When did the Middle Ages end in Europe?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

1945.

They began in AD 70, when Bible Times ended.

Before Bible Times you had Dinosaur Times. After the Middle Ages you had the Good Old Days.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

1850. Bite me.

I know Le Goff is a Big Name, and I get the point he's trying to make, but that's really too much of a stretch. If the same historical period includes the early barbarian Kingdoms as well as the hypersophisticated courts of 1700 and the political turmoil of 1800, it's really extended beyond utility. Even the idea that "feudalism" was the same thing in the 6th century than it was in the late Ancient Regime (let alone in the 30 years after the Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies steamrolled over it) seems pretty silly to me. As for Christianity, it had radically reshaped itself over this period, and I'm pretty sure even the common believer from 500 would find much in common with that of 1800.

If anything, I'd be far more interested in a periodization that "breaks up" the Middle Ages into more coherent pieces of 2-3 centuries each (for example, the Dark Ages up to Charlemagne, the transition into strong feudalism up to the First Crusade, the Golden Age up until the Great Famine, and the Crisis up until 1453). This is how we usually periodize the modern era, so I think it's a lot more helpful in terms of understanding what happened in the Middle Ages. History might have been "slower" back then, but it wasn't that slow.

Tbh we have the same problem in our periodization of the Classical Era. The idea that we can say anything coherent in a time that spans between the outset of Greek city-states and the fall of Rome is pretty surreal. But at least it's kept at around 1000 years total, which should be the absolute maximum for a historical cycle.

Yes but by your same argument, it's absurd to categorize the fall of Constantinople in the same "modern" era as the atom bomb. I mean, for the average person there was less change in life between 550 and 1450 than between 1450 and 1950.

If you were to look at the most fundamental distinctions between average life in the indisputably modern era and, say, the 13th century, the broadest possible measure, the things a time traveler would notice first and be most struck by, you would say the modern era has these things:

- light/power as a mass utility, & other utilities
- powered (vs animal) transportation, whether by land, air or sea
- instant long distance communication
- the production of images/screens

and to a lesser degree:
- artificial computing (although less noticeable in everyday life)

The average time traveler would not notice that Constantinople had fallen, certainly not before any of the things I mentioned, and certainly would not consider that fact to be more definitive of the differences between their time and ours.

These all point to the mid 19th century.

I am intrigued by this Long Middle Ages idea.  From a US perspective, the statement "In Mississippi, the Middle Ages ended in the 1960's." is not entirely crazy.  From a Western European perspective, this would probably have the Middle Ages ending during the French Revolution->Napoleon->UK Reform Acts->Italian and German unification period.  This would also be around the time economic growth was obvious to the average person in Europe. 

In the US, the generalized end of the "Long Middle Ages" would be the 1860's. 

Maybe not crazy, but it's certainly odd given that racialized chattel slavery (and hence also its legacy) is of Early Modern vintage. It seems to me that, for the Middle Ages in Mississippi to have ended in the 1960s, they would have had to have begun in the last few decades of the nineteenth century, when the ersatz-feudal institution of sharecropping was first substituted for the old "peculiar institution".

This is also just ignoring all the things that a time traveler from the sixth or seventh century to the thirteenth would have noticed, such as heavy plows, sailing ships, and large agricultural surpluses. All of these are things that, while we don't think about them much today, would have been extremely important differences to somebody from a primarily non-urban society.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The Middle Ages aren't "everything that feels old-timey to us 21st century people", they have to be defined by their own inner logic and not in opposition to our present time.

The issue here is that Americans are sundered from the Middle Ages and what it wrought in ways that Europeans are not. It has no real existence in the American imagination other than 'the olden days when there were knights and castles'. As far as most Americans are concerned, Chaucer, Hildegard von Bingen and the Catalan Company are no more real than Robin Hood. Whereas I (for instance) am surrounded by the period's extremely visible legacy; by the ruins of castles and abbeys, by still-extant churches and cathedrals, by woods, boundary-ditches, hedges and fields that the people of the time knew as well as I do, and even by the continuing impact of administrative boundaries first idly sketched out during the period. And one way or another, this is true of everyone else in this continent. The period is part of our living past; it almost feels as if one can reach out and touch it, and in a way, of course, one can. The result is a fundamental divergence in perspective, amongst other things. There is a reason why academic Mediaevalism in North America is such a poisonous pit of stupidity.

Another part of the problem is that the American school system in many places simply stops teaching world history after World War II, giving the impression that everything before the Good Old Days "was" history-as-such in a way that events that are more firmly within living memory aren't. Anecdotally I know somebody, a friend's father, a man in his late fifties with a master's degree who worked as a civil servant for thirty years, who's of the belief that Operation Overlord constitutes a "climax" to world history the way a novel or movie has a climax! My first post in this thread was a parody of the way lots of Americans end up thinking about world history, but not an especially broad one.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The Middle Ages aren't "everything that feels old-timey to us 21st century people", they have to be defined by their own inner logic and not in opposition to our present time.

The issue here is that Americans are sundered from the Middle Ages and what it wrought in ways that Europeans are not. It has no real existence in the American imagination other than 'the olden days when there were knights and castles'. As far as most Americans are concerned, Chaucer, Hildegard von Bingen and the Catalan Company are no more real than Robin Hood. Whereas I (for instance) am surrounded by the period's extremely visible legacy; by the ruins of castles and abbeys, by still-extant churches and cathedrals, by woods, boundary-ditches, hedges and fields that the people of the time knew as well as I do, and even by the continuing impact of administrative boundaries first idly sketched out during the period. And one way or another, this is true of everyone else in this continent. The period is part of our living past; it almost feels as if one can reach out and touch it, and in a way, of course, one can. The result is a fundamental divergence in perspective, amongst other things. There is a reason why academic Mediaevalism in North America is such a poisonous pit of stupidity.

Yeah, that might be the one thing about Americans I've had the most trouble relating to. I've been keenly aware of being part of a multi-millenary history since third grade (Our Ancestors the Gauls etc. - though of course I never bought that part for obvious reasons), and that has always been a source of wonder for me, even when modern history became my main interest. It's hard for me to put myself in the shoes of someone from a "young" country whose history is four centuries old at most (of course, the lands they occupy had a much older history, but that history was deliberately destroyed, so those few centuries are all that remains).

Now, stopping at 1945 as Nathan points out is an entirely self-imposed problem, and one that's becoming more and more dangerous as time goes on. I can see an argument for not teaching the last few decades, since it's genuinely hard to put much historical analysis on them, but you people are soon going to miss a full century.

I don't want to defend American history education, and I really don't want to defend the College Board, but I think the latter part is a bit overstated - I remember when taking my AP US and Euro tests five years ago that we had essay questions on the rise of the right from Goldwater to Reagan and the fall of overambitious gunners.

Yeah, my APUSH curriculum went all the way through to the end of the Cold War.

My high school (which, believe it or not given my overall everything-about-me, had a vocational-technical focus; my second-favorite class (after English) was woodshop and I'm still quite handy with a bow saw or a belt sander) didn't even have AP courses. I literally didn't know what AP was until I was already in college. Our American history courses went up to Watergate or so--this was twelve or thirteen years ago now so Reagan, Gingrich, etc. still felt more contemporary and thus "less historical" than they do now--but our world history courses basically got to the end of the War, acknowledged that the Cold War was a thing that happened right afterwards, and then petered out.