After three centuries of “Enlightened” propaganda, almost everything modern people think they know about the Middle Ages is wrong, William S. Lind and William S. Piper say:
Living standards rose, and with them population. That was true for all classes, not just the nobles. Monarchs were far from absolute — royal absolutism was in fact the latest thing in 18th-century fashion, a system for promoting rational efficiency — and subjects had extensive rights. Unlike the abstract Rights of Man, as practiced during the Jacobins’ Reign of Terror, Medieval rights were specific and real, established by precedent.
Our Medieval ancestors were observant and creative. They invented important technologies: the wheeled plow, the windmill, soap. (Medieval people loved to bathe; it was the Renaissance that stopped.) They had elaborate table manners; latter-day “Medieval feasts” would have appalled them. They made beautiful objects. And they built — oh, how they built! Can anyone visit the cathedrals at Chartres or Salisbury or the now desecrated St. Chapelle in Paris and think these people were primitive? And yes, they knew the world was round.
The Enlightenment’s picture of the Middle Ages, like so much it produced, was a bright, shining lie. We would be wiser to speak of the enlightened Middle Ages and the verdunkelte 18th century.
Verdunkeln is German for to darken or to obscure — the opposite of to enlighten.