Example research essay topic: Impact Of Western European Culture - 1,677 words

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Impact of Western European Culture After the time of dark ages the organization of political power was still fundamentally ancient. Power in ancient society was imposed from above -- based on the unlimited exercise of protests. In the aftermath of The Feudal Revolution, the exercise of power was re-organized around rituals of reciprocity so that social relations would come to be mediated by contractual obligations which were still unequal but essentially unlike what had existed in late antiquity. The cornerstone of feudal society was the revolution in combat technology.

This transformation in the means of violence had made mounted knights the rulers of others. After the passing of the Justinian pandemic and Charles Martel's victory at the Battle of Poitiers, which halted the Moslems advance in 732, a new society began to take shape in the northwestern region of Europe. Feudalism developed from a military revolution. The new warfare was based on the mounted horseman's massive advantage over the foot soldier. Unorganized ground troops were smashed by the cavalry's shock force. The stirrup enabled the horseman to concentrate the combined force of weight and speed at the point of impact, at the end of his lance, radically enhancing his advantage.

Around 1300, living in extended families or as unmarried domestic servants, they were numerous enough to account for the feeding, clothing, and employment of a very substantial proportion of the population without reference to the market. Extended families, indeed, were so organized, if that is the word, that members who were kept alive in this way were chronically underemployed. These people were a reserve, adding nothing to the wealth of the community as the market measured such things. What they subtracted from it in order to survive, they subtracted from their families and neighbors in ways which the market was not sensitive enough to register. When famines and the plague struck, they took the places of those who had perished, in an orderly succession that left the world of markets and land tenure virtually undisturbed by the losses the community had sustained. The pre-plague period is often cited for the Malthusian dynamic of relative overpopulation which was so great as to push the death-rates to a punishing height.

Historians suggest that there was some connection between poverty, malnutrition, and mortality from plague, neither is able to explain what that linkage might have been. The richer members of the peasantry did not live in more hygienic surroundings, nor were their bodies kept cleaner. The very nature of the plague was that it did not respect persons. There was, in point of fact, no connection between malnutrition, poverty, and death from disease. The Black Death carried off rich and poor, noble and commoner, prelates and parishioners. There is little evidence to suggest that anyone -- rich or poor -- was especially knowledgeable concerning the nature of the plague or the mode of its transmission.

In the culture of the times, it was seen as a sign of divine warning or even judgment on a sinful people. The impact of plague mortality was electrifying, bewildering, and terrifying. Yet, while many died, others survived. Our historical record is inadequate to discover the reasons for resistance to infection and mortality -- or both. The effect of the plague, acting in combination with other forces of social disintegration, tended in fact to polarize society towards strenuous religiosity on the one hand and religious dissidence on the other.

The culture of the time is characterized by a heightened tension between the two. This disoriented response to the plague was of profound significance because it turned Western culture inward by deepening anxiety, guilt, and introspection. In so doing, it led to novel forms of religious experience and generalized some psychological characteristics that hitherto had been confined behind the monastic walls and that came into contact with secular society only through the agency of the mendicant orders. By the end of Henry IIs reign -- unexpectedly and absolutely unintentionally -- England possessed not only a bureaucratic system of full-time royal justices but also a revolutionary, new interpretation of rights which pried the tenant loose from his obligations to his lord by establishing a property relationship between a tenant and his tenement. The royal law had become institutionalized royal authority. The royal law was to be the umpire governing disputes between lords and tenants.

But who was to govern the umpire? The Magna Carta (1215), then, was a response to nobles desires to put the king under restrictions similar to those under which the king's court put them. The primacy of royal law was a precondition for the development of the theory of individual ownership by which The ten urial system converted the villagers into tenants, and the theory of the law placed the freehold of most of the lands of the manor in the lord. In the affairs of state appeared the Magna Carta, the establishment of England's Parliament, and Bractons collection of laws, which became the foundation of modern common law. Magna Carta is the supreme, but not the only example in this period, of successful resistance by the barons to a king who ruled in defiance of custom and their wishes. Commercial prosperity had given barons wealth and wealth had given them power -- all thanks to Magna Carta.

The strength of the towns lay in their economic organization as centers of trade. Magna Carta did much more than defined with precision the obligations of feudal society. To some degree all classes shared in its benefits. In the early middle Ages there was not much heresy simply because there were few thinkers and people blindly accepted what they were taught. To the medieval mind skepticism in the modern sense was unknown. Dogmatism was rampant; hence there was little or no toleration.

Yet at times, strange to say, the Church was more tolerant than either the state or the people. In the later Middle Ages, however, with the general intellectual awakening which crept over Europe, there appeared a surprisingly large amount of frank and radical criticism of the fundamental doctrines, constitution, administration, practices, and officials of the Church. The period of the Babylonian Exile and Great Western Schism saw the rise of individual heretics all over Europe, and the appearance of powerful heretical movements like those led by Wiclif in England and Huss in Bohemia. Dangerous discussions were heard on all sides and among all classes of society. Nearly all the evils in the Church: the corruptions of the clergy high and low; simony and immorality were attributed to heresy. The consistent Catholic has no defense of the corruption that had crept into the Church.

The only question in the Catholic mind is whether such a moral motive should have led to revolt and schism. The effect seems indeed much greater than the cause. The early Protestant seemed to seek revision of dogma as well as reformation of morals within the Church. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the numerous pamphlets were replete with coarse and flippant wit at the expense of the Pope, clergy, and Church; but everybody laughed and enjoyed the keen thrusts.

Mere criticism, however severe, and the demands for the correction of abuses, did not constitute heresy. Indeed, one might say that the Church criticized itself. It was only when men made an attack on the fundamental doctrine and authority of the Church, or repudiated them, that the question of heresy arose. In an age when leadership and lordship were intertwined, the Church's innovations in legal practice transformed the conduct of civil society. Not only did this provide normative pacification, confirming property and market relations, but the growth of canon law also provided an alternative to violence as a technique for organizing secular life.

It was in conjunction with this innovation in the technology of knowledge that universities were founded to instruct clerks in the legal dialectic. Begun in 1087, the University of Bologna was the preeminent institution for legal training; it had thousands of students, as did a series of other great universities which were soon established across the length and breadth of Western Europe. A new kind of man -- the intellectual -- emerged in the West: the cathedral schools were lists, the scene of intellectual exploits that were as thrilling as military exploits and, like them, prepared the combatants to take on the world. The intellectual awakening in Italy undermined the Medieval Church and the Papacy by a deadly criticism, destructive and not constructive, of the entire category of ecclesiastical evils and of the very foundations on which the Church was built. The intellectual awakening of Europeans was followed by stressing the right of men to think for themselves about things religious as well as irreligious and to live normal lives in a real world. The skepticism and indifference to spiritual values became prevalent among the humanists and had an impact on the development of science.

Universities, like cathedrals and parliaments, are a product of the Middle Ages. The occasion for the rise of universities was a great revival of learning, not that revival of the thirteenth fourteenth and centuries to which the term is usually applied, but an earlier revival, less known though in its way quite as significant, which historians now call the renaissance of the twelfth century. So long as knowledge was limited to the seven liberal arts of the early Middle Ages, there could be no universities, for there was nothing to teach beyond the bare elements of grammar, rhetoric, logic, and the still barer notions of arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music. The achievements of Western society were made possible because of the intellectual gifts it received from the pagan Greeks, the Byzantine Christian Greeks, and the civilization of Islam. Although reason was valued in these civilizations, it was consciously esteemed by a relatively small number of scholars who were never sufficiently influential to give reason the intellectual standing that it would receive in the medieval West.

The West did what no other society had previously done -- it institutionalized reason in its universities.

Research essay sample on Impact Of Western European Culture