history of Europe

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.

But, as Gibbon’s own work showed, not only had the term and the often pejorative idea of the Middle Ages been shaped in the 16th and 17th centuries, but so had the critical and technical standards of modern historical scholarship. Some Enlightenment thinkers even became interested in earlier periods of European history. Their attraction to the Middle Ages paralleled the respect for and interest in the period shared by many ideologically conservative rulers, nobles, magistrates, and churchmen. But the historians also began to apply critical techniques to their investigation of the Middle Ages. The new scholarship on the period was animated in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by historians imbued with ethnic-national sentiment and with a conception of historically “ethnic” communities—especially in Germany and England—that lacked a recognized past (or had only a peripheral past) in traditional histories of the Greco-Roman world.

During the Romantic era, an affectionate and sentimentalized portrait of the Middle Ages emerged that was usually no more accurate than the polemical characterizations of Enlightenment writers. Such views contributed to the myth that 19th-century nation-states were composed of ethnic groups that had remained unchanged and had occupied the same territory for long periods (or had once occupied territory that was now inhabited by other nation-states). These arguments became powerful and dangerous political forces in the 19th and 20th centuries, although research in the late 20th century dismissed them as political fantasies.

Not all 19th-century historians were appreciative of the Middle Ages. Although the French historian Jules Michelet at first praised the Middle Ages as the time of the birth of France, his increasing political liberalism led him to shift his admiration to the 16th century, virtually coining the term Renaissance in the process of appropriating it for France. In 1860 the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt published his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, a work as widely read and influential as that of Michelet. Despite Romantic nostalgia and increasingly disciplined scholarship, the work of Michelet and Burckhardt served to fix the opposition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in the modern mind, generally to the disadvantage of the former. These views were sharpened by 19th-century anticlericalism, especially anti-Roman Catholicism, although they were countered by equally learned Catholic apologists.