Meaning of the Middle Ages (What is, Concept and Definition)

What is the Middle Ages:

As Middle Ages is called the historical period that covers from the V century until the end of the XV century of our era.It is also known as Middle Ages or Medieval .It should be capitalized in the initials.

Periods of the Middle Ages

As such, the Middle Ages lasted for a thousand years, and in turn is subdivided into the High Middle Ages , which runs from the 5th to the 10th century, and the Low Middle Ages , which covers approximately the last five centuries, between the 11th and 15th centuries.

The Middle Ages is a period in the history of the humanity that usually circumscribes to the European sphere specifically, due to the absence of contact of Europe with other civilizations of the world, such as the Chinese, the Japanese, the Indian or the Islamic, that without counting the cultures of the Black Africa or the prehispa civilizations unique from America.

Hence the milestones on which its chronological delimitation is based are Eurocentric: the beginning would mark it, on the one hand, the fall of the Roman Empire from the west , in the year 476 of our era, and on the other, the knowledge by the European man of the existence of America from the first Christopher Columbus's trip to America, in 1492 .However, there are also those who point out the end of the Middle Ages in coincidental events such as the fall of the Byzantine Empire , the end of the one hundred year war and the invention of the printing press, confluent in the year of 1453.

See also:

Characteristics of the Middle Ages

Some of the characteristics most relevant of the Middle Ages are, in the economic , the transition from the slave mode of production to the feudal; in the social , society would be redefined according to levels, leaving behind the concept of citizenship, used until then in the Roman Empire; in the political , the power previously centralized and concentrated by Rome, would disintegrate into small kingdoms and city-states; On the ideological level, theocentric thinking, fundamentally advocated by Christianity, happens to subordinate everything.

The Middle Ages has been traditionally described as a dark period (obscurantism), fundamentally associated with feudalism , the isolation of Europe from the rest of the world's civilizations, the cultural and technical backwardness , with a sovereignly ignorant population, with poor health conditions, and subject to the designs of the Catholic Church and the widespread violence resulting from wars, invasions and crusades.

See also Medieval literature.

The origin of the term

The term Middle Ages is born as a necessity to name the intermediate time between the Ancient Age, associated with classical culture and Greco-Roman civilization, and the Modern Age, related to n the cultural renewal of the Renaissance and Humanism.

See also Modernity.

Other meaning

Like middle ages , written in lowercase, you can also designate the average age of someone or something: "The average age to finish high school is around 16 years."