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117-502: Henri Pirenne ( French: [piʁɛn] ; 23 December 1862 – 24 October 1935) was a Belgian historian. A medievalist of Walloon descent, he wrote a multivolume history of Belgium in French and became a prominent public intellectual . Pirenne made a lasting contribution to the study of cities that was a controversial interpretation of the end of Roman civilization and the rebirth of medieval urban culture. He also became prominent in

234-684: A few other physical traits. The article was published anonymously in the Journal des Savants , the earliest academic journal published in Europe, and titled "New Division of the Earth by the Different Species or 'Races' of Man that Inhabit It". In the essay, he distinguished four different races: A product of French salon culture, the essay placed an emphasis on different kinds of female beauty. Bernier emphasized that his novel classification

351-570: A good servant, that a Kaffir dances and plays the violin, that some Bambara knows arithmetic... Let us leave aside these puerilities and compare together not men, but groups. Gobineau later used the term " Aryans " to describe the Germanic peoples ( la race germanique ). Gobineau's works were also influential to the Nazi Party , which published his works in German. They played a key role in

468-631: A history stretching back into the Middle Ages, and that understanding their medieval history was important to understanding their character in the twentieth century. Twentieth-century Medieval Studies were influenced by approaches associated with the rise of social sciences such as economic history and anthropology , epitomised by the influential Annales School . In place of what the Annalistes called histoire événementielle , this work favoured study of large questions over long periods . In

585-514: A main characteristic of race is either beauty or ugliness. Meiners thought only the white race to be beautiful, and considered ugly races to be inferior, immoral, and animal-like. Meiners wrote about how the dark, ugly peoples were differentiated from the white, beautiful peoples by their "sad" lack of virtue and their "terrible vices". Meiners hypothesized about how the Negro felt less pain than any other race, and lacked in emotions. Meiners wrote that

702-445: A major catastrophe hit the earth approximately 5,000 years ago. Cuvier theorized that the survivors lived in complete isolation from each other, and developed separately as a result. One of Cuvier's pupils, Friedrich Tiedemann , was among the first to make a scientific contestation of racism. Tiedemann asserted that based upon his documentation of craniometric and brain measurements of Europeans and black people from different parts of

819-514: A new consensus among anthropologists that human races are a sociopolitical phenomenon rather than a biological one. The term scientific racism is generally used pejoratively when applied to more modern theories, such as those in The Bell Curve (1994). Critics argue that such works postulate racist conclusions, such as a genetic connection between race and intelligence , that are unsupported by available evidence. Publications such as

936-423: A non-contagious form of leprosy , which darkened their skin color. Rush drew the conclusion that "whites should not tyrannize over [blacks], for their disease should entitle them to a double portion of humanity. However, by the same token, whites should not intermarry with them, for this would tend to infect posterity with the 'disorder'... attempts must be made to cure the disease". Christoph Meiners (1747–1810)

1053-462: A nuanced position which allowed him to criticize German nationalism without excluding German works from the scholarly canon. He attacked race theory and Völkisch nationalism as the underlying causes of German wartime excesses. His earlier belief in the inevitable progress of humanity collapsed, so he began to accept chance or the fortuitous in history and came to acknowledge the significance of single great individuals at certain points in history. At

1170-595: A preface explaining its provenance and published it, with the English translation appearing in 1956. It stands as a monumental intellectual achievement. Pirenne first expressed ideas on the formation of European towns in articles of 1895; he further developed the idea for the Pirenne Thesis while imprisoned in Germany during World War I. He subsequently published it in a series of papers from 1922 to 1923 and spent

1287-478: A renewal of Classical Antiquity (the Renaissance ) or what came to be called modernity . This gave nineteenth-century Romantic scholars, in particular, the intellectual freedom to imagine the Middle Ages as an anti-modernist utopia —whether a place nostalgically to fantasise about a more conservative, religious, and hierarchical past or a more egalitarian, beautiful, and innocent one. European study of

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1404-419: A separate species from the whites. Charles Darwin 's views on race have been a topic of much discussion and debate. According to Jackson and Weidman, Darwin was a moderate in the 19th century debates about race. "He was not a confirmed racist — he was a staunch abolitionist, for example — but he did think that there were distinct races that could be ranked in a hierarchy". Darwin's influential 1859 book On

1521-460: A shortened big toe, a characteristic, he said, that connected Negroes closely to apes. The scientific classification established by Carl Linnaeus is requisite to any human racial classification scheme. In the 19th century, unilineal evolution , or classical social evolution, was a conflation of competing sociologic and anthropologic theories proposing that Western European culture was the acme of human socio-cultural evolution. The Christian Bible

1638-451: A tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection... Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory, they are equal to

1755-478: A want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa & America. I can add with truth that no body wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body & mind to what it ought to be, as fast as the imbecility of their present existence, and other circumstance which cannot be neglected, will admit. Samuel Stanhope Smith (1751–1819)

1872-561: Is an extremely important stage in the evolution of scientific racism". Writing for The New York Times , historian Paul Finkelman described how as "a scientist, Jefferson nevertheless speculated that blackness might come 'from the color of the blood,' and concluded that blacks were 'inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind'". In his " Notes on the State of Virginia ", Jefferson described black people as follows: They seem to require less sleep. A black, after hard labor through

1989-460: Is marked by black complexion, crisped or woolly hair, compressed cranium, and a flat nose. The projection of the lower parts of the face, and the thick lips, evidently approximate it to the monkey tribe: the hordes of which it consists have always remained in the most complete state of barbarism. He thought Adam and Eve were Caucasian, and hence, the original race of mankind. The other two races arose by survivors escaping in different directions after

2106-578: Is not linear or hierarchical". In a 2008 essay published by the Linnean Society of London , Marie-Christine Skuncke interpreted Linnaeus' statements as reflecting a view that "Europeans' superiority resides in "culture", and that the decisive factor in Linnaeus' taxa was "culture", not race". Thus, regarding this topic, Skuncke considers Linnaeus' view as merely " eurocentric ", arguing that Linnaeus never called for racist action, and did not use

2223-671: The Bulletin de Philosophie Médiévale , Mediaevalia , Comitatus , Viator , Traditio , Medieval Worlds , and the Journal of Medieval History . Another part of the infrastructure of the field is the International Medieval Bibliography . The term "Middle Ages" first began to be common in English-language history-writing in the early nineteenth century. Henry Hallam 's 1818 View of

2340-590: The Mankind Quarterly , founded explicitly as a "race-conscious" journal, are generally regarded as platforms of scientific racism because they publish fringe interpretations of human evolution , intelligence , ethnography , language , mythology , archaeology , and race. During the Age of Enlightenment (an era from the 1650s to the 1780s), concepts of monogenism and polygenism became popular, though they would only be systematized epistemologically during

2457-586: The Caucasian (white), Mongolian (yellow), and the Ethiopian (black). He rated each for the beauty or ugliness of the skull and quality of their civilizations. Cuvier wrote about Caucasians: "The white race, with oval face, straight hair and nose, to which the civilised people of Europe belong, and which appear to us the most beautiful of all, is also superior to others by its genius, courage, and activity". Regarding Negroes, Cuvier wrote: The Negro race ...

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2574-911: The International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds . There are a number of journals devoted to medieval studies, including: Speculum (an organ of the Medieval Academy of America founded in 1925 and based in Cambridge, Massachusetts ), Medium Ævum (the journal of the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature, founded in 1932), Mediaeval Studies (based in the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies and founded in 1939),

2691-633: The New Imperialism era. Scholars of the medieval era in the United States also used these concepts to justify their westward expansion across the North American continent. These colonialist and imperialist connections meant that medieval studies during the 19th and 20th centuries played a role in the emergence of white supremacism . However, the early twentieth century also saw the increasing professionalisation of research on

2808-654: The University of Sydney (1997) and Bangor University (2005), and the merging of the Medieval History and Medieval Language and Literature sections of the British Academy to create a Medieval Studies section. Medieval studies is buoyed by a number of annual international conferences which bring together thousands of professional medievalists, including the International Congress on Medieval Studies , at Kalamazoo MI , U.S. , and

2925-478: The University of York (1968), and in the United States at Fordham University (1971). The 1990s saw a further wave of Medieval-Studies foundations, partly prompted by the dynamism brought to the field by its embracing of postmodernist thought and the associated rise of neo-medievalism in popular culture . This included centres at King's College London (1988), the University of Bristol (1994),

3042-440: The anatomy of the Negro, and came to the conclusion that Negroes were all carnivores , based upon his observations that Negroes had bigger teeth and jaws than any other race. Meiners claimed the skull of the Negro was larger, but the brain of the Negro was smaller than any other race. Meiners theorized that the Negro was the most unhealthy race on Earth because of its poor diet, mode of living, and lack of morals. Meiners studied

3159-476: The master race theory of Nazism . Another polygenist evolutionist was Carl Vogt (1817–1895) who believed that the Negro race was related to the ape. He wrote the white race was a separate species to Negroes. In Chapter VII of his Lectures of Man (1864) he compared the Negro to the white race whom he described as "two extreme human types". The difference between them, he claimed are greater than those between two species of ape; and this proves that Negroes are

3276-638: The nonviolent resistance to the Germans who occupied Belgium in World War I . Henri Pirenne's reputation today rests on three contributions to European history : for what has become known as the Pirenne Thesis , concerning origins of the Middle Ages in reactive state formation and shifts in trade; for a distinctive view of Belgium's medieval history ; and for his model of the development of

3393-653: The " Great Chain of Being ", and he tried to scientifically prove that human races had distinct origins from each other. He speculated that whites and Negroes were two different species. White was a believer in polygeny , the idea that different races had been created separately. His Account of the Regular Gradation in Man (1799) provided an empirical basis for this idea. White defended the theory of polygeny by rebutting French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon 's interfertility argument, which said that only

3510-425: The 1980s onwards medieval studies increasingly responded to intellectual agendas set by postmodern critical theory and cultural studies , with empiricism and philology being challenged by or harnessed to topics like the history of the body . This movement tended to challenge the progressivist account of the Middle Ages as belonging to a continuum of social development that begat modernity and instead to see

3627-447: The 19th century, notes that in the ninth century long-distance trading was at a low ebb; the only settlements that were not purely agricultural were the ecclesiastical, military and administrative centres that served the feudal ruling classes as fortresses, episcopal seats, abbeys and occasional royal residences of the peripatetic palatium . When trade revived in the late tenth and eleventh centuries, merchants and artisans were drawn to

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3744-439: The 19th century. Monogenism contends that all races have a single origin, while polygenism is the idea that each race has a separate origin. Until the 18th century, the words "race" and "species" were interchangeable. François Bernier (1620–1688) was a French physician and traveller. In 1684, he published a brief essay dividing humanity into what he called "races", distinguishing individuals, particularly women, by skin color and

3861-572: The 6,000 years of the prevailing Ussher chronology subscribed to by most of the monogenists. Opponents of monogenism believed that it would have been difficult for races to change markedly in such a short period of time. Benjamin Rush (1745–1813), a Founding Father of the United States and a physician, proposed that being black was a hereditary skin disease , which he called "negroidism", and that it could be cured. Rush believed non-whites were actually white underneath, but that they were stricken with

3978-521: The Americas, and India—although culturally very different from one another—belonged to roughly the same racial group, and he explained the differences between the civilizations of India (his main area of expertise) and Europe through climate and institutional history. By contrast, he emphasized the biological difference between Europeans and Africans, and made very negative comments towards the Sámi (Lapps) of

4095-614: The Flemish and Walloons together. Pirenne, inspired by patriotic nationalism, presupposed the existence of a unified "Belgian civilisation" – in a social, political, and ethnic sense – which predated its 1830 independence by centuries. Although a liberal himself, his history was written with such balance that Catholics, liberals and socialists across the divides in Belgium's pillarized society could quote from it with equal respect in publications, newspapers, and even in political gatherings. It

4212-630: The Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Etudes Médiévales (FIDEM) (founded 1987) and Co-operative for Advancement of Research through Medieval European Network (CARMEN). Some notable ones include: Race theory Scientific racism , sometimes termed biological racism , is the pseudoscientific belief that the human species is divided into biologically distinct taxa called " races ", and that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racial discrimination , racial inferiority, or racial superiority . Before

4329-616: The Human Races (1853–55) which proposed three human races (black, white and yellow) were natural barriers and claimed that race mixing would lead to the collapse of culture and civilization. He claimed that "The white race originally possessed the monopoly of beauty, intelligence and strength" and that any positive accomplishments or thinking of blacks and Asians were due to an admixture with whites. His works were praised by many white supremacist American pro-slavery thinkers such as Josiah C. Nott and Henry Hotze . Gobineau believed that

4446-485: The Middle Ages as radically different from the present. Its recognition that scholars' views are shaped by their own time led to the study of medievalism —the post-medieval use and abuse of the Middle Ages—becoming an integral part of Medieval Studies. In the twenty-first century, globalisation led to arguments that post-war Europeanisation had drawn too tight a boundary around medieval studies, this time at

4563-581: The Middle Ages from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, a theory Edward Gibbon famously put forward in the 18th century, and which is inexorably linked to the supposition of a Roman "decline" from a previous classic ideal. Pirenne postponed the demise of classical civilization to the 8th century. He challenged the notion that Germanic barbarians had caused the Western Roman Empire to end and he challenged

4680-568: The Middle Ages have taken Pirenne's main theses, however much they are modified, as starting points. Pirenne was born in Verviers , an industrial city in the Province of Liège in south-east Belgium . He studied at the University of Liège where he was a student of Godefroid Kurth (1847–1916). He became Professor of History at the University of Ghent in 1886, a post he held until the end of his teaching career in 1930. After World War I he

4797-491: The Middle Ages. In this context, researchers tended to resist the idea that the Middle Ages were distinctively different from modernity. Instead they argued the so-called ' continuity thesis ' that institutions conventionally associated with modernity in Western historiography like nationalism, the emergence of states, colonialism, scientific thought, art for its own sake, or people's conception of themselves as individuals all had

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4914-411: The Negro had thick nerves, and thus, was not sensitive like the other races. He went so far as to say that the Negro possessed "no human, barely any animal, feeling". Meiners described a story where a Negro was condemned to death by being burned alive. Halfway through the burning, the Negro asked to smoke a pipe, and smoked it like nothing was happening while he continued to be burned alive. Meiners studied

5031-718: The Origin of Species did not discuss human origins. The extended wording on the title page, which adds by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life , uses the general terminology of biological races as an alternative for " varieties " such as "the several races, for instance, of the cabbage", and does not carry the modern connotation of human races . In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), Darwin examined

5148-481: The Roman way of life. The more recent formulation of a historical period characterized as " Late Antiquity " emphasizes the transformations of ancient to medieval worlds within a cultural continuity, and European archaeology of the first millennium, purposefully undertaken in the later 20th century, even extends the continuity in material culture and patterns of settlement below the political overlay as reaching as late as

5265-440: The State of Europe during the Middle Ages has been seen as a key stage in the promotion of the term, along with Ruskin 's 1853 Lectures on Architecture . The term medievalist was, correspondingly, coined by English-speakers in the mid-nineteenth century. The concept of the Middle Ages was first developed by Renaissance humanists as a means for them to define their own era as new and different from what came before—whether

5382-855: The UK saw the development of some scholarly societies with a similar remit, including the Oxford Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature (1932) and its offshoot the Manchester Medieval Society (1933). With university expansion in the late 1960s and early 1970s encouraging interdisciplinary cooperation, centres similar to (and partly inspired by) the Toronto Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies were established in England at University of Reading (1965), at University of Leeds (1967) and

5499-525: The appeal of interdisciplinarity grew. Accordingly, medieval studies turned increasingly away from producing national histories, towards more complex mosaics of regional approaches that worked towards a European scope, partly correlating with post-War Europeanisation . An example from the apogee of this process was the large European Science Foundation project The Transformation of the Roman World that ran from 1993 to 1998. Amidst this process, from

5616-481: The borders of Europe, with Muslim Iberia and the Orthodox Christian east seen in western European historiography as having an ambivalent relevance to medieval studies. Thus a range of medievalists have begun working on writing global histories of the Middle Ages —while, however, navigating, the risk of imposing Eurocentric terminologies and agendas on the rest of the world. By 2020, this movement

5733-524: The coldest climates of Northern Europe, and about Africans living at the Cape of Good Hope . For example, Bernier wrote: "The 'Lappons' compose the 4th race. They are a small and short race with thick legs, wide shoulders, a short neck, and a face that I don't know how to describe, except that it's long, truly awful, and seems reminiscent of a bear's face. I've only ever seen them twice in Danzig , but according to

5850-422: The concept that all races have a single origin. Buffon and Blumenbach believed a "degeneration theory" of the origins of racial difference. Both asserted that Adam and Eve were white, and that other races came about by degeneration owing to environmental factors, such as climate, disease, and diet. According to this model, Negroid pigmentation arose because of the heat of the tropical sun; that cold wind caused

5967-418: The conclusion of the war, Henri Pirenne stopped his work on A History of Europe in the middle of the 16th century. He returned home and took up his life. He died at Uccle , Brussels in 1935. His son Jacques Pirenne , who had survived the war to become a historian in his own right, discovered the manuscript. He edited the work by inserting dates for which his father was uncertain in parentheses. Jacques wrote

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6084-509: The day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of the morning. They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But, this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. When present, they do not go through it with more coolness or steadiness than the whites. They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than

6201-543: The degeneration could be reversed if proper environmental control was taken, and that all contemporary forms of man could revert to the original white race. According to Blumenbach, there are five races, all belonging to a single species: Caucasian , Mongolian , Negroid , American , and the Malay race . Blumenbach stated: "I have allotted the first place to the Caucasian for the reasons given below, which make me esteem it

6318-528: The diet of the Americans, and said they fed off any kind of "foul offal ", and consumed copious amounts of alcohol. He believed their skulls were so thick that the blades of Spanish swords shattered on them. Meiners also claimed the skin of an American is thicker than that of an ox. Meiners wrote that the noblest race was the Celts . This was based upon assertions that they were able to conquer various parts of

6435-507: The different races originated in different areas, the white race had originated somewhere in Siberia, the Asians in the Americas and the blacks in Africa. He believed that the white race was superior, writing: I will not wait for the friends of equality to show me such and such passages in books written by missionaries or sea captains, who declare some Wolof is a fine carpenter, some Hottentot

6552-540: The disappearance from western Europe of items that had to come from outside. For example, the minting of gold coins north of the Alps stopped after the 7th century, indicating a loss of access to wealthier parts of the world. Papyrus , made only in Egypt, no longer appeared in northern Europe after the 7th century; writing reverted to using parchment , indicating its economic isolation. Pirenne's thesis did not convince most of

6669-408: The eleventh century. According to Pirenne, the real break in Roman history occurred in the 8th century as a result of Arab expansion . Islamic conquest of the area of today's south-eastern Turkey , Syria , Palestine , North Africa , Spain and Portugal ruptured economic ties to western Europe, cutting the region off from trade and turning it into a stagnant backwater, with wealth flowing out in

6786-437: The established taxonomic bases of binomial nomenclature for fauna and flora, and also made a classification of humans into different subgroups. In the twelfth edition of Systema Naturae (1767), he labeled five " varieties " of human species. Each one was described as possessing the following physiognomic characteristics "varying by culture and place": There are disagreements about the basis for Linnaeus' human taxa. On

6903-585: The exceptional quality of Pirenne's insight and style." Ernst Kossmann , historian Pirenne's other major idea concerned the nature of medieval Belgium . Belgium as an independent nation-state had appeared in 1830 only a generation before Pirenne's birth; throughout Western history, its fortunes had been tied up with the Low Countries , which now include the Netherlands , Luxembourg and parts of northern France . Furthermore, Belgium lies across

7020-430: The existence and significance of racial categories and a hierarchy of superior and inferior races. During the 20th century, anthropologist Franz Boas and biologists Julian Huxley and Lancelot Hogben were among the earliest leading critics of scientific racism. Skepticism towards the validity of scientific racism grew during the interwar period , and by the end of World War II, scientific racism in theory and action

7137-412: The existing centres, forming suburbs in which trade and manufactures were concentrated. These were "new men" outside the feudal structure, living on the peripheries of the established order. The feudal core remained static and inert. A time came when the developing merchant class was strong enough to throw off feudal obligations or to buy out the prerogatives of the old order, which Pirenne contrasted with

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7254-477: The fact that necessity is the mother of invention, because those tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers, and invent and perfect all the arts in their struggle with need, want, and misery, which, in their many forms, were brought about by the climate. This they had to do to make up for the parsimony of nature, and out of it all came their high civilization. Franz Ignaz Pruner (1808–1882)

7371-472: The fall of Rome. He wrote completely from memory. Rather than a blow-by-blow chronology of wars, dynasties and incidents, A History of Europe presents a big-picture approach to social, political and mercantile trends. It is remarkable not only for its historical insight but also its objectivity, especially considering the conditions under which it was written. After the war, he reflected the widespread disillusionment in Belgium with German culture, while taking

7488-694: The fields of cultural, military, economic, and political history. Henri Pirenne donated the majority of his personal library to the Academia Belgica in Rome . In 1933, the seventh volume received was awarded the Francqui Prize on Human Sciences. Pirenne was also the author of Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade (1927), a book based on lectures he delivered in the United States in 1922. In this book, he contends that through

7605-576: The fighting at the Battle of the Yser in October 1914. The German officer questioning Pirenne asked why he insisted on answering in French when it was known that Pirenne spoke excellent German and had done postgraduate studies at Leipzig and Berlin. Pirenne responded: "I have forgotten German since 3 August 1914", the date of the German invasion of Belgium, part of Germany's war plan to defeat France. Pirenne

7722-645: The first centre of this type in 1929; it is now the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (PIMS) and is part of the University of Toronto . It was soon followed by the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, which was founded in 1946 but whose roots go back to the establishment of a Program of Medieval Studies in 1933. As with many of the early programs at Roman Catholic institutions, it drew its strengths from

7839-493: The form of raw resources and nothing coming back. This began a steady decline and impoverishment so that, by the time of Charlemagne , western Europe had become almost entirely agrarian at a subsistence level, with no long-distance trade. In a summary, Pirenne stated that "Without Islam, the Frankish Empire would probably never have existed, and Charlemagne, without Muhammad, would be inconceivable." That is, he rejected

7956-467: The great linguistic divide between French and Dutch . The unity of the country might appear accidental, something which Pirenne sought to disprove in his History of Belgium (1899–1932) by tracing Belgium's history back to the Roman period. His ideas, promoting a form of Belgian nationalism , have also proved controversial. Pirenne's Histoire de Belgique , published in seven volumes from 1899–1932, stressed how traditional and economic forces had drawn

8073-526: The historians at the time of its publication, but historians since that time generally agree it has stimulated debate on the Early Middle Ages , and has provided a provocative example of how periodization would work. It continues to inform historical discussion in the 21st century, with more recent debate focusing on whether later archaeological discoveries refute the thesis or demonstrate its fundamental viability. "[Pirenne's History of Belgium ]

8190-473: The medieval city. Pirenne argued that profound social, economic, cultural, and religious movements in the long term resulted from equally profound underlying causes, and this attitude influenced Marc Bloch and the outlook of the French Annales School of social history. Though Pirenne had his opponents, notably Alfons Dopsch who disagreed on essential points, several recent historians of

8307-610: The medieval past was characterised in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by romantic nationalism , as emergent nation-states sought to legitimise new political formations by claiming that they were rooted in the distant past. The most important example of this use of the Middle Ages was the nation-building that surrounded the unification of Germany . Narratives which presented the nations of Europe as modernizing by building on, yet also developing beyond, their medieval heritage, were also important facets underpinning justifications of European colonialism and imperialism during

8424-676: The merchant class. Pirenne's theory of a commercial renaissance in towns in the 11th century remains the standard interpretation. Pirenne wrote a two-volume A History of Europe: From the End of the Roman World in the West to the Beginnings of the Western States , a remarkable but incomplete work which Pirenne wrote while imprisoned in Germany during World War I. It was published by his son in 1936. A translation into English, by Bernard Miall ,

8541-958: The mid-20th century, scientific racism was accepted throughout the scientific community, but it is no longer considered scientific. The division of humankind into biologically separate groups, along with the assignment of particular physical and mental characteristics to these groups through constructing and applying corresponding explanatory models , is referred to as racialism , race realism , or race science by those who support these ideas. Modern scientific consensus rejects this view as being irreconcilable with modern genetic research . Scientific racism misapplies, misconstrues, or distorts anthropology (notably physical anthropology ), craniometry , evolutionary biology , and other disciplines or pseudo-disciplines through proposing anthropological typologies to classify human populations into physically discrete human races, some of which might be asserted to be superior or inferior to others. Scientific racism

8658-504: The new element in numerous ways. The leaders among the mercantile class formed a bourgeois patriciate , in whose hands economic and political power came to be concentrated. Pirenne's thesis takes as axiomatic that the natural interests of the feudal nobility and of the urban patriciate, which came to well-attested frictions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, were in their origins incompatible. This aspect of his thesis has been challenged in detail. Traditionally, historians had dated

8775-678: The notion that barbarian invasions in the 4th and 5th centuries caused the collapse of the Roman Empire. Instead, the Muslim conquest of north Africa made the Mediterranean a barrier, cutting western Europe off from the east, enabling the Carolingians, especially Charlemagne , to create a new, distinctly western form of government. Pirenne used statistical data regarding money in support of his thesis. Much of his argument builds upon

8892-561: The notion that the end of the Western Roman Empire should be equated with the end of the office of emperor in Europe, which occurred in 476. He pointed out the essential continuity of the economy of the Roman Mediterranean even after the barbarian invasions, and that the Roman way of doing things did not fundamentally change in the time immediately after the "fall" of Rome. Barbarian Goths came to Rome not to destroy it, but to take part in its benefits; they tried to preserve

9009-414: The one hand, his harshest critics say the classification was not only ethnocentric, but seemed to be based upon skin colour. Renato G. Mazzolini argued that classifications based on skin colour, at its core, were a white/black polarity, and that Linnaeus' thinking became paradigmatic for later racist beliefs. On the other hand, Quintyn (2010) points out that some authors believed that Linnaeus' classification

9126-498: The period from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, Europe reclaimed control of the Mediterranean from the Muslim world, and opened up sea routes to the Orient. This allowed the formation of a merchant/ middle class and the development of that class's characteristic abode, the city. He argued that capitalism originated in Europe's cities, as did democracy. His "Merchant Enterprise School" opposed Marxism but shared many of Marx's ideas on

9243-453: The portraits I've seen, and from what I've heard from a number of people, they're ugly animals". The significance of Bernier's ideology for the emergence of what Joan-Pau Rubiés called the "modern racial discourse" has been debated, with Siep Stuurman considering it the beginning of modern racial thought, while Rubiés believes it is less significant if Bernier's entire view of humanity is taken into account. An early scientist who studied race

9360-415: The primeval one". Before James Hutton and the emergence of scientific geology, many believed the Earth was only 6,000 years old. Buffon had conducted experiments with heated balls of iron, which he believed were a model for the Earth's core, and concluded that the Earth was 75,000 years old, but did not extend the time since Adam and the origin of humanity back more than 8,000 years—not much further than

9477-419: The racist tradition", and that Linnaeus' division was influenced by the medical theory of humors , which said that a person's temperament may be related to biological fluids. In a 1994 essay, Gould added: "I don't mean to deny that Linnaeus held conventional beliefs about the superiority of his own European variety over others... nevertheless, and despite these implications, the overt geometry of Linnaeus' model

9594-496: The rest of his life refining the thesis with supporting evidence. The most famous expositions appear in Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade (1927, based on a series of lectures of 1922) and in his posthumous Mohammed and Charlemagne (1937), published from Pirenne's first draft. In brief, the Pirenne Thesis, an early essay in economic history diverging from the narrative history of

9711-533: The revival of medieval scholastic philosophy by such scholars as Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain , both of whom made regular visits to the university in the 1930s and 1940s. These institutions were preceded in the United Kingdom, in 1927, by the establishment of the idiosyncratic Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic , at the University of Cambridge . Although Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic

9828-578: The rigorous Northern climate: The highest civilization and culture, apart from the ancient Hindus and Egyptians , are found exclusively among the white races; and even with many dark peoples, the ruling caste, or race, is fairer in colour than the rest, and has, therefore, evidently immigrated, for example, the Brahmins , the Inca , and the rulers of the South Sea Islands . All this is due to

9945-522: The role of climate and diet in explaining degrees of human diversity. Bernier had been the first to extend the concept of "species of man" to racially classify the entirety of humanity, but he did not establish a cultural hierarchy between the so-called "races" that he had conceived. On the other hand, he clearly placed white Europeans as the norm from which other "races" deviated. The qualities which he attributed to each race were not strictly Eurocentric , because he thought that peoples of temperate Europe,

10062-432: The same species can interbreed. White pointed to species hybrids, such as foxes, wolves , and jackals , which were separate groups that were still able to interbreed. For White, each race was a separate species, divinely created for its own geographical region. The French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788) and the German anatomist Johann Blumenbach (1752–1840) were proponents of monogenism ,

10179-613: The savages to the north of the Esquimaux Indians, of the new continent, appear to be of one common race". Scholar Stanley A. Rice agrees that Linnaeus' classification was not meant to "imply a hierarchy of humanness or superiority"; however, modern critics regard Linnaeus' classification as obviously stereotyped and erroneous for having included anthropological , non-biological features, such as customs or traditions. Charles White (1728–1813), an English physician and surgeon, believed that races occupied different stations in

10296-486: The snow. Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) was an American politician, scientist, and slave owner. His contributions to scientific racism have been noted by many historians, scientists, and scholars. According to an article published in the McGill Journal of Medicine : "One of the most influential pre-Darwinian racial theorists, Jefferson's call for science to determine the obvious 'inferiority' of African Americans

10413-563: The tawny colour of the Eskimos ; and that the Chinese had fairer skins than the Tartars , because the former kept mostly in towns, and were protected from environmental factors. Environmental factors, poverty, and hybridization could make races "degenerate", and differentiate them from the original white race by a process of "raciation". Interestingly, both Buffon and Blumenbach believed that

10530-470: The understanding of Belgium's past, but his notion of a continuity of Belgian civilization forming the basis of political unity has lost favour. Some Belgian scholars have argued that the creation of their country was a historical chance. Pirenne's argument that the long Spanish rule in the Low Countries had little continuing cultural impact has likewise fallen, in the face of new research since 1970 in

10647-681: The wake of the Second World War , the role of medievalism in European nationalism led to greatly diminished enthusiasm for medieval studies within the academy—though nationalist deployments of the Middle Ages still existed and remained powerful. The proportion of medievalists in history and language departments fell, encouraging staff to collaborate across different departments; state funding of and university support for archaeology expanded, bringing new evidence but also new methods, disciplinary perspectives, and research questions forward; and

10764-553: The whites; in reason, much inferior, as I think one [black] could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination, they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous... I advance it, therefore, as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. However, by 1791, Jefferson had to reassess his earlier suspicions of whether blacks were capable of intelligence when he

10881-480: The word "race", which was only introduced later "by his French opponent, Buffon ". However, the anthropologist Ashley Montagu , in his book Man's Most Dangerous Myth: the Fallacy of Race , points out that Buffon, indeed "the enemy of all rigid classifications", was diametrically opposed to such broad categories, and did not use the word "race" to describe them. "It was quite clear, after reading Buffon, that he uses

10998-649: The word in no narrowly defined, but rather in a general sense", wrote Montagu, pointing out that Buffon did employ the French word la race , but as a collective term for whatever population he happened to be discussing at the time; for instance: "The Danish, Swedish, and Muscovite Laplanders, the inhabitants of Nova-Zembla, the Borandians, the Samoiedes, the Ostiacks of the old continent, the Greenlanders, and

11115-405: The world, that the then-common European belief that Negroes have smaller brains, and are thus intellectually inferior, was scientifically unfounded, and based merely on the prejudice of travellers and explorers. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) attributed civilizational primacy to the white races, who gained sensitivity and intelligence via the refinement caused by living in

11232-506: The world, they were more sensitive to heat and cold, and their delicacy is shown by the way they are selective about what they eat. Meiners claimed that Slavs are an inferior race, "less sensitive and content with eating rough food". He described stories of Slavs allegedly eating poisonous fungi without coming to any harm. He claimed that their medical techniques were also counterproductive; as an example, Meiners described their practice of warming up sick people in ovens, then making them roll in

11349-790: Was Robert Boyle (1627–1691), an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher , chemist , physicist, and inventor. Boyle believed in what today is called monogenism , that is, that all races, no matter how diverse, came from the same source: Adam and Eve . He studied reported stories of parents' giving birth to differently coloured albinos , so he concluded that Adam and Eve were originally white, and that whites could give birth to different coloured races. Theories of Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton about color and light via optical dispersion in physics were also extended by Robert Boyle into discourses of polygenesis , speculating that perhaps these differences were due to "seminal impressions". However, Boyle's writings mentioned that at his time, for "European Eyes", beauty

11466-509: Was a polygenist ; he believed God had created different races on Earth in separate regions. In his 1734 book Sketches on the History of Man , Home claimed that the environment, climate, or state of society could not account for racial differences, so the races must have come from distinct, separate stocks. Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), the Swedish physician, botanist, and zoologist, modified

11583-399: Was a German polygenist , and believed that each race had a separate origin. Meiners studied the physical, mental, and moral characteristics of each race, and built a race hierarchy based on his findings. Meiners split mankind into two divisions, which he labelled the "beautiful white race " and the "ugly black race ". In his book titled The Outline of History of Mankind , Meiners argued that

11700-553: Was a German physician, ophthalmologist, and anthropologist who studied the racial structure of Negroes in Egypt. In a book Pruner wrote in 1846, he claimed that Negro blood had a negative influence on the Egyptian moral character. He published a monograph on Negroes in 1861. He claimed that the main feature of the Negro's skeleton is prognathism , which he claimed was the Negro's relation to the ape. He also claimed that Negroes had brains very similar to those of apes and that Negroes have

11817-428: Was also innovative by the standards of contemporary national histories in avoiding the concept of a racially defined Volksgeist (national spirit) but argued that Belgium had developed naturally as a cosmopolitan society to serve as a mediator between Latin and Germanic Europe . Pirenne's history cemented his reputation as one of Belgium's leading public intellectuals in his lifetime. His thesis remains crucial to

11934-693: Was an American Presbyterian minister and author of the Essay on the Causes of Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species (1787). Smith claimed that Negro pigmentation was nothing more than a huge freckle that covered the whole body as a result of an oversupply of bile, which was caused by tropical climates. Racial studies by Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), the French naturalist and zoologist , influenced both scientific polygenism and scientific racism. Cuvier believed there were three distinct races:

12051-410: Was based on his personal experience as a traveler in different parts of the world. Bernier offered a distinction between essential genetic differences and accidental ones that depended on environmental factors. He also suggested that the latter criterion might be relevant to distinguish sub-types. His biological classification of racial types never sought to go beyond physical traits, and he also accepted

12168-407: Was based upon geographical distribution, being cartographically-based, and not hierarchical. In the opinion of Kenneth A. R. Kennedy (1976), Linnaeus certainly considered his own culture as superior, but his motives for the classification of human varieties were not race-centered. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1994) argued that the taxa was "not in the ranked order favored by most Europeans in

12285-526: Was being characterised as the 'global turn' in Medieval Studies. Correspondingly, the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, founded in 1963, changed its name in 2021 to UCLA Center for Early Global Studies. Many Centres / Centers for Medieval Studies exist, usually as part of a university or other research and teaching facility. Umberella organisations for these bodies include

12402-465: Was common during the period from the 1600s to the end of World War II , and was particularly prominent in European and American academic writings from the mid-19th century through the early-20th century. Since the second half of the 20th century, scientific racism has been discredited and criticized as obsolete, yet has persistently been used to support or validate racist world-views based upon belief in

12519-478: Was first published in Great Britain in 1939 by George Allen and Unwin. Medieval studies The term 'medieval studies' began to be adopted by academics in the opening decades of the twentieth century, initially in the titles of books like G. G. Coulton 's Ten Medieval Studies (1906), to emphasize a more interdisciplinary approach to a historical subject. A major step in institutionalising this field

12636-607: Was formally denounced, especially in UNESCO 's early antiracist statement, " The Race Question " (1950): "The biological fact of race and the myth of 'race' should be distinguished. For all practical social purposes, 'race' is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth. The myth of 'race' has created an enormous amount of human and social damage. In recent years, it has taken a heavy toll in human lives, and caused untold suffering". Since that time, developments in human evolutionary genetics and physical anthropology have led to

12753-652: Was held in Crefeld , then in Holzminden , and finally in Jena , where he was interned from 24 August 1916 until the end of the war. He was denied books, but he learned Russian from soldiers captured on the Eastern Front and subsequently read Russian-language histories made available to him by Russian prisoners. This gave Pirenne's work a unique perspective. At Jena, he began his history of medieval Europe, starting with

12870-520: Was interpreted to sanction slavery and from the 1820s to the 1850s was often used in the antebellum Southern United States, by writers such as the Rev. Richard Furman and Thomas R. Cobb , to enforce the idea that Negroes had been created inferior, and thus suited to slavery. The French aristocrat and writer Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), is best known for his book An Essay on the Inequality of

12987-536: Was invaded by the German Empire and placed under German military occupation . How involved Pirenne was in the Belgian resistance during World War I is not known. What is known is that Pirenne was questioned by German occupiers on 18 March 1916, and subsequently arrested. The occupying army had ordered striking professors at the University of Ghent to continue teaching. Pirenne's son Pierre had been killed in

13104-467: Was limited geographically (to the British Isles and Scandinavia ) and chronologically (mostly the early Middle Ages ), it promoted the interdisciplinarity characteristic of Medieval Studies and many of its graduates were involved in the later development of Medieval Studies programmes elsewhere in the UK. Around the same time as the first North American Medieval Studies institutions were founded,

13221-961: Was not measured so much in colour, but in "stature, comely symmetry of the parts of the body, and good features in the face". Various members of the scientific community rejected his views, and described them as "disturbing" or "amusing". Richard Bradley (1688–1732) was an English naturalist. In his book titled Philosophical Account of the Works of Nature (1721), Bradley claimed there to be "five sorts of men" based on their skin colour and other physical characteristics: white Europeans with beards; white men in America without beards (meaning Native Americans); men with copper-coloured skin, small eyes, and straight black hair; Blacks with straight black hair; and Blacks with curly hair. It has been speculated that Bradley's account inspired Linnaeus' later categorisation. The Scottish lawyer Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782)

13338-463: Was presented with a letter and almanac from Benjamin Banneker , an educated black mathematician. Delighted to have discovered scientific proof for the existence of black intelligence, Jefferson wrote to Banneker: No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men, & that the appearance of

13455-488: Was studied by the royal family, officers were made to read it in the military colleges, barristers in Brussels expounded it, schoolchildren received it as a prize for good examination results, for the bourgeoisie in town and country and the literary élite it was essential reading. On publication in the summer of 1911 the fourth volume sold seven hundred copies within three days. This was partly, but certain not entirely, due to

13572-480: Was the foundation of the Mediaeval (now Medieval) Academy of America in 1925. In American and European universities the term medieval studies provided a coherent identity to centres composed of academics from a variety of disciplines including archaeology, art history, architecture, history, literature and linguistics. The Institute of Mediaeval Studies at St. Michael's College of the University of Toronto became

13689-402: Was the most prominent and influential historian in Belgium, receiving numerous honours and committee assignments. He was Rector of the University of Ghent from 1918 to 1921. Pirenne was a close friend of German historian Karl Lamprecht (1856–1915), until they broke during the war when Lamprecht headed a mission to invite Belgians to collaborate with Germany's long-term goals. In 1914, Belgium

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