The Middle Ages. The thoughts, beliefs, and values of medieval Europeans were dramatically different from those of modern people. Europeans living in postmedieval periods such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment—as the names of those eras suggest—self-consciously tried to portray themselves as somehow overthrowing the formal structures and restrictions of an earlier age, and in the process they managed to denigrate and misrepresent the life and thought of an entire millennium. The Middle Ages were born in the still-mysterious process that caused the disintegration of the Roman Empire, and the whole of medieval culture was affected by a widespread attempt to regain the glories of classical civilization. Yet, in the midst of this apparent attempt to re-create the past, medieval Europeans moved forward as well. There were many important intellectual advances during the Middle Ages, including the beginnings of almost every modern vernacular European...