Abstract
The success of the >Middle Ages< as a concept is a child of the Enlightenment. During the second half of the eighteenth century, a new way of thinking about >history< led to the notion that there had been a time in European history that was much more holistic, was static in terms of social coherence, and was based on strong religious beliefs: the Middle Ages. This concept served the need to demonstrate how reason and progress, which had allegedly been suppressed by religious intolerance and the >feudal< system of the distant past, had become dominant at the beginning of the early modern era (in German, die frühe Neuzeit or simply Neuzeit; whereas the German term die Moderne refers to modernity in a stricter sense of the word, i.e. the era from the late Enlightenment until today). The critique of the Enlightenment in the context of >Romantic< movements brought about a new concept of the >Middle Ages<, now seen in a positive light as a period of wholeness, harmony and a stable social and moral system. The main purpose of the article is to ask what both the >Enlightened< and >Romantic< concepts of the Middle Ages meant for the emergence of medieval studies in many fields of research. The argument is focused on the development of historiographical meta-narratives during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that put emphasis not on the quintessential otherness of the Middle Ages but on continuities.
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