Should the Middle Ages Be Abolished?
By Alexander Murray
Essays in Medieval Studies, Vol. 21 (2004)
Introduction: Medievalists who want to open up questions about “periods and boundaries” can do so with confidence that their material will not run out. The thousand-year-long, continent-wide world which we medievalists claim as ours is so full of awakenings, consolidations, collapses, movements, declines, reawakenings, and all the other buffers and points which articulate the historical model railway, that we can debate forever, without going outside the medieval period at all, just how and when these awakenings (and so on) began and ended. But any questions we put about these must be overshadowed by a greater one, about the “Middle Ages” as such. Was there really such a period? Are the “Middle Ages” what Ockham would have called a mere nomen as distinct from a res? Are they a mere mind-set (as we might put it), as distinct from an entity really there in history wie es eigentlich gewesen? And if so, in the interests of getting at that history, should the concept of “the Middle Ages” go? That is the question I shall address in this paper.
It is more than a question: it is a trial, its defendant a mind-set. And any trial begins by identifying the defendant. So here goes.
Click here to read this article from the University of Zadar
How you can Follow Us!