"I think the whole period of the Middle Ages is done a great disservice in the popular consciousness, even the educated popular consciousness, because our image of the era is basically the era as seen through the very self-interested eyes of the post-medieval period (up through Victorian England!), which tried to view itself as the Super-Awesome Inheritor of Antiquity (which requires that everything between antiquity and them be denigrated), completely unaware that its only thought moved within a framework wholly established in the Middle Ages by the Schoolmen (and indirectly by the Arabs). All the bullshit about how the scholastics supposedly all bowed down before arguments to authority and Aristotle, which is obvious bullshit if you actually read them. Though to be fair when I read e.g. Hobbes I get the feeling that he was more talking about the professors in England of his era, who may have been crap for all I know."
All my reading and research in middle ages, high middle ages, and renaissance completely supports this view. A lot of the "Renaissance" was a counterrevolution.
Joanna