Is Lenin’s Lace Led

Most historians in the past two hundred years have assumed the inevitable progress of man and handled their facts accordingly. But the idea of inevitable progress has run into some trouble: men like Raymond de Roover in the United States and M. M. Postan in England are drawing aside some of the fables which surround the social history of the Middle Ages (especially as it relates to the Renaissance). The painstaking factual enquiries which are now rescuing certain aspects of medieval life from the assumptions and prejudices of the Enlightenment indicate that the spectacular revival of Europe during the Middle Ages was followed by slump and depression.

Two Yale scholars, A. S. Lopez and H. A. Miskimin, in a belligerent attempt to overcomes academic resistance to uncomfortable facts, have recently published an article called simply “The Economic Depression of the Renaissance.” Professor Lopez says that at a 1954 meeting of the American Historical Association, “my comments on what I then believed (and still believe) to be the basic economic trend of the Renaissance ‘elicited lively discussion,’ which is a polite understatement of the fact that I narrowly escaped lynching.”

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Noel Stock

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Most historians in the past two hundred years have assumed the inevitable progress of man and handled their facts accordingly. But the idea of inevitable progress has run into some trouble: men like Raymond de Roover in the United States and M. M. Postan in England are drawing aside some of the fables which surround the social history of the Middle Ages (especially as it relates to the Renaissance). The painstaking factual enquiries which are now rescuing certain aspects of medieval life from the assumptions and prejudices of the Enlightenment indicate that the spectacular revival of Europe during the Middle Ages was followed by slump and depression.

Two Yale scholars, A. S. Lopez and H. A. Miskimin, in a belligerent attempt to overcomes academic resistance to uncomfortable facts, have recently published an article called simply “The Economic Depression of the Renaissance.” Professor Lopez says that at a 1954 meeting of the American Historical Association, “my comments on what I then believed (and still believe) to be the basic economic trend of the Renaissance ‘elicited lively discussion,’ which is a polite understatement of the fact that I narrowly escaped lynching.”