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New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 355, 12 April 1946, Page 18

Sir,-In your issue of March 22 I complained that, in a series of broadcasts for schcols, children were being told that in the Middle Ages (up to 1400) "there had been a blackout on education, art, science — even thought, and everything making for progress." In your issue of March 29 the author of the broadcasts defends his statement. No one will deny that he has courage. The editor of the Cambridge Mediaeval History speaks of the "marvellous" renaissance of the 12th Century; so sober a writer as H.

W. C. Davis, in his little book in the Home University Library, describes the mediaeval period as a "Golden Age"; and a very eminent French historian, Diehl, allows himself to speak of the civilisation of Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages as "equal to that of any age in brilliancy," but for Mr. Tyndall the Mediaeval period is just a blackout! In his great work, Science and the Modern World, Professor Whitehead ‘tells us that "the Middle Ages formed one long training of the intellect of Western Europe in the sense of order’; he goes so far as to say that "the faith in the’ possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivative from mediaeval theology; but for Mr, Tyndall the mediaeval period is marked by a blackout in "thought, and everything making for progress." Mr. Tyndall says that it was the same with education gen-erally-just a blackout. Yet I find that Monroe, in his standard History of Education, refers to the later Middle Ages as a period where intellectual interests were "numerous and intense"; I find that A. F. Leach, in his book on educational charters, describes the university life of the early 14th Century as "full of life and progress"; and finally Rashdale in his great History of the Universities of the Middle Ages, speaks of "vast numbers of keen and active and industrious brains" and of "the enormous intellectual enthusiasm" kindled in the universities in their best period. (Before Mr. Tyndall talks about only 80 students attending a mediaeval university, he would do well to consult Rashdale’s chapter on the numbers at Mediaeval universities; and he will learn that it is "pretty certain’ that Paris at the time had about 6,000!) As for Art, Mr. Tyndall tells us that he prefers the painters of a later period. About that I wouldn’t dream of making any complaint; but, before he writes again about a blackout in mediaeval art, he ought to get hold of a good book containing pictures of the mediaeval cathedrals. Of course there was a dark side to the period, a terribly dark side, as indeed there is to every period, and nobody can complain when attention is drawn to it-even in broadcasts to children? but, when a teacher, speaking over the air to children who are compelled to listen, describes the dark side and nothing else, so serious a perversion of history invites

a protest.

HAROLD

MILLER

(Wellington).