Why is it called "The Middle Ages" and "Medieval History"?

Nice question, bollinger, and I'm glad you've asked it. Friends have asked me this one before, and I actually happen to know the answer to it. The answer is that the two words are, in fact, the same words, in different languages, sort of.

You see, the word "Medieval" is derived originally from the Latin words "medium" and "aevum". Translated to English, those two words mean "Middle" and "Ages". The term "Medieval" is preferred by many historians because, at the time that it entered general usage in the English language, the term was in heavy usage in the scientific and intellectual communities.

Even as recently as my grandmother's adolescence, the subject of Latin was still emphasized in many U.S. Schools (she learned it in grade school), and for much of the time between the early Christian-era and the present day, a person unlearned in Latin was considered not to be fully educated, and was not taken at all seriously in the scientific community. It remains in vogue in the scientific community to use Latin rather than vernacular languages in classifying subject matter.(Case in point, every plant, animal, and insect on the planet actually has a Latin name. Like in the beginning of Road Runner/Wily Coyote cartoons, only not actually a joke.

Another example is the name of diseases, such as, for instance, Encephalitis or Syphilis, or the names of parts of anatomy, such as the femur, tibia, and appendix. ) The period of history stretching from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the rise of Humanism and the Renaissance is called the Middle Ages because it represents a transition between the glory and enlightenment of the classical world and the glory and enlightenment of the various Renaissances. The term actually didn't develop during the period of time it describes at all, but actually came into usage in the first decade of the 17th century, so we see that it was a term invented by Renaissance-era thinkers who were actually looking back at the period before and seeking to describe this period of approximately 1000 years of relatively little technological and philosophical innovation (certainly, a lot was accomplished in the Middle Ages, but the amount pales in comparison to the contributions to culture and technology which were made during the Classical Era, i.e.

Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Galen, Pythagoras, Cicero, Livy, Herodotus et all, and the Renaissance Era, represented by such brilliant minds as Da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Erasmus, Luther, Newton, Keppler, Brahe, Copernicus, Gallileo, Locke, and Rousseau, et all) that occurred in between two "Golden-Age" type eras.Wow. That might just be the longest sentence I've ever written. Maybe I've got a shot at the world record.

:p.

The Middle Ages is the noun form. Medieval story is an adjective use, and "Medieval is used as the adjective form of "middle ages". Me·di·eval (mē′dē ē′vəl, mid′ē-; mi dē′vəl) adjective of, like, characteristic of, or suggestive of the Middle Ages Etymology.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.