 Hello, and welcome to Tan Academy's Medieval History series. I'm Mrs. Lewis, and it's my joy to be with you throughout this series. Whether you love history like I do, or you just know that it's a class that you have to take, I pray that through our time together, you will come to see the story behind the history we're studying together. And it's a story ultimately of love, a story of God's fidelity to His people. And it's exciting too, because truth be told, His people don't always behave in accordance with His loving will. Sometimes we do things that are actually contrary to His will. And that's part of the wonder of history too, to see how faithful God is, even when we behave badly. Before we start any work together, let's begin in prayer. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. O creator ineffable, who of the riches of thy wisdom did appoint three hierarchies of angels, and did set them in wondrous order over the highest heavens, and who did apportion the elements of the world most wisely. Do thou who art in truth the fountain of light and wisdom, dain to shed upon the darkness of my understanding the rays of thine infinite brightness, and remove far from me the twofold darkness in which I was born, namely sin and ignorance. Do thou who give speech to the tongues of little children, instruct my tongue, and pour into my lips the grace of thy benediction, give me keenness of apprehension, capacity for remembering, method and ease in learning, insight in interpretation, and copious eloquence in speech, instruct my beginning, direct my progress, and set thy seal upon the finished work, thou who art true God and true man, who livest and rainest world without end, amen. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. Now along with our time together, you'll also be reading the story of the church and the Old World and America. You'll also have some wonderful historical literature that will help to put some flesh and bones on the spine of the story that we'll be reading about and talking about together. Pope St. John Paul and Pope Emeritus Benedict had some really profound insights to share about the study of history, and I'd like to read a few of those quotes to you today. In the incarnation of the Son of God, we see forged the enduring and definitive synthesis which the human mind of itself could not even have imagined. The eternal enters time. The whole lies hidden in the part. God takes on a human face. God is not a distant hypothesis placed at the origin of the world, but is present in the life of man, of every man. History therefore becomes the arena where we see what God does for humanity. God comes to us in the things we know best and can verify most easily the things of our everyday life, apart from which we cannot understand ourselves. For the people of God, history becomes a path to be followed to the end so that the unceasing action of the Holy Spirit, the contents of revealed truth may find their full expression. For those who don't know God, the study of history is really a study of events, political things, rulers, maybe everyday common people, but it lacks the meaning that we can find in history as people of God. We know that God seeks to draw all people to himself. We know that sadly, sometimes those rulers and everyday people don't respond to his call and they don't know or they reject the ultimate end to which they are called by him. In our study of history, we will keep in mind the ultimate end. We will recognize the failings of some people even within our very church who fail to heed God's call, but we will also make sure that we are looking for individuals who stand as guiding witnesses of God's love, showing the way for us to model our own lives and follow him to our end. Now, to move from some of those lofty heights, and some of you might be thinking, oh my goodness, I'm drowning here, she's getting really deep. We're going to come back up to the surface here and talk about some of the basics of studying history together. Because all of human life occurs in time, it's important that we know how we can reference these periods of time when we're talking to one another, when we're reading historical texts. You might remember that earlier civilizations marked time often by the reign of a ruler, a Caesar, a pharaoh. The ancient Greeks marked their time based on the date of the first Olympic Games. And in the Roman Empire, they looked back to the date they chose as the founding of the city of Rome to mark their time. We have our own point of orientation when we're studying history, and it is the incarnation. When we look at history, the thousands of years before Christ was born, we designate those years BC, before Christ. And the years after, we designate AD, Onno Domini, the year of our Lord. Now, what's particularly important for you to keep in mind, and if you look at the graphic, you can see it very clearly, is that these years, from 0 to 99, the years before the incarnation, this would be the first century BC. And the same thing for the years after the incarnation, from 0 to 99 will be the first century AD. The years from 100 to 199 are part of the second century AD. Sometimes people mistakenly believe that because the first number in that century is a one, that it would be the first century. So I want to make that clear to you before we get started. And if you think about our own time, we're here together in the 21st century. But when we're writing our date, it doesn't start with a 2-1, it starts with a 2-0. And that's why. In our time together, we're going to be studying the first 13 centuries after the incarnation. We'll read about the explosive growth of the church in these early days following Pentecost. We'll follow the apostles in their travels. And we'll see how the early church in the days immediately after the apostles to defend and explain some of the truths of the faith that we would consider the most fundamental. We'll then see the building and the flowering of Christendom after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. We'll meet amazing men and women, saints like Dominic and Francis, who will help to guide us in our own lives. Now, you can probably hear that I'm getting a little excited because when I talk about history, I do get really excited. I'm a history nerd. It's the truth. I also have to tell you that there's so, so much more that we can discover except we don't have the time together. And so I want to encourage you beyond this series if there's any piece of a story that interests you or excites you, jot it down somewhere, write it down, take the time later to go and investigate that point because there is so much exciting truth, exciting adventure to history. When we're talking about history, it's not just a dry recitation or memorization of dates and names. We also need to take into account the where, where these things happen. Now, to some extent, they all happened here, but this isn't really how we think about the where of history, the geography. It's more likely we think about it like this. It's a nice flat map, and our brains can get wrapped around where things are, where the continents are, for instance, where the individual countries that we know in our day are located. But there's more to the study of geography as it relates to history than a dry map. How does geography affect history, you might ask? Oh, you didn't ask? No, I wasn't talking to you. It was the boy three states over from you. He asked, and for that reason, I'm going to answer. Thank you for asking. Geography affects history because think of yourself thousands of years ago, living in a tribe, and about a week's journey away is another tribe. Are you going to have any interactions with that tribe? Are you going to try and trade with them? Are you going to share stories or music or food? Well, that depends on geography. If the space in between your settlement and that other settlement looks like this, a nice flat plane, chances are really good that you'll come into contact with the people a week's journey away. Your languages over time might develop very similarly. Your cultures are going to develop pretty similarly. You'll intermarry. And at some point in time, you might look at yourselves more as one people than two distant settlements a week away. Now, it's also possible truth be told that if all that flat land is between you and another settlement, one tribe might get aggressive, and there might be warfare. One settlement might be wiped out in that war. But all of that is only likely because the landscape looks like that. Let's say, for instance, that the week's journey from your settlement to the next one looks more like this. Now, how likely would you be to even know that there's another settlement a week's journey away? What's the likelihood that anyone from your tribe would make that perilous journey across that mountain range to look and see if there are other people? The chances that you would trade with them pretty slim. In hundreds of years, your languages are going to have developed very differently. And so here you can see that geography would have a very real ramification for how these peoples would develop. And that's part of what we're going to study in our history together. Another reason that you'll want to know about geography, the place, is that so many of the countries you know on a modern map simply didn't exist then. Imagine that you went back in time to the 7th century and you asked someone how you would get to Germany. Well, that person wouldn't have any clue what you were talking about. They wouldn't know what Germany was, let alone where it was. Imagine, too, that someone from the past came to you and wanted to know where he could find St. Willbord. And then he told you, oh, he's evangelizing in Frisia. Would that help you? Probably not, because Frisia as a place name doesn't exist today. So it's important for you to get comfortable with all kinds of maps in order for you to know what places in the past translate into what place names in our time. It's also important to recognize that Germany, for instance, as a place, didn't exist in those early centuries, in part because people didn't think of themselves as belonging to such a large tract of land. More likely an individual saw himself or herself as belonging to the area of land on which he lived and maybe farmed. It might be that he or she looked at life and allegiance in terms of whoever the noble was who protected that land. It might be if the person lived near to where a king or queen lived that he or she might think in terms of a connection to that king or queen. But the idea of being a German, the idea of being a Frenchman under the King of France, that won't develop during this time. It takes quite a while to get to that point and it's important for us to keep that in mind in our study in history. Now, how do we keep all of this information together? I'm going to be reading textbooks, you say. I'm going to be listening to these videos, you say. I'm going to be reading literature that's also going to talk about some of the same places and people. How do I keep it all together? You're going to need to take good notes. It's a skill. It's something you can learn. It's something you can improve. So whether you already consider yourself a great note taker or if you feel like you couldn't find a main idea but if it had a neon sign around it, I promise you and in my years of teaching I've had the privilege of seeing it happen with students every year. Practicing note taking improves the skill. You will improve if you commit yourself to learning how to take good notes. Now, it's natural to ask yourself what constitutes good notes. How do I take those good notes? Some of that is individual. If you're a person who thinks in terms of full sentences and phrases, well, you might need to get used to thinking in smaller chunks but those words are still how you organize your thoughts. So you're going to want to take notes that will honor words and phrases but maybe you're not a words and phrases person. Maybe you're a picture person. So notes can have different looks. This method here is called the Cornell method of note taking. And as you can see, the paper is divided into sections before the student even comes to class. Certain things are written at certain times in those sections. This portion here, you'll notice, is written entirely after class. So when you finish your video for you, this would be blank and it would only be later that you would go in and say, okay, after listening to Mrs. Lewis and everything she had to say, these are the most important points. This is where I'm going to summarize the information. But if you're that person who thinks in pictures and not really in words or phrases, there's note taking for you too. This might look like a nightmare for you if you're a picture person. Sketch notes is just one option for a graphic representation of information that might appeal to you. As you can see, it uses lots of pictures. There's opportunity for coloring. One of my children thinks graphically. And for her, the idea of just having a black or a blue ink pen while she takes notes, not going to work. On her desk, it's a party of colors with all of the markers and the colored pens that she needs. And if that's the case for you, make your note page look something like that. It doesn't have to work for me. It doesn't have to work for one of your brothers or sisters. It has to work for you. And it will make it so much easier for you when it's time to study for a test. If the method that you've used is one that you're comfortable with. Now I'm going to make a caveat to that. You need to practice. You need to commit to one of these kinds of systems. And you need to stick with it for a while before you tell yourself, I don't think this works for me. And I want you to promise me that you'll do that before we get together again. So that when we start, you have a notebook and a pencil or pen or a whole host of colored markers ready for that study time. It's time for us to close now. And we will do that in the same way that we'll do it each time we get together. We will pray a glory be giving glory to God our Father who is so faithful as all of history unfolds and calls us to himself. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen.