Since this is the last week of class, as well as the final round of blog posts, I wanted to sum up our findings and observations we have concluded of the middle ages through this course. Specifically, how far we have come from blindly to stating “the medieval were just dark times” to analyzing the complexity this time period enfolded.
If one were to do a quick google search of the word “medieval today,” the results would generally fall under two categories: an article reporting new/updated research that uncovered something during the middle ages or an article reporting how this modern event or actions relates to the middle ages. The latter part uses a range of elements from the middle ages as a point of reference. These promising articles include headers detailing how we are either in a better or worse state than our former counterparts. Yet, when reading these articles, we no longer can excuse ourselves of agreeing with writers and actors who ignorantly say something is medieval and leave it at that. Instead, I presume that we put our skills we picked up on our class to the test and go through a mental process of sorts:
“Oh this article is trying to connect this [include recent event/action/moment] to this dynamic we talked about in this course. It claims ‘…insert direct quote’ but does this really make sense?”
This is just one variation of how you might begin to analyze, but my focus is the moment where we do not allow ourselves to excuse these writers and instead ask the questions. Is what the author claiming historically accurate or another anachronism, how the majority of the population thought the middle ages went down? Are they making sense? But, really does it make sense?
Week after week, we watched and read works that at moments seemed so far the realm of possibility, we had to accept it as another’s interpretation of the medieval. Some may point out that these modern-day news articles is another of the writer’s interpretation of the medieval. I come ask myself if this is acceptable continuation of fabrication the medieval of what is not? Moving past the point of how a work is not claiming to be historically accurate, we should definitely cast a broader dialogue of the connections to the complex period we have only just begun to study. The modern day population have some beliefs (medieval = barbaric, unclean, violent) that have been exploited and retold over and over by the media. I leave it open to you of how we could start talking of how misguided we can be when it comes to this period in history.
Getting Medieval 
I believe in our modern world we will always as a society to put a violent and barbaric stigma around the medieval era. The stories we love to hear that take place during these times bring these thoughts to the forefront of our minds. I do agree that we should think deeper into these stories instead of reading and taking them at face value.
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I agree with Trevor that as a society we will always think of medieval as things that are barbaric or violent. As you state in your post the media has exploited these beliefs and used them to suite their own purposes, and I believe this will never change. I think that because the media continues to portray the medieval in this very stereotypical and wrong light the stigma will never change. This is shown in the fact that in all the movies we watched in class there always seemed to be some form of violence, they just had different levels of violence. This trend continues today in movies that are used to portray the medieval and because of this I believe the medieval will always have the stigmas of violence and barbarity associated with it no matter how we go about having a discussion about our misguided interpretation of the medieval.
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While I agree that Medievalism does bring to mind themes of war and barbarism, it also recalls themes of masculinity, heroism, and chivalry. But somehow the dark aspects of Medievalism seem to predominate. One explanation for this, as Lynch points out in Medievalism and the Ideology of War, is that the Medieval era is an effective backdrop for presenting universal struggles such as good versus evil; the good/light fight to prevail over the bad/dark.
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I think the OP brings up some very interesting points here, that not only apply to our study of history, but also in the way we view the modern world. I am not sure how many of us in this class are history majors, however I am not one, and I am not sure how many more history classes I will take at Mac (no offense professor). Having said this, I think we can take what you said in this blog post about thinking critically, and apply it to the outside world. I hate to bring this up, but let’s put this into the context of the election. Say you are watching a presidential debate and one of the candidates make a claim that sounds super flashy and interesting and it sounds like something you can get behind. We can just blindly take what this politician said as true/feasible, and get behind it, or we could ask the question “does this make sense.” This will lead to us being much more informed, not only during election season, but in other times of our lives when we choose to apply this strategy of thinking.
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