In the 14th century, however, the literary moralist Petrarch (1304–74), fascinated with ancient Roman history and contemptuous of the time that followed it, including his own century, divided the past into ancient and new—antiquity and recent times—and located the transition between them in the 4th century, when the Roman emperors converted to Christianity. According to Petrarch, what followed was an age of tenebrae (“shadows”), a “sordid middle time” with only the hope of a better age to follow. Although Petrarch’s disapproval of the Christianized Roman and post-Roman world may seem irreligious, he was in fact a devout Christian; his judgment was based on aesthetic, moral, and philological criteria, not Christian ones. Petrarch’s limitless admiration for Rome heralded a novel conception of the European past and established criteria for historical periodization other than those of salvation history or the history of the church, empire, cities, rulers, or noble dynasties. His followers in later centuries focused primarily on the transformation of the arts and letters, seeing a renewal of earlier Roman dignity and achievement beginning with the painter Giotto (1266/67 or 1276–1337) and with Petrarch himself and continuing into the 15th and 16th centuries.
Petrarch, engraving.© Ancient Art & Architecture Collection
In the early 16th century, religious critics and reformers, including both the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus and the Protestant reformer Martin Luther, added another dimension to the new conception and terminology: the idea of an evangelical, apostolic Christian church that had become corrupt when it was absorbed by the Roman Empire and now needed to be reformed, or restored to its earlier apostolic authenticity. The idea of reform had long been built into the Christian worldview. This conception of the period between the 4th and 16th centuries was laid out in the great Protestant history by Matthias Flacius Illyricus, Centuriae Magdeburgensis (1559–74; “The Magdeburg Centuries”), which also introduced the practice of dividing the past into ostensibly neutral centuries. The Roman Catholic version of church history was reflected in the Annales Ecclesiastici (“Ecclesiastical Annals”) of Caesar Baronius (1538–1607), completed by Oderico Rinaldi in 1677. Thus, the historical dimension of both the Protestant and the Catholic reformations of the 16th and 17th centuries added a sharply polemical religious interpretation of the Christian past to Petrarch’s original conception, as church history was put to the service of confessional debate.
Petrarch’s cultural successors, the literary humanists, also used variants of the expression Middle Ages. Among them was media tempestas (“middle time”), first used by Giovanni Andrea, bishop of Aleria, in 1469; others were media antiquitas (“middle antiquity”), media aetas (“middle era”), and media tempora (“middle times”), all first used between 1514 and 1530. The political theorist and historian Melchior Goldast appears to have coined the variation medium aevum (“a middle age”) in 1604; shortly after, in a Latin work of 1610, the English jurist and legal historian John Selden repeated medium aevum, Anglicizing the term in 1614 to middle times and in 1618 to middle ages. In 1641 the French historian Pierre de Marca apparently coined the French vernacular term le moyen âge, which gained authority in the respected lexicographical work Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae latinitatis (1678; “A Glossary for Writers of Middle and Low Latin”), by Charles du Fresne, seigneur du Cange, who emphasized the inferior and “middle” quality of Latin linguistic usage after the 4th century. Other 17th-century historians, including Gisbertus Voetius and Georg Horn, used terms such as media aetas in their histories of the church before the Reformation of the 16th century.
The term and idea circulated even more widely in other historical works. Du Cange’s great dictionary also used the Latin term medium aevum, as did the popular historical textbook The Nucleus of Middle History Between Ancient and Modern (1688), by the German historian Christoph Keller—although Keller observed that in naming the period he was simply following the terminology of earlier and contemporary scholars. By the late 17th century the most commonly used term for the period in Latin was medium aevum, and various equivalents of Middle Ages or Middle Age were used in European vernacular languages. 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.
Voltaire, bronze by Jean-Antoine Houdon; in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia.Scala/Art Resource, New York
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.