Le Moyen Âge: passés recomposés et (in)disciplines
The Middle Ages: Composed Pasts and the Lack of Discipline(s)

Author(s): Marie Blaise
Subject(s): Theoretical Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, French Literature, Philology
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Middle Ages; 19th century; orders of knowledge; literature; history
Summary/Abstract: Between flagrant contradictions and successive denials, scholars and artists, unequally, have been constructing the idea of the Middle Ages since the 16th century. Generations were derogatory of the Dark Ages, or the “middle age”, and unflattering texts by Enlightenment philosophers are well known. In the dawn of the 19th century, the idea of Middle Ages appears as both a symptom and a privileged locus for the study of the ruptures and concordances between Classical and Romantic conceptions as, in the mist of the French Revolution, the paradigms that governed history no longer hold. During all the 19th century, reconstructing the Middle Ages blurs the borders between the various orders of knowledge and the new academic disciplines, and opens a via regia to the complex reassessment of literature. Focusing on the choice of the Middle Ages as an “historical other”, this article comments on these disputes in order to assert that, if the medieval period has always been the result of an a posteriori construction, it is as a part of the rise of modernity.

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