As it has been said, far from being an “age of darkness,” the Middle Ages were filled with light perhaps in greater measure than any subsequent era of human history. Not only was the question of the nature of light an issue that preoccupied philosophers and theologians as different as Robert Grosseteste and St. Bonaventure, and artists like Dante, this age knew “lights” in the afterglow of which we still live today, whether we recognize it or not: e.g. the light of Classical Antiquity—whether in seclusion in monasteries in the Latin West until the 12th century or in the busy cities of the Greek East, like Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria; the light of the university culture from the 12th century onwards, which produced the great summas and men like Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus and Meister Eckhart; the light of gothic cathedrals which we can still admire today and which have little comparable architecture that measures up to it; the light of manuscript illuminations at which the men of those times so excelled; the light of paintings such as those in a small church in Lohja, in Finland, or those that issued from the hands of Giotto, Cimabue, Fra Angelico and Andrei Rublev; but above all, they knew the light of the transfigured and risen face of Christ, which bore fruit in charity and faith.

In fact, this last point reminds us of the astonishing contradiction that produced the Middle Ages and, according to some scholars, its dissolution: the mixture of the immiscible—no, not the two natures that coexist in the hypostasis of Christ—, of divine thoughts and aspirations and the pragmatism of worldly concerns that is the alliance of the Gospel and secular power inaugurated by the conversion of Constantine. That defining moment meant the accommodation by the Church of the worldly power of princes. The movement that issued from the overthrow of Thrones and Principalities found itself bound to other thrones. We could ask—and we can certainly wonder—what would have happened otherwise. Could the light of that lightning event have reached deeper? We will never know. As it happens, instead the memory of the light of that lightning lived on in the lights of countless candles that illuminated the equally countless sheets of parchment as writers wrote and artists painted such masterpieces of art and spirit as the Lindisfarne Gospels.

So yes, the Middle Ages were a time about which it is hard to make up our minds. In them coexist great light and beauty and also the gruesome splendour of all the ills of a fallen world, as The Canterbury Tales so well testify. Only The Cloud of Unknowing or the Christ Pantocrator from St. Catherine’s monastery on Mount Sinai can help us be less mindful of the Justinianic Plague or the Hundred Years War. But then again, can we really look down on them, we moderns who live in the shade of the Holocaust, the Holodomor and the Armenian Genocide and whose experience of fighting COVID is so mixed? Probably not.

The Middle Ages were complex, and in them humans went on being human, capable of great sanctity—remember the likes of Maximos the Confessor, the Desert Fathers and Francis of Assisi—but also of great cruelty—think of the Nika riots and of Emperor Justinian or of Empress Irene, who blinded and killed her own son. But they were also fascinating and have had a way, ever since the 19th century—think of the Pre-Raphaelites, of William Morris or of J. R. R. Tolkien’s work—, of inhabiting the modern imagination and of drawing some of us irresistibly to them.

The following essays and translations testify to what we might call “the medieval achievement” and to the intellectual vitality it still has today, and to the curiosity it arouses and the spiritual nourishment we can derive from it. They show us a doorway into the hidden gems, mysteries, tragedy and glory about which the great majority of us still know too little about. I want, therefore, to thank all contributors to this edition, from the depth of my heart, for entrusting their work to me and to Forma de Vida, and for being such good guides into this epoch of paradoxes and enduring appeal. With them, the reader will travel from Iceland to the Arab Caliphate, from England to Japan, from Portugal to Cappadocia and beyond. Through these contributions we can almost hear the voices of those extraordinary men and women; and, as Charles Moseley wisely says, we should do them the courtesy of listening.