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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3384263" data-attributes="member: 4937">???My understanding from my reading is that the terms like Dark Ages and Middle Ages, and the general derision against the inhabitants of those times dates to the Reinnasance and the Reformation, a time of social upheaval when people had a closer stake in the social orders that grew out of the middle ages.Indeed. Because new social orders have arose, because we are in a time of social upheaval ourselves, you think that this should lead to greater objectivity about older social orders?  You don't, for example, think that any current social or political commentators have a stake in the history of the Catholic Church? Ahhh... yes.  The new 'just so' stories.  Someone says, "The Crusades were a noble adventure inspired by piety to liberate and protect the Christians in the historically Christian lands of the middle east, and it happened just so."  Someone else says, "The Crusades were an ignoble expression of European racism and religious fanaticism inspired by greed and envy, and it happened just so."Just so stories have a way of being long on explaining secret motives, the internal thought processes of the actors, what emotion people were experiencing, what we should feel about what happened and so forth, and very short on actual facts, this happened, and then this happened and then this happened.  They also happen to be short in thier summaries, whereas actual history is too bloody long and complex to fit in a book.  Both the above 'just so' stories would have a very hard time accounting for the actual narrative of events.</blockquote>

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