A READER WRITES: “I thought the middle ages started with the crowning of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope on Christmas Day, 800 AD.”

See, this is why the questions below (see post re Dante as the Fonz) are so fascinating. Which event you fix on as the beginning of the Middle Ages says a lot about whether you think they were simply a plunge into darkness, an intermission between the ancient and modern worlds, or whether they had a positive and vivid identity in their own right; whether the conflicts and collusions of Church and state are the biggest story of the era; etc. Different possible starting- and stopping-points shed light on different aspects of the time. The point is not so much to pick one, as to show how different emphases yield different beginnings and endings–and how our “sense” of when things began or ended reveals our assumptions, or perhaps reveals insights about the period that we haven’t yet articulated.

So send ’em in!