The Middle Ages

The Question:
Over the past five hundred years, scholars have disagreed in their assessments of the Middle Ages. Some have seen the period "as a sterile age in which government had degenerated into feudal anarchy, religion into superstition, and scholarship into pedantic quibbles of schoolmen over texts that they scarcely understood" and whose main value was in transmitting--though imperfectly--some legacy of more glorious Creco-Roman past to those who followed. On the other hand, some have seen it as a period of energy and creativity that made important original contributions to modern We…