内容简介

Literary medievalism played a vital role in the construction of the French Enlightenment. Starting with the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, it influenced movements leading to the Romantic rediscovery of the Middle Ages, and helped to shape new literary genres, from the epistolary novel to the fairy tale and opera. Indeed, the dominant mode of the early Enlightenment, galanterie, was of medievalist inspiration. Moreover, the academic study of medieval texts underlay modern ideals of scholarship, institutionalized at the royal academies. The Middle Ages polemically functioned as an alternative site, allowing authors to rethink their age's political and social ideologies. At the centre of these debates was the notion of historical progress. Was progress possible, as the philosophes held, or was human history a process of degeneration, with the Middle Ages as a lost Golden Age? From the re-evaluation of the medieval thus emerged not only the seeds of a new poetics, but also the central questions that preoccupied Enlightenment thinkers from Montesquieu to Rousseau. This book shows how, in order to understand the aesthetic and intellectual transformations that marked modernity, it is essential to examine how this period conceived of the past, and particularly those "Dark Ages" that served as the defining foil for the modern Age of Light. Alicia C. Montoya is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Literary and Cultural Studies at the Radboud University Nijmegen.

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豆瓣评论

  • 海上心史
    写学术史真的是深入泥潭,但真的也能逼着作者去细细地读每一本书。中世纪形象的演变有一个从文学到历史的过程,从17到19世纪也是学科专业化的过程。这本书核心都是法国的梳理,非常清晰透彻,另外,我觉得低地国家倒是也可以特别关注。尤其是从苏格兰启蒙历史学派以来,关于贸易、异质文明的论述反过来影响到了对中世纪在欧洲历史地位的界定问题。以历史时间为核心,但是能串起来,虽然范式感不是特别强,但绝对是本清晰透彻的好书,让我对启蒙时代的中世纪观念也有了新认识了。09-09

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