There are problems with such an account, as Fried is not unaware. It is dangerous to render the early Middle Ages in terms of exotic primitivism, and conversely unwise to recognise too much of our modern selves in Peter Abelard. His account of his life in his so-called Story of my Calamities appears disarmingly frank, but we must remember that Abelard and his peers were trained rhetoricians. His is a highly wrought text, a public confessional performance as mannered as Kabuki theatre. No one in the Middle Ages wears their heart on their sleeve.

From here we must ask, to what extent is medieval Latin Christendom recognisable as “the modern West”? Fried’s account is ambivalent. While acknowledging the contribution to Latin intellectual culture of Byzantium and Islam, he wants to argue that the East lacked the dynamism of the West. At the same time, however, his pen portraits of figures such as Maimonides, the brilliant Jewish thinker and Saladin’s court physician, or Pletho, the Greek scholar and latterday Plato who trained under the Ottomans before coming to Medici Florence, suggest otherwise. Once we stand back, we may take the view that, in cultural terms, “the West” remained the Third World in the Middle Ages. Greater cultural and political power lay in Baghdad or Cairo until the end of the period, if not beyond.

Finally—and this Fried does intimate—there is the moral price of high culture to consider. In “pre-conceptual” Europe before 1000, the peasantry were relatively unconstrained, higher education was as open to women as to men, and the era saw no large-scale religious persecution. All of this was to change. The urban and urbane society of high medieval Europe was built on the systematic exploitation of peasant labour; the universities at the centre of this world were exclusively male clerical institutions; and the scholastic culture which fostered the development of “rational inquiry” also enabled the development of the Inquisition. In southern France in particular, this ecclesiastical machinery enabled the systematic search for and destruction of heretics. And then there were the pogroms. From the end of the 11th century onwards, across the cities of the Latin West, Jews were robbed, assaulted, and murdered with impunity. 

Was the persecution of heretics and Jews a phenomenon of mob violence which the clerical hierarchy sought to contain—or was it actually organised by the priests? Medievalists have been wrestling with the question for some time now. On one thing we agree. The debate has shifted since the 18th century. The charge against the Middle Ages is no longer that they are an era of “barbarism and superstition”, as Gibbon put it. The issue is rather that they conjoin, as can we, barbarism and civilisation.