They weren't backwards necessarily because of the church but because this is where Europe was developmentally at this time. The prince might be illiterate but the monk was not. The Christian leaders like monks were the most educated and the most dedicated seekers of knowledge of anyone in the kingdom.

I thought christianity during this time didn't stifle knowledge - this was done by the rich (And the fact that warring, feudal society can't devote the time it should to higher learning). The class you were born into determined who you were.

Inequality was a part of the natural order: the life of serfs was little better than those of animals, while the knight's code of chivalry was based more on caste solidarity than morality. In the final programme ( Power), Professor Bartlett lays bare the brutal framework of the medieval class system. The medieval dead shared the world with the living: the cult of the saints, encounters with the dead, and visions of the next world were all seen as proof of a two-way traffic between this world and the next. In the third installment ( Belief), the supernatural comes under the spotlight. Yet this was the era that gave birth to the idea of romantic, or 'courtly' love. The Church preached hatred of the flesh, promoted the cult of virginity and condemned woman as the sinful heir to Eve. In the second episode ( Sex), he unearths remarkable evidence of the complex passions of medieval men and women.

But as the Middle Ages grew to a close, it became a place to be mastered, even exploited. In the first programme, Knowledge, he explores the way medieval man understood the world - as a place of mystery, even enchantment. One of the world's greatest authorities on the Middle Ages, Professor Robert Bartlett of St Andrew's University, investigates the intellectual landscape of the medieval world.

Going medieval documentary