Joeseph Strayer.

I am not sure he was a military feudualism person (now I have had time to check).

I will go and see if I can find out.

Rich – as you imply hard to see the concept of the Paladin in the Classical “religions”, I know there is in role playing games (with Paladins of the various Gods), but not in history. The idea of the knight fighting for the cause of right (regardless of the odds) is a Christian concept (although there is the concept of the hero in classical literature – and it sometimes come close).

And it goes over into atheism also.

After all the main characters in the fiction of Ayn Rand are basically atheist Paladins.

Well forget the word “basically” – they are Paladins.

The place of religion in a culture may be one of those things. The place of religious convictions in medieval, early modern, and even nineteenth-century societies is hard to grasp now – when religion is practically dead in most of the modern world. (IMO. We see what’s left and it seems obtrusive – but we don’t grasp the level of religious activity of these earlier periods, which was much greater.)

Another thing is trying to relate the place of “religion” in polytheistic societies such as the classical age (or China and Japan) to “religion” in the European and Moslem sense. On the one hand, polytheistic “religions” did not have the sort of moral authority claimed by the Abrahamic religions. It would be absurd for Zeus to hand down commandments. But on the other hand, it’s clear that ancient societies believed very strongly in the supernatural, and spent vast sums to accommodate and display their “religious” convictions.

One of the leading scholars of the Middle Ages recently died – the leftists on wikipedia were full of the CIA connection.

Who?

Also, your comments are most interesting and enlightening–thanks.

It’s worth adding though that a perhaps more down to earth reason is simply that Classical/Mediaeval degrees were and still are to an extent populated, studied and taught by the sorts of people appreciated by the Whitehall establishment. That’s to say public school and Oxbridge educated. This actually might be changing with a massive growth in subjects like “Intelligence Studies” etc.

Call me a cynic, but I doubt such ‘professionalisation’ will actually result in better results.

It is not really lack of records that makes a scholar of the Middle Ages ideal for intelligence work – it is the experience of getting into a different mindset.

Clasical authors are like modern ones – the State can (basically) do what it likes, and religion is a matter of paying lip service.

In the Middle Ages people did not believe that “the law” was whatever the state said it was (and they were willing to KILL to back up this position). Canon lawyers taught that natural law trumped state law (the OPPOSITE of what Roman Imperial lawyers had taught) and it was not just natural law – TRADITION had a vast power also (and, and there is no paradox here, proves to be far more useful for progress than the arbitrary whims of the Emperors).

And most people (even very intelligent people) has a passionate belief in God.

Some student of the Classical period is not really goint to understand the passionate faith that (for example) Marxists have in Marxism.

Or understand the passionate faith that Islamists have in Islam.

Such a typical cynical student of the Classical period will assume these people do not “really” believe what they say they believer.

Or they will assume that these people are “stupid” and easy to defeat. The position of David Hume and co – cynical contempt for the religious.

On the contrary – such people are often highly intelligent.

To understand the minds of scholars and nobles of the Middle Ages requires a leap of understanding.

Mental flexibility.

And remember…..

It was the Middle Ages that had new inventions – new ways of doing things. Economic advance – and rising populations.

Whatever the Roman Empire may have started with – it was certainly (from the physical evidence) in DECLINE for centuries.

“You are King – but you can not do this, it is against the lawd of God and the traditions of man” would have been a meaningless statement under the Roman Empire.

And military logic meant that soldiers favoured the winner – who ever it was.

Fighting to the last man is not a habit of the Roman civil wars – where sworn loyality meant little or nothing.

Just as such things as following a Maid into battle because God had told her that she would liberate France, would have meant nothing to the Roman mind (or to a modern mind).

And, I repeat, if you make the assumption that such people are stupid – you bones will soon be bleaching in the sun.

They are not stupid.

Written records are incomplete – look for physical evidence when you can. Although for the Middle Ages Church records are not that bad.

It is even worse for the Classical period….

Which is why when people tell me “the Romans did not have…..” just because no written record mentions it, one must remember that only 1% of classical works survive.

“How do we stop the water system of Rome leaking?” asked one of the Popes.

But no one could answer him – the old knowledge had been lost. [one of the "Mad Max" Popes of the Dark Ages, Hadrian, built a wall around the small area of Rome that was still inhabited - but he misspelt the inscription on it, that was how bad things had got, the Pope and his advisers were functionally illiterate - a bit like me].

Once people knew – and then the new generations (trying to fit things back togehther again) did not know.

For example, we can build artillery (stone throwers and so on) from the Middle Ages – because it was based on mechancial principles we know.

But the “Roman artillery” you will be shown can not do the stuff that we know (by digging people up with bolts in them at X range) that we know Roman artillery did.

That is because the Romans relied on certain things they did to animal hair and gut – in making the ropes.

What things?

No idea.

5th century monks did not write it down (or if they did the works were not copied) so even in the Middle Ages people had to figure out new ways of doing things.

Remember perhaps the most common Roman book was the “Institutes of Gaius” the basic guide for law students.

We did not have a copy of that till the 19th century (when one discovered by accident – it was reused for a work on theology, and the old writing could still be made out).

The “Twelve Tables”? The basic foundation of law in the Roman Republic?

No one has got a copy of that. Everything we know about it is second hand (or, rather, hundreth hand).

And people want to specualte on what the Greeks and Romans knew about scientific subjects?

Where the number of copies of works written would have been far fewer?

And Saint Augustine said that such works were not worth copying out anyway…….

Not really the fault of Mad Max Popes – they tended to be decent sorts, busy fighting barbarians (trying to save what was left of civilisation). Saving works on, say, the history of the Etruscans or the principles of geology, was not high on their list of priorites (and the language used in such Greek and Latin works would havee been much to hard for them in any case, full of technical words that would have sounded like gibberish).

Some areas are relatively well known and attested such as Classical Athens or the First and Second Triumvirates and the transition to Imperial Rome. Other areas are extremely poorly attested, periods of Hellenistic history and the crisis of the Third Century have very little in the way of documentary evidence. There are Roman emperors who are little more than faces and names on coins.

I would say some areas of ancient History are more well known than the Middle Ages and vice versa but I’d hesitate to make a blanket statement on one being more known than the other.

A further point worth considering is that once you get into periods of history before the invention of the printing press it becomes very much an interdisciplinary mixture of archaeology and history. Archaeology depends much more on funding and certain areas are often unjustly neglected due to modern day unfashionability or even political considerations (I had a tutor who had once worked in Iran, who had been compelled to label anything found from Alexander onwards as “Post-Achaemenid” and who had been non too subtly encouraged to not find such things at all if it could be helped).

Suffice to say, many areas of Mediaeval and Ancient History are not very well known or understood through no fault of their own and no paucity of evidence.