If the author were not for the famous Italian philosopher, aesthetician, medieval scholar and novelist Umberto Echo, would we be puzzled when we saw the "Beauty of the Middle Ages" published by Yilin Publishing House?
From the moment we study world history, the textbooks we are exposed to tell us that the key word in the European Middle Ages was darkness. Under the shroud of "darkness", Europe's medieval feudal divisions, frequent wars, people's livelihood, and witchcraft prevailed... This has become the fixation of our memory of the Middle Ages, so at first sight of the famous scholar and writer we trust who has written a book called The Beauty of the Middle Ages, the fans here will pick up the book and read it after being surprised, to see what kind of beauty Umberto Echo has found in the dark Middle Ages.
To me, Umberto Echo is not an unfamiliar name, but only to the novelist Umberto Echo. I have read his Names of roses, Foucault pendulums, and Portolino, and I have read The Name of the Rose twice. Coincidentally, "The Name of the Rose" tells the story of a monastery in the Middle Ages. The story can be fictionalized, but as a medieval scholar, echoes arranged the schedule and venue for the main character of "The Name of the Rose", the monk William, but it is all based on it. I wondered what I had learned about the European Middle Ages as a student, which began with The Name of the Rose, but I understood better that no matter how provenance there was, the novel was, after all, a fictional work of literature. It seems to me too much to take it for granted now that long before writing The Name of the Rose, Echo had completed a monograph, The Journey of Beauty in medieval Europe. But can this "journey of beauty," called The Beauty of the Middle Ages, subvert the understanding of the European Middle Ages that has slowly entered our minds over the past few decades and is therefore becoming more and more solid?
Darkness is still one of the many colors of the European Middle Ages. In The Beauty of the Middle Ages, The Beauty of the Middle Ages, Symbolism and Fables, Echo describes the medieval scene he crawled through in the voluminous volume of material: "For both the city and the countryside, the 'Dark Ages' of the early Middle Ages were repressive: years of war, famine, plague, and dry days. Echo's description corroborates a book I've read before and a movie I've seen.
The book is the "Witch" written by the French scholar Jules Michelet more than 100 years ago. In this outstanding sociological work, Jules Michelet explores the origin of the witches who were hated in the European Middle Ages. Jules Michelet could certainly answer this question by stacking up materials, but the Frenchman seemed more willing to speak in terms of historical facts: Catherine Cartier, who was only 21 years old when she "slipped" out of the historical record. In her short life of 21 years, Catherine Cartier was tortured by the human world, and the demon who tormented her was Father Jihar - only because Catherine Cartier showed a different temperament from the girls at that time since childhood, Father Jihar transferred to Toulon, where Catherine Cartier lived, began to design a design to trick Catherine into losing herself to him, causing her to become pregnant, and then privately dispensed a potion to make Catherine abort, causing Catherine to die, and cut the old scars on Catherine's body to prevent her from healing, and then lied. This is the Witch Mark. Catherine, who was already very weak, inevitably behaved abnormally, and Father Jihar injected Catherine with a potion to anesthetize her nerves, causing Catherine's behavior to almost overlap with the image of the witch that the people believed at that time... There are no witches in the world, and Jules Michelet focuses on "Witches" and recreates how dark the European Middle Ages really were.
The movie is The Last Wizard Hunter. It's a feature film that travels through time to hunt down witches, so the whole movie seems a bit magical. However, the image restoration of the spread of the Black Death in the European Middle Ages before the beginning of the film is creepy to watch: in the vast snowy field, the male protagonist who has lost his wife and daughter leads a group of ragged survivors to starve in search of the witch who caused the disaster...
Umberto Echo
It is true that the European Middle Ages can be summarized in terms of the "Dark Ages", but our problem is that when reading the material of the European Middle Ages, we often stop the pace of continuing to explore after seeing the "darkness" and think that this is the Middle Ages. Umberto Echo's Beauty of the Middle Ages, through the "darkness", looks into the depths of the Middle Ages. What's in the depths of the Middle Ages? As long as we follow Echo's "Beauty of the Middle Ages" back to the Middle Ages with curiosity, we can see under the guidance of this medieval scholar that the people living in Europe at that time never simply lay down in the dark because of the constant wars, famines, and plagues in their lives. In response to the anxiety and extreme insecurity brought about by the Dark Ages, Echo concluded that "one of the methods proposed by society was the system of retreat, from which a stable, orderly, and peaceful social group emerged" (Beauty of the Middle Ages, p. 122).
The place associated with the hermitage, of course, was the church. Although Umberto Echo's fictional Name of the Rose tells the reader that the Middle Ages are a European history that connects the classical period and the modern era, people living in the Middle Ages cannot avoid common human problems, even in the most "stable, orderly, and peaceful" churches in the "Dark Ages", they will still let lies fly, calculate and murder because of conspiracies. However, the Middle Ages did not make the people who fell into darkness invisible to the footsteps of the ancestors of the classical period who sought beauty, thus losing the eyes that found beauty and the soul that appreciated beauty.
As a scholar, Umberto Echo certainly understood the need to support his views with artifacts and documents, and the artifacts he selected were the churches built in the Middle Ages that we can come across when we travel to Europe today. "The Beauty of Transcendence", "The Beauty of Proportion", "The Beauty of Light", "The Beauty of the Organism", etc., are some of the chapter titles of "The Beauty of the Middle Ages", as the name suggests, Umberto Echo uses a variety of angles of shape to beauty, sharing with us the medieval church buildings, the frescoes in the church, the sculptures inside and outside the church, and the stained glass embedded in the church buildings.
However, I think that the value of "Beauty in the Middle Ages" is by no means limited to the reader's ability to see the beauty of the Middle Ages under the guidance of Umberto Echo, so as to realize that beauty still exists and still happens even in the dark Middle Ages. What struck me most about "Beauty in the Middle Ages" was the story of Europeans living in the Middle Ages who worked hard to find out why beauty was beautiful.
In the third chapter, The Beauty of Proportions, Umberto Echo writes: "All medieval discourses on figurative art showed an ambition to raise figurative art to the same heights as music in mathematics. In these discourses, mathematical conceptions are translated as codes of practice and rules of composition, usually divorced from the matrix of cosmology and philosophy, but connected to it through a hidden undercurrent of taste and preference", while a passage quoted by Umberto Echo in the first chapter of the same book, "Aesthetic Sensibility in the Middle Ages", leads us to the early Middle Ages understanding of beauty, "the scholastic philosophers said that beauty is a property of God".
From "beauty is a property of God" to "wanting to raise figurative art to the same height as music in mathematics", looking back at the progress of people's understanding of beauty in the Middle Ages in the 21st century, you may feel that it is just a small step. Imagine what our aesthetic would have reached today without those who, in the dark Middle Ages, had been relentlessly searching for, following, and creating beauty. So, Umberto Echo's Beauty of the Middle Ages, who also contributed to the course of the beauty of the Middle Ages, erected a monument with these names inscribed on it: St. Thomas Aquinas, Victor Molte, Pseudo-Denisius, William of Auvergne, Alexander of Halles, Vincent of Beauvais...