As a noob asking from a place of curiosity, does “Medieval” mean anything outside of the Europe sphere of influence? Medieval evokes a certain imagery in my mind, rather than a time period. It feels weird and Eurocentric to refer to Asian countries in ~1200 as “Medieval” for example.

"Medieval" can sometimes be applied to places like China or India, but it's not used that way by historians. In general historians don't use the terms "Medieval" or "Dark Ages" much anymore, and if they do it's with qualifiers. For Europe "Post-Classical," "Early Middle Ages" or "Late Antiquity" are more often used refer to the earlier Middle Ages.

"Medieval" is certainly still used.[0] "Dark Age" is no longer used interchangeably with Medieval, however. This is because many now see the period starting from the High Middle Ages in Europe as directly leading to the modern period. Refering to the entire Medieval period as a Dark Age is to take a side in that argument.

[0]https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=Medieval&scisbd=1

When this came up a couple week ago, I found examples of people using "medieval Arabic", "Medieval Africa", and even more specifically "Medieval Somalia". See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35984909 for links.

These are used in modern scholarly writing, like "The Medieval Archaeology of Somaliland" from 2002 at https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.013.566 and "China in medieval Indian imagination: “China”-inspired images in medieval South Asia" from 2021 at https://doi.org/10.1017/S1479591421000176 .

However, as others have commented, just because people do use them isn't enough to say if that's the primary form to refer to that period of time.

The general term is the Post-classical Era.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-classical_history

Medieval refers to a specific European time period, I’m not sure what you expected.

> Minstrels were fixtures of European life in the Middle Ages, but though countless references to these entertainers exist in literature from this era, no clear records of an actual minstrel’s “repertoire,” meaning their act or set, has been identified—until now.

What’s not to like?

Also most of Europe had similar jokes both from books and trovadours.

He wrote, in French.