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In the Time of ... the Medieval Mind (1400) other pages in the time of Matteo Ricci

I haven't lived chronologically. No one does. Each moment reaches backward and forward to all other moments. The interweaving of elements from my life's work -- out of chronology, as echoes and forshadowings -- is true, I think, to the inner shape of any life.

Richard Avedon, Autobiography

Our educational system goes back twenty-five centuries. Socrates taught rational thinking when he gathered rich white boys on the porch in Athens and asked them questions. Those students, one of whom was Aristotle, wrote books that still speak to us today.

The Greeks' logic and rhetoric stayed alive and well in other parts of the world, but not the part where English was spoken. There, the people retained only Aristotle's ideas about a fixed universe, the sun and planets in fixed celestial spheres, completely created, in perfect unchanging inscrutable balance. Christianity, with a complete creation in seven days, adapted well. The first chapter of Genesis makes it clear: the sun revolves around the Earth and the Earth revolves around man in God's image.

A thousand years ago, these English-speaking people lived in the southeast corner of the island around the capital, London, and the two universities, Oxford and Cambridge. Their society was more violent and dangerous than ours, and most often their lives were shorter. Their wars lasted far longer. Their terrible viruses put some perspective on our AIDS epidemic. Plague, the Black Death, killed half the people in Europe between 1350 and 1370.

At home, of course, these folks spoke the basilect, an earlier variety of what we now call English. It was commonly described as coarse and dirty, mere gruntings of people only a generation or two removed from beasts. Few could read or write that dialect. But everyone spoke it.

The Medieval English Mind

All the questions are already asked and answered. God knows all the answers, revealed in the Bible for all time.

Everyone has a God-given place in society.

God-fearing people shun ideas, things, methods, and people that are new or different.

No one travels very far and no one cares what's going on anywhere else in the world.

Writing, mysterious marks on scrolls made of dried animal skins, confuses people. The priest tells them what they need to know.

So what's new? Turn the dried animal skins into words scrolling past on a computer screen and this portrait describes people who live in your neighborhood today. It may, at least in part, describe you. If you substitute any number of small-g gods, from communism to ancestors to psychiatry, this portrait describes people all over the world.

It may be easier for us to understand what the English speakers back then didn't have.

clocks, calendars
maps, roads
written records
any "fact" beyond their own personal experience
the idea of history
the idea of a future or a sense of progress
any sense of themselves as individuals with "rights"
any curiosity to discover new ideas
any ambition to improve anything such as their lifestyle or their place in society

If they weren't sure what to do, they asked someone in authority, especially the priest, how it had always been done by people just like them.

In The Day the Universe Changed, James Burke paints their portrait:

Much of their life was led in a kind of perpetual present: their knowledge of the past was limited to memories of personal experience, and they had little interest in the future. Time as we know it had no meaning.

As do many of us today, these people had a sense of a lost past or golden age. They were very sure that they were living in a bad, sinful, temporary world because they had lost a better, more permanent one, be it the Garden in the Old Testament or the fabled glories of Rome in the New Testament. Today, it's the world of Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver and "traditional American values" that many white, middle-class Americans believe they've lost.

In part, those folks way back then were right. From clocks to ambition, people in Africa, Arabia, India, and China had already figured out or invented everything on the above list. All of these societies, however, at the same time had people who shared that Medieval mindset, even if they called it something different, just as we do today.