List of common misconceptions about the Middle Ages

Eventually, the Carolingian Empire was established in the 9th century and reunited much of Western Europe, but the entity itself collapsed and fractured into a number of states.

Even as the Middle Ages become increasingly well documented; historians increasingly focus on writing literature addressing some of the primary misconceptions about medieval history;[2][3] and other historians take the alternative approach of highlighting many of the intellectual, scientific, and technological advances that took place during the period,[4] such ideas remain prominent in the public sphere and continue to dominate conceptions about the Middle Ages as a whole.

They promoted the idea that the "Middle Age" was a time of darkness also because of corruption within the Catholic Church such as popes ruling as kings, the veneration of saints' relics, a licentious priesthood, and institutionalized moral hypocrisy.

[12] Baruch Spinoza, Bernard Fontenelle, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Denis Diderot, Voltaire, the Marquis De Sade and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were vocal in attacking the Middle Ages as a period of social regress dominated by religion, and Edward Gibbon in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire expressed contempt for the "rubbish of the Dark Ages.

The earliest entry for a capitalized "Dark Ages" in the Oxford English Dictionary is a reference in Henry Thomas Buckle's History of Civilization in England in 1857.

"[16] Furthermore, Lindberg noted that contrary to common belief, "the late medieval scholar rarely experienced the coercive power of the church and would have regarded himself as free (particularly in the natural sciences) to follow reason and observation wherever they led.

He ascribes the popularization of the flat Earth myth to the writings of John William Draper, Andrew Dickson White and Irving.

[21] It is frequently asserted that medieval scholastic philosophers engaged in drawn out debates and discussions on how many angels could fit on the head of a pin or a needle.

According to the historian Peter Harrison, "That scholastic philosophers engaged in speculations about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin has long been exposed as a myth invented in the seventeenth century."

The Ancrene Wisse, a 13th-century medieval text, advises female hermits that "you shall not possess any beast, my dear sisters, except only a cat.

The basis of this claim is a papal bull issued by Pope Gregory IX, Vox in Rama, which itself does not mention killing of cats or make any statements about cats being evil; The following rites of this pestilence are carried out: when any novice is to be received among them and enters the sect of the damned for the first time, the shape of a certain frog appears to him, which some are accustomed to call a toad.

At length, when the novice has come forward, he is met by a man of marvelous pallor, who has very black eyes and is so emaciated and thin that, since his flesh has been wasted, seems to have remaining only skin drawn over the bone.

Afterwards they sit down to a meal and when they have arisen from it, from a certain statue, which is usual in a sect of this kind, a black cat about the size of an average dog, descends backwards, with its tail erect.