Laudator Temporis Acti

Régine Pernoud, Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths, tr. Anne Englund Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), pp. 152-153 (one misprint corrected):

In 1969, shortly after man's first steps on the moon, while the television was questioning a group of children about the reasons for the technical progress of mankind, a little boy replied: "It is because after the Middle Ages, people began to think!" He might have been eight or nine years old, but already he knew that during the Middle Ages people did not think.

I have already said this, but I must repeat that this ignorance is not the prerogative of young children, which would of course be excusable, since they are repeating what they have been taught. I recall the conversation I had with a Catholic television reporter. The subject was Joan of Arc's trial. (Le Monde had published an article about a recent work on Joan of Arc. Therefore, Catholic TV could, in turn, without excessive risk, hazard to speak of her ...).

This reporter who was interviewing me asked how the acts of the trial were known, and I explained that we possessed the authentic account made by notaries—just as in any juridical action of the period—of the questions posed by the tribunal and the replies made by the accused.

"But, then, they wrote everything down?"

"Yes, everything."

"That must be a very big file?"

"Yes, very big."

I had the impression I was speaking with an illiterate.

"Then, in order to publish it, there were people who re-copied everything?"

"Yes, everything."

And I could tell he was plunged into a stupefaction so intense that any insistence on the matter would have to be gentle: he murmured to himself: "It's hard to believe that those people could do things so carefully ..."

"Those people ... so carefully." It was my turn to be astonished: Had this journalist never looked at a Gothic arch? He had never asked himself if, in order to have it hang suspended for nearly a thousand years at some 130 feet from the ground, it might not have been necessary to make it carefully? He reminded me of that other interlocutor who—again with respect to Joan of Arc—said to me, quite haughtily: "You would really think that if documents from that period did still exist, they would have to be in such a condition that one couldn't read anything at all in them ... !" Of course, in order to convince him, I would have had to invite him to come see some of the yards of shelving in the National Archives. He would immediately have recognized that parchment and rag paper are much tougher than our newsprint. But that is of little importance. What is at issue is this infantile vision of one part of mankind's history. There is a primary and decisive progress that needs to be made in what concerns the Middle Ages, which would be to admit that "those people" were people like us; a humanity like our own, neither better nor worse, but before whom it is not enough to shrug one's shoulders or smile condescendingly: one can study them as serenely as any other people.