Perhaps an over-diligent attempt to recognize the existence of late antiquity?
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Replying to @AdmiralHip @merovingianist
I love historical periodisation fights as much as anyone. Late antiquity is a fluid concept depending upon region, but, goddam, if 9th Century continental Europe isn’t in the EMA then I don’t know if the terminology has much purpose. Saying this as a layperson obviously.
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Replying to @stmarnock69 @AdmiralHip
To be honest I would cut it off much earlier myself. I just know there are some interpretations that push it that late. (I can't think of Charlemagne as late antique, for example.)
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Replying to @merovingianist @AdmiralHip
I was in the middle of composing a tweet about that! Ex post facto designations of time, place and peoples can be useful IMHO but can veer into parlour game territory if they aren’t viewed with requisite humour and skepticism. No-one in Heraclius’ Constantinople thought of
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themselves as “Byzantine” and I’m pretty sure no-one alive before the Early Modern Era (see what I did there) conceived of themselves as living in the Antiquity/Early Mediaeval European world. I do love the serious work that underpins the nomenclature.
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Replying to @stmarnock69 @merovingianist
Okay so my point about periodisation is more that we can’t delineate a change in eras to a year or even a 50 year period. There is gradual change over time and it varies country to country. But the early medieval period flat out did not start in 900.
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Even making a late antique argument, which still undermines the idea of “tribal” IMO, I really don’t think it can apply to Western Europe after 600, if we wanted to be super generous. I think the EM period could start much earlier though.
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But yeah no one thought of themselves as medieval, or ancient, or whatever. But they also didn’t think of themselves as “tribal”. The idea of kingship is rooted in the Iron Age, imo, in Ireland, so we shouldn’t be calling them Earls or Chiefs in the 9th c. They were kings.
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Replying to @AdmiralHip @stmarnock69
I've noticed debates over periodisation combining and recombining in really weird ways lately in the popular realm. Almost like people have been picking up bits and pieces and assembling it into a Franken-timeline for the medieval period.
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Maybe, but a lot of people really just don’t know what medieval means.
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Replying to @AdmiralHip @stmarnock69
Racking my brain to try and remember where this started, but there is a (goofy) interpretation that we don't have "medieval" until we have "feudal" (which is objectively ridiculous for so many reasons, obviously). But that might be at work in the game's timeline design.
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Replying to @merovingianist @stmarnock69
That is probably where they get this from but calling it early medieval means that they heard the phrase but don’t know what it means, because the tooltip says it means leaving the Dark Ages. Like, no.
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