The Medieval Internet

Power, politics and participation in the digital age

Jakob Linaa Jensen

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839094149
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Estudios de comunicación

This book sheds light on the world of the Internet and social media through a historical prism drawn from the Medieval Age. Memes and metaphors originating in medieval society have often been used to describe and explain contemporary society. Social shaming has been described as "a pillory", good deeds have been deemed as knightly, persecution or censorship has been labelled as inquisitions and elitist tendencies in political life are sometimes dubbed feudalism. This book argues that terms and concepts originating in medieval society are suitable for describing and discussing a plethora of social and political phenomena, all related to the massive rise and use of new digital media technologies and adherent societal paradoxes, dilemmas and challenges. The author argues that apparently distinct social phenomena related to the spread of new media are related and a product of logics that dominated medieval society, not at least those of control, surveillance and feudalism.

Chapter 1

The Middle Ages and Medieval Ways of Living and Thinking

The Middle Ages are often defined by the time span that extends roughly from the fall of the Western Roman empire to the final fall of the Eastern Roman empire, which lasted about 1,000 years from 476 to 1453. These are, of course, approximations to point to the emergence and dissolution of a historical process. In Denmark, for instance, which was never a part of the Roman empire, one could take the Middle Ages to be marked by the end of the Viking age to the fall of the Catholic Church, a period between 1050 and 1536. The important thing is not to get hung up on specific dates or epoch-changing events, but instead to map out the approximate duration of the period and the structures that spanned ‘the High Middle Ages’ throughout Europe.

Only in cartoons do Neolithic people know they are living in the Stone Age. These categories, including the Middle Ages, have been accorded retrospectively by the historians of the nineteenth century, who saw themselves as existing in the age of science and progress. Medieval people did not see themselves as living in the Middle Ages but, instead, saw themselves as mostly living in the Last Age, before the Apocalypse. The nineteenth-century historians were building, in part, on the Renaissance humanists, who denigrated the millennium before them as a time of ignorance – the Dark Ages (Mommsen, 1942). Given the humanistic heritage, nineteenth-century historians put the Middle Ages between Late Antiquity and the Renaissance (meaning rebirth), the latter being defined as the era in which classical art, ideas and philosophy were rediscovered – with the implication that the Middle Ages had ‘lost’ the accumulated knowledge of the ages before it, and had consequently been a period of ‘ignorance’. Hence the continuing use of the phrase ‘the dark ages’, first proposed by Petrarch. However, this contemptuous historical treatment of the Middle Ages has latter been severely criticised by twentieth-century historians, who see it as a vulgar product of a naively positivist historiography, a form of presentism – that is, elevating the present at the expense of the past. In recent historiography, the Middle Ages are recognised as less monolithic, and as having its own creativity. Rather than an absolute rupture in history, historians now recognise in the Middle Ages various elements that have been further developed in modernity. Important inventions like the forge, the printing press and the waterwheel originate from the Middle Ages, while modern institutions like banks, universities and courts all trace their origin to this period too. Medieval philosophy was more advanced than the old image of a non-scientific scholasticism – indeed, medieval advances in pure logic have been recognised in modern logical theory – while the art of the novel and the foundation of certain epic tales that have fed European culture all the way up to twenty-first century cinema was laid in the novels written in the high Middle Ages. Cultural values from the Middle Ages like chivalry, knighthood and courtly love became part of the ‘civilizing process’ in Europe, inspiring bourgeois ideals of the love marriage and the code of the gentry that did much to soften manners and accord women a greater social worth (Wickham, 2016, p. 197).

The Middle Ages have gone in and out of fashion since the ‘neo-Gothic’ revival in the nineteenth century. For a certain group of traditionalist intellectuals – John Ruskin, William Morris, etc. – the Middle Ages connoted a pre-capitalist age of integrity, before the class war between Capital and Labour. Contemporary culture is less ideological in its fondness for the period, but stereotypical images from what we imagine the Middle Ages to be have spread through books, TV shows and subcultures, creating a palpable Gothic turn in the culture as a whole. Countless medieval markets, which encourage role-playing (and are tightly connected to video game role-playing), have sprung up in Europe and beyond over the last 20 years. Still, we also use the term ‘medieval’ to denote thoughts, behaviour and punishments we consider barbaric and backwards.

When we think about the Middle Ages, images of kings, knights, castles and tournaments most likely pop up, along with wizards and witches. In the public mind, the old enlightenment accusation of superstition has now become a lore, with magic seeming a vacation from rationality. It is true that horses and knights played an important role as tools of power and means of combat in the Middle Ages. Some, like the famous historian Lynn Townsend White (1962), even claim that the import of the stirrup from Asia, first used in Europe in the battle of Tours in 732, was a fundamental requisite for the constitution of Middle Age society. The stirrup facilitated mounted battle, which put a premium on cavalry, promoting the status of a class of knights, fundamental for medieval warfare and the medieval power structure in general.

In terms of its material life, medieval societies were characterised by a feudal economic structure, which was exhaustively analysed in the classic study by Marc Bloch (1961). It was based on a chain of exploiters and exploited. The kings depended on the vassals for their wealth, who in turn were invested with their fiefs, officially, by the monarch. The holders of these fiefs were, in turn dependents of the local feudal lords – who were often wealthier and more powerful than kings – who themselves appropriated a large share of the produce of the peasants, the majority of the population, who were firmly at the bottom of the societal pyramid and attached by law to the land. The overlapping forms of dependence made for a formally stagnant society in economic terms, as the incentives for those in power were all about conserving the existing economic and political order. However, as we shall see, it was also a time of new inventions, social and cultural development and in many ways the Middle Ages paved the road for the age of enlightenment and later modernity.

Medieval Society

Imagine you are in the year 1220. It is exactly 800 years ago as I write this. You are living in the centre of Europe. 1220 is in the middle of the époque historians refer to as ‘high Middle Ages’. Most of the concepts and phenomena we associate with medieval times have crystalised into culture-shaping forces: Knight orders, the crusades, fortified castles, trenches and endless fights between small kingdoms or fiefdoms struggling for power and dominance with each other. Europe is, nominally, wholly Catholic, although there is a lot of evidence that popular beliefs were in continuity with ancient popular beliefs regarding many spiritual forces. Notre Dame de Paris, the paradigmatic Gothic cathedral, was started in 1160 and was being completed. They had been building Chartres for 20 years, and other great cathedrals were going up in Northern Europe. The population is growing, having recovered from the early ‘barbarian’ period’s invasion and the decay of infrastructure. Forests are being cleared and swamps drained. There is no hint, yet, of the demographic disaster yet to come – the Black Death that swept Europe in the fourteenth century. But people in 1220 were not unfamiliar to outbreaks of horrible diseases and often a sudden and unpleasant death.

Imagine you are in a town in the middle of Europe. The streets are dirty. You are living in a narrow, confined house with a lot of mice, fleas and moisture but no glass windows and no address. The streets are full of garbage and faeces from humans and animals. You smell the odour of the sewers running along the street. The amount of garbage was a problem as collection was not organised until later. It is a hot day and the stink is close to unbearable, but you are used to it and don’t notice. You can hear loud voices and clinking from the beer hall on the town square. You realise you have not had lunch and cross the cobble stone street and reach the square. You eye the stocks where a condemned criminal is taking his public punishment. Before you enter the beer hall, your eyes catch the landscape outside the city gate where a deceased body is swinging in the gallows. The ravens flock around the corpse. You nod to the gatekeeper, the person deciding who has the access to the town and who has not. You enter the darkness of the beer hall and join the crowd for talks and gossips of today’s events. You get a mug of dark beer and some food. The taste is bland compared to modern standards. Medieval food was characterised by lack of spices and sugar. Alcohol was of a lesser strength and distribution.

After the meal, you return to your house. The house itself contains an extended family, with two married couples. In the thirteenth century, sons often lived with the father even after marrying – although there were different family patterns corresponding to the opening up of land and migration.

Now imagine you belong to the elite of society. Imagine you are a daughter of a grand duke, standing in the tower of your father’s spacious castle looking across his lands. Far away, you can eye some of the serfs struggling with the land, ploughing and planting new crops. You are speculating about tonight’s banquet where the mighty king of the neighbouring country will come, along with his son. Your father wants you to marry the young noblemen to form alliances across the border. Now you are wondering whether the young man is as handsome as rumours tell. You are also looking forward to the jousting tournament, set up in the honour of the visiting king. And you look forward to abundant food and the claret wines your dad has just received from France.

Such speculations and worries were totally different from those of ordinary peasants, the lowest class in medieval society. Now imagine you are a poor peasant, struggling to keep up a minimal living. You work 14 hours a day with menial labour, farming, dragging heavy carts, trying to get an outcome of your meagre soil. The sweat is running down your body and you are exhausted. Your stomach rumbles from lack of adequate food and your poor clothing is torn from heavy use, let alone the fact that you have to work until you faint. You do most of the work for your feudal lord as you are a serf, sometimes referred to as a copyholder. You do not own your own farm or land and have to pay up rent to the feudal lord by your work. If you fail, he might beat you up relentlessly. Your back is still striped and sore from the latest session on the whipping horse when you once again had failed to deliver the absurd amount of grain and coins he demanded. You fear for the next time ….

Finally, imagine you are a priest, listening to St Francis’s preaching, which was a vast moral event at the time. You are the second son of an Italian nobleman and as your elder brother is bound for inheriting the noble title, you are destined to serve God. You have studied at the Latin school, been to the university in Bologna, the first in Europe. You are living a plain and a monotonous life in the monastery, praying five times a day and devoting your entire life to God. Sometimes you are travelling to other monasteries in your order, to exchange knowledge and not at least the true word of God. Priests and monks had a complete monopoly on teaching and learning and the travelling of clergy helped to spread not only the gospel but also scientific knowledge, ultimately paving the way for the Age of Enlightenment. When travelling, you are dependent on the sparse road maps and the emerging auberges and inns that appeared at the time, to accommodate clergy and pilgrims.

The four examples above provide good snapshots of what the material and cultural circumstances of life would be for persons differently situated on the social spectrum at the beginning of the high Middle Ages. The Church held an almost total monopoly on literacy and cultural knowledge. In Italy, secular types – notably merchants – were beginning to compete with them, but on the whole, the teaching of letters and the cultural memory of all ancient knowledge was in the hands of the Church. Our speculative scenarios are based on historical research. This has made ample use of the texts and visual art of the period, which is, however, not oriented towards the standards of realism of the twenty-first century. Other conventions adhere. The miraculous is a regular part of medieval narratives. The sculpture and pictures do not follow the laws of linear perspective, as they were famously laid down by Italian Renaissance artists in the fifteenth century. Rather, they follow other, and to the modern onlooker, more ‘primitive’ rules: for instance, the Bayeux tapestry, produced around 1090, shows the events associated with William the Conqueror’s conquest of Britain and depicts, recognisably, many men, dogs, and horses, but runs the story, cartoon-like, without trompe-l’oeil effects. Thus, representations of the Middle Ages coming after the Middle Ages translate one set of conventions into another.

Towns grew in size and importance in the high Middle Ages, until the disaster of the Black Death. In the transitional period after the chaos and disruption in the wake of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, towns had shrunk, lacking the interior resources to support themselves, and the trade routes they depended on. But these things, in conjunction with the towns, came back. The town’s growth and wealth were not only based on goods from abroad but an influx of products from the countryside. A class of merchants and master craftsmen evolved, who were franchised and independent. Much of the new, population-encouraging wealth came from trade, which is why some of the richest towns were found along the coasts, open to trade across the seas that were more accessible than the countryside, with its lack of roads that could bear the volume of cargo that were laden in boats. The roads were generally in a bad condition. The upkeep of Kings Highways fell to the king, but most roads were maintained by local authorities, which meant most were ill maintained as the original Roman roads, which employed foundations and a built-up surface of crushed stone and clay, were covered over with dirt. On the other hand, there was a lot of bridge-building, since it was obviously important, if you were carting goods, to get over rivers, or sometimes valleys, in mountainous areas. In cities, starting with Paris in 1089, municipalities began to put in pavements. The Church was a big driver of road-building. Monasteries depended on pilgrims and visitors, and in turn often paid for upkeep of the roads.

Most goods were transported across the sea or through waterways. The dangers of storm at sea were less for shore hugging vessels; on land, merchants and travellers were subject to threats from villains, thieves and imagined supernatural monsters, as well as to a lack of infrastructure that could supply their wants of food and shelter. An example of the importance of the sea for trade and wealth is the mighty Hanseatic League, a union of cities in Northern Europe, for instance, Hamburg, Lübeck, Bergen and Riga, that prospered in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They even had significant military capacity to protect their interests and trading vessels. In Italy, cities like Venice and Genoa prospered from the trade with Asia through the Silk Roads, as well as the Mediterranean trade with the Arab world, which was richer, at that time, than Catholic Europe.

The establishment of European universities took place in the Middle Ages. Medical schools at Bologna and Montpellier as well as Salerno not only passed on Greek and Roman science, but also challenged and changed it too. Logic was developed into a fine art in the Middle Ages – from Duns Scotus to William of Ockham.

On the political level, Europe was divided into major kingdoms with shifting boundaries, often created by dynastic marriages. England and France were consistent nations throughout the period. In Italy and in Germany, there were many city-states. Venice stood out as a city-state empire, extending its sway in the Eastern Mediterranean. It was Venice’s influence that led to the sacking of its rival, Constantinople, in 1204. Europe was crosshatched with many small kingdoms, duchies and fiefdoms and alliances by marriage. The complex German system resulted in a number of princes who owed allegiance to the Holy Roman Empire, which was led by members of the Hohenstaufen family. Wars, in this system, were waged in the interest of the dynastic house rather than the nation, although towards the end of the Middle Ages certain geopolitical entities began to collectively imagine themselves as nations rather than inherited properties (notably Britain and France).

In contrast, the Middle East and Asia principalities were often bigger and wealthier, with the central rulers exerting more control over the territory. The Byzantine empire was a continuation of the Eastern Roman empire and was a significant power in the Eastern Mediterranean until around the thirteenth century. Sacked, then, by the Crusaders, it continually shrank before the advent of the Turks until it fell in 1453. Other powers included the various Egyptian, Persian and North African empires. Spain, which the Christians reconquered in the thirteenth through fifteenth century, was a conduit for Greek and Latin knowledge into Europe. In the thirteenth century the Mongolians swept through all of Asia on their strong horses, destroying the Song Dynasty in China and the Persian empire in Baghdad, and gluing all the pieces, temporarily, in the largest empire the world has ever seen, reaching from the Pacific to the edge of Central Europe. In 1241, they even threatened the Austrian capital of Vienna but decided to turn around when they got news their great Khan had died. Mongol rulers, after the split up of the great empire, still reigned in China and Kashmir. The Mongols never, however, conquered the Indian subcontinent. As Europeans well knew, many of these areas were much wealthier than Europe in terms of gold and manufactures. It was the desire to partake of that wealth that drove the first wave of European colonisers at the very end of the Middle Ages.

In the popular culture of the twenty-first century, castles and crusaders seem to epitomise the medieval mind-set. In the grab bag of popular Middle Ages archetypes, we put big cathedrals, almighty Popes (although the Pope was often very weak during this time), famine, the Black Death, short lifespans and violent death. We draw our imagination of the Medieval from ‘The Name of the Rose’ by Umberto Eco or ‘Pillars of the Earth’ by Ken Follett. We might have seen films like ‘Braveheart’, ‘Ivanhoe’ or ‘Knights of the Round Table’, continuing a romantic myth that began with the popularity of Walter Scott’s novels across Europe in the early nineteenth century. This dramatic and cinematic view of the Middle Ages has variously been held up as an ideal of authenticity or disparaged as the night of ignorance; certain religious people find it the best of times, certain secularisers and promoters of science find it the worst of times. What it was mostly was ordinary time. People lived their daily life in family patterns somewhat different from ours, in hierarchies that were somewhat different as well (although it is well to remember that the democratic ideal of egalitarianism in our society is mostly a myth, and if the Middle Age peasant was at the bottom and the King was at the top, they both pretty much enjoyed the same kind of medicine and sanitation, while royal women were often as illiterate as peasant women. The wealth of the richest medieval man could buy little more science than the much lesser riches of the poorest peasant), and went on with their tasks in the circumstances they were given. If certain of their options were limited, compared to today, others were more dramatic: at a time when the world was much less homogenised, travelling between different societies was a startling, indeed almost fantastic experience. The vast majority of the population were peasants – as indeed they were, in Europe, right up until the twentieth century. They worked their land, which was attached to them by an extremely complex system of rights that limited their ability to exchange it. They were always at the mercy of their feudal lords. Life was often uncertain. The harvest could fail, lightning could strike and kill the cattle or destroy the crops and wars were frequent, although unmechanised. The great danger was from foraging soldiers rather than, say, concentration camps. The society as a whole was often near the Malthusian edge, where resources could not support any increase in the population. It is for this reason that, as some historians have pointed out, the Black Death was actually a boon to survivors, as wage earner could negotiate larger compensations for their products and labour and rents for land fell (Cantor, 2002).

After the Dark Age, the social groups became more distinct and their boundaries became more rigid. For most, leaving the position where they were born was both difficult and undesired. Because the Catholic church prohibited priests from marrying, it was the one modality in the social whole that was, at least theoretically, not inheritance based. The priest’s son didn’t inherit the priest’s position, which unblocked positions fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Middle Ages and Medieval Ways of Living and Thinking
• Chapter 2. The Medieval and the Contemporary Landscape of Information
• Chapter 3. The Public – Deliberation, Visibility and Mutual Surveillance
• Chapter 4. Community and Beyond – Medieval and Modern
• Chapter 5. Instruments of Internet Power
• Chapter 6. Structures of Internet Power – Algorithms and Platforms
• Chapter 7. Digital Feudalism
• Chapter 8. Politics and Publics
• Conclusion: The Return of the Medieval?
• Notes
• References
• Index