Laudator Temporis Acti

George Caspar Homans, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), pp. 10-11:

Many of the men who have written about the Middle Ages have made one or the other of two kinds of judgment about the life of those times. Some have looked on it as a wretched state of misery and oppression. To others it has seemed a kind of Gothic idyll. These judgments of the past are likely to be linked with judgments of the present. If you look upon the present as an age of high fulfillment of the possibilities of the human race, you take the first attitude toward the Middle Ages: the men of the Middle Ages were wretched in so far as they had no experience of life as it is lived in a modern democracy. If you look upon the present age as an age of social disorganization, you take the second attitude: the men of the Middle Ages were happy in that they all were the children of a universal Church. One reason why the two judgments differ is that they are concerned with different sets of facts. Certainly the physical conditions of a husbandman's life were hard, but nothing is more commonplace or more often forgotten than the words: "Man does not live by bread alone."