What we call the Middle Ages is the period between the deposition of the last sovereign of the Western Roman Empire, Romulus Augustulus (476, 5th century), until the conquest of the city of Constantinople by the Turks (1453, 15th century), putting an end to the Empire Byzantine.
This period, due to the numerous territorial invasions, frequent wars and wide intervention of the Church, was known by the Renaissance in the 16th century as the “Dark Ages”, the “Age of Faith” or the “Thick Night gothic". The term "Middle Ages" comes from the Latin medium aevo. During the fifteenth century, humanism divided Latin into three categories: Classical Latin, Barbarian Latin, and Humanist Latin. But between Classical Latin and its rediscovery, there was a Latin that escaped the standards of Classical Antiquity, called middle latinites. The medieval expression, period comprised between the 5th and 15th centuries, came from this Latin.
In the 16th century some thinkers theorized the Middle Ages as a decadent period. A phase of history in which, due to religious interference, ignorance predominated. In the following century the Middle Ages began to have its value recognized. Europe was going through a period known as Romanticism, a time when sensitivity arose. Romantics sought a national identity and a closer relationship with the past in order to better understand their present.
But it was in the 20th century that the Middle Ages were recognized as a period of discoveries that transformed our environment. Besides being the origin of our miscegenation (through the mixture of values of the ancient society with the Germanic peoples), according to Jacques Le Goff (in his book “Towards a new concept of the Middle Ages”. Lisbon: editorial Estampa, 1980, p. 12.), it was in the Middle Ages that modern society emerged, which created "the city, the nation, the State, the university, the mill, the machine, the time and the clock, the book, the fork, the garment, the person, the conscience and, finally, the revolution".
The Contemporary Age sought (and seeks) to investigate facts without judging them. History evolved, no longer favoring biographies and elites, to explore customs, beliefs, parties, everyday life, among others. In 1929, in France, in order to study a “New History”, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febrve created a magazine that reformulated our historiography and influenced a group of French historians to study the way of thinking of the men. The “History of Mentalities”, as it is known, examined little explored literary, archeological and artistic sources referring to the Middle Ages and was responsible for its new concept.
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By Demercino Junior
Graduated in History
