance</a>, which itself was associated with the rise, for the first time in history, of a class of career scholars, who were engaged in the study of philosophy and learning.

List of common misconceptions about the Middle Ages open-in-new

List of common misconceptions about the Middle Ages