Medieval

Medieval (pronounced mee-dee-ee-vuhl (U), med-ee-ee-vuhl (U), mid-ee-ee-vuhl (non-U) or mid-ee-vuhl (non-U))

(1) Of, pertaining to, characteristic of, or in the style of the Middle Ages.

(2) In informal (usually disparaging) use, extremely old-fashioned; primitive; backward; uncivilized.

1820-1830: A creation of Modern English from the New Latin medium aevum (the middle age, thus pertaining to or suggestive of the Middle Ages), the construct being medi(um) (the middle) + aev(um) (age) + -al (the Latin adjectival suffix appended to various words (often nouns) to make an adjective).  The Latin medium was from the primitive Indo-European root medhyo- (middle); aevum was from the primitive Indo-European root aiw- (vital force, life; long life, eternity), also the source of eon.  Mediaeval & mediæval are the now rare alternative spellings.

Between Rome and the Renaissance

The noun medievalism, originally a descriptor of the beliefs and practices characteristic of the Middle Ages, dates from 1846, later used to describe the academic discipline studying the epoch; the adverb medievally was first noted in 1844; the noun medievalist, first used in 1847, meant "proponent of medieval styles, one who sympathizes with the spirit and principles of the Middle Ages”, but was from 1882 a companion word to the later sense of "medievalism” and used to describe historians and others “versed in the history of the Middle Ages".

Lindsay Lohan dressed in "medieval" flavor, Wendy Nichol's fashion show at the Elizabeth Street sculpture gardens, New York Fashion Week, September 2013.

The Middle Ages (or the Medieval) is one of the three epochs in Western Civilization: (1) Antiquity, (2) the Middle Ages and (3) the Modern Age (itself not to be confused with modernism or modernity).  It’s a modern construct.  The writers and historians working during the Medieval period divided history into periods such as the "Six Ages" or the "Four Empires", and, under the influence of Christian eschatology, seem universally to have though their own time to be the last before the end of the world, all referring to their age as "modern".  The phrase "Middle Ages" appeared first in Latin in 1469 as media tempestas (middle season) and this, over centuries, spawned many variants, including medium aevum (middle age) in 1604 and media saecula (middle ages) in 1625.  The more familiar medieval (and the now rare mediaeval & mediæval) is from medium aevum, its creation reflecting the enduring European reverence for the classical world (which still exists in academic historiography’s Greek and Roman factions).  The tripartite division of Western history had been used by historians for some time and became (more or less) standard after the seventeenth century German classical scholar Christoph Cellarius (1638–1707) in 1683 published his Universal History Divided into an Ancient, Medieval, and New Period.

Be prepared: Medieval armor.

Historians date the beginning of the Middle Ages from either in 410 or 476, depending on whether they prefer the Visigoth’s sack of Rome or the final overthrow of the last Roman Emperor as the crucial turning point.  A date around 1500 is usually accepted as the end of the Middle Ages but there’s no precise end-date and the transition to the modern era was marked by immense regional differences, some parts of Europe remaining distinctly medieval well into the twentieth century.  The end was more a milieu, events such as the discovery of the "New World" (1492), the fall of Constantinople (1453) and the Protestant Reformation (1520s onward) all landmarks of the transition.

Lighting up the Dark Ages: The burning of Protestant heretics, in English historian John Foxe’s (circa 1517–1587) Actes and Monuments (1653) (often published with the title John Foxe's Book of Martyrs).

The once parallel term "Dark Ages" does cause confusion.  It adopts a traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the “light” (the learning and progress Antiquity and the Modern Age) with the “dark” (the violence, backwardness and stultification of the Middle Ages), the phrase derived from the Latin saeculum obscurum (dark age), originally applied by Italian cardinal and ecclesiastical historian Caesar Baronius (1538–1607) in his writings about an especially tumultuous period during the tenth and eleventh centuries.  A memorable phrase, it caught the popular imagination and the concept came to characterize the entire Middle Ages as a time of intellectual darkness between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance, a slur most widely applied during the eighteenth century Age of Enlightenment.  It’s now less used and English-speaking historians, following their German counterparts, generally subdivide the Middle Ages into "Early", "High", and "Late", avoiding “Dark Ages” completely, those who make any mention generally noting it can apply only to the earliest centuries and then usually in the context of the paucity of documents and other historic records rather than as a damnation of a thousand-odd years.

Christ Rescuing Peter from Drowning (1370) by Lorenzo Veneziano (known as Lorenzo the Venetian, his dates of birth and death are unknown but he was active between 1356–1372).  A number of paintings from the medieval era featured the famous New Testament story in which Christ is said to have walked on water during a mighty storm.  Lorenzo's work depicts the fishing boat in which Jesus’ disciples were traveling in across Israel’s Sea of Galilee.  The story appears in three of the four Gospels (Matthew 14:22-33; Mark 6:45-52 & John 6:16-21), each telling the tale in a subtlety different way.