Brief History of The Medieval World || The Middle Ages In Modern Historiography

Enlightenment scorn and Romantic admiration

During the 17th and 18th centuries, a number of thinkers argued that Western Europe after the 15th century had surpassed even antiquity in its discoveries and technology and had thereby created a distinctively modern world. Their views, which were sharpened by Enlightenment critics of earlier European political and religious structures, did nothing to change the image of the Middle Ages. Voltaire, in his An Essay on Universal History, the Manners and Spirit of Nations from the Reign of Charlemaign to the Age of Lewis XIV (1756), savaged the Latin Christian and the reformed churches for their clerical obscurantism and earlier rulers for their ruthless and arbitrary use of force. Edward Gibbon, the English historian whose great work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) begins with events in late antiquity and ends with the fall of Constantinople (the capital of the Byzantine Empire) to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, categorically attributed the beginning of that very long “decline and fall” to “the triumph of barbarism and religion,” thus contemptuously characterizing the entire period from the 5th to the 15th century.

The Middle Ages in modern historiography

With the extraordinary growth of the academic discipline of history in the 19th century, the history of the Middle Ages was absorbed into academic curricula of history in Europe and the United States and established in university survey courses and research seminars. Journals of scholarly historical research began publication in Germany (1859), France (1876), England (1886), and the United States (1895), regularly including studies of one aspect or another of the Middle Ages. Historical documents were edited and substantial scholarly literature was produced that brought the history of the Middle Ages into synchronization with other fields of history. The study of the Middle Ages developed chiefly as a part of the national histories of the individual European countries, but it was studied in the United States as a pan-European phenomenon, with a focus after World War I chiefly on English and French history. The growing influence and prestige of the new academic and professional field of medieval history were reflected in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (“Historical Monuments of the Germans”), a research and publication institute founded in 1819 and still in operation in Munich, and in the eight-volume collaborative Cambridge Medieval History (1911–36). (The latter’s replacement, The New Cambridge Medieval History, began to appear in 1998.)