Looking back at our “unenlightened” past can lead to truly progressive ideas, writes Tom Hodgkinson

Greetings from Umbria where Victoria and I are on an Idler retreat, studying the music, art and philosophy of the Renaissance by day, and drinking and feasting in the evening.

The Renaissance is a strange term as it implies that prior to this “rebirth”, the European population was living in a sort of dark age. That’s obviously not true, as anyone who has visited the glories and wonders of Florence will surely recognise. The Middle Ages in fact saw an explosion of creative energies, in architecture, clearly (there are 44 surviving cathedrals in England) but also in art and music.

We heard this week from Sandy Burnett how a medieval monk invented tablature and notation for music, and that music was gloriously polyphonic, with vast heavenly choirs all singing different notes and harmonies. Business was arranged around the guild system, where the craftsmen and the owners were the same people. Usury, though practised, was frowned upon, and cities were self-governing communes, based on the Athenian model (but without the slaves).

There was technology too: historian Seb Falk has written a brilliant book called The Light Ages which describes amazing medieval machines, astrolabes and clocks and so on.

The system was by no means ideal: large swathes of the population of the medieval city states (the “popolo minuto”) worked for guilds rather than being members of the guilds, and to be sure, there was poverty, there were single mothers and there was violence in the streets. Most men carried a sword by their side.

But the culture was rich and imaginative and sophisticated. The Renaissance grew out of it, and so it would be true to say that the Renaissance could be seen as the flowering of the Middle Ages, but also the death of a great period in history.

This was certainly the view of William Morris and his circle, people like Rossetti and Burne-Jones, who called themselves the “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood”, because they were medievalists; they loved the art that came before Raphael, who lived from 1483 to 1520.

Being a medievalist, and consciously idealising the Middle Ages, was, for Morris and his mates, a way of attacking the dull utilitarianism and greed of his own age. Morris, whose Dad had made a fortune from his shares in Cornish tin mines, had certainly profited from this dull utilitarianism. Morris senior died when he was young, leaving William with a private income of £900 a year (which would be over £80,000 today).

But instead of going into the City himself, which might have been expected, Morris – whose nickname was “Topsy” – embraced Bohemia in the 1850s. His medievalism, says historian EP Thompson, was “a revolt against the world of the Railway Age, and the values of Gradgrind. It posed the existence, in the past, of a form of society whose values were richer than those of profit and capitalist utility.”

Later, in the 1890s, when he had become a confirmed socialist, Morris wrote: “Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilisation.”

But, paradoxically, this hatred of his own time and love of a bygone age made him into a true progressive. Morris moved Victorian civilisation forward artistically, politically and philosophically.

To go forwards, you sometimes need to go backwards.

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