Medieval

Etymology

A 19th-century coinage from Latin “medium aevum,” “the middle age” (“medius,” middle, plus “aevum,” age). The very name is a backhanded label: Renaissance thinkers cast these centuries as a mere middle stretch between the glories of antiquity and their own revival of them. The slang use of “medieval” to mean brutal or backward carries that same old bias.

adjective · /meh-dee-EE-vul/
Relating to the Middle Ages, the roughly thousand-year European period between antiquity and the Renaissance (about the 5th to 15th centuries).
What it names
A whole era, but its casual use as an insult also shows how one age’s self-image can be smuggled into a supposedly neutral word.
Example
The manuscript’s gold-leaf illustrations are a marvel of medieval craft.
Related idea
Distinguish it from feudalism, the social and economic system common in the period — medieval names the whole era, while feudalism names one of its defining structures.