I have been really enjoying The Great Courses, Great Minds of the Medieval World. A commonly held view today equates the medieval world with a backward, Church-dominated, gloomy period in which warts were a common facial accessory and nobody travelled further than the end of a muddy road in their own village, and then only to the dung heap. According to this view, people lived short, nasty lives, had awful diets, suffered plagues and couldn't read or write. What a joy!

Some of that is true but it's is only part of the story. Often those who come after a reign or period get to write the history and they are frequently none too upbeat about what has come before. The Renaissance gets all the good press, touted as a dynamic era of invention and inquiry, one in which the arts flourished under wealthy patrons, in which the individual emerged from the group, cities and architecture thrived, in short, a time when modern man began to emerge from the shadows, the slough of despond. Some of this is true too, though the Renaissance steals a portion of its clothing from the medieval world.

It is a long time from the 5th to the 15th century and the course locates Augustine and William Caxton at either end of this vast span of years. In between are some of the greatest minds that might be encountered in any period. I wont spend time here listing them - it is more fruitful to find out for yourself - for my point here is something altogether different.

It is a special kind of arrogance to believe that your own time is superior to all that have gone before. Sure, based on any number of metrics, the modern world is doing pretty well, if life expectancy, living conditions and opportunity are anything to go by. There are many others you can use. I certainly don't want to consult a medieval physician nor have a tooth pulled by a blacksmith or a barber. But we cannot know for sure that we are any happier, for people then had strong faith, worked according to the rhythms of the days and the seasons and had deeper community ties. You cannot diminish the tightly held world view of our ancestors, one which worked for them so well, without understanding their lives in the context of that time. Or without considering what has been lost.

In increasing life expectancy, we deal with degenerative illness; in becoming members of a modern capitalist economy, we get stress, anxiety, alcoholism and drug dependency. The increased speed of our lives has its unhappy downside. Strangely, more of the same is seen as a remedy to the very ills that are produced.

But now folks, something to cheer the soul! We may not believe in hell anymore but this rendering of Dante's Inferno by Bartolomeo Di Fruosino ties two souls together (one medieval and the other renaissance) for all time.