Moderne i suvremene predodžbe srednjovjekovlja – anakronija između bajke i horora

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The paper reviews modern and contemporary images of the Middle Ages with emphasis on popular culture in the form of selected cases from literature, cinematography and video games in the context of the notion of historical anachronism. Erroneous statements that antedate or misplace events, objects or people basically constitute an “innocent” anachronistic transgression, which can be easily rectified using verifiable data. However, faulty projection of a set of features or characteristics to an age which did not know them represents a far more dangerous fallacy because it opens the question of interpretation – and interpretations vary. To understand past realities it is necessary to uncover how past people understood their own reality and why did they what they did. Projecting contemporary meanings onto the past, in this case the Middle Ages, is a genuinely perilous anachronism which is very difficult or even impossible to rectify. One example of such a historical “mistreatment” is the notion of the “Dark Ages”. Therefore, the paper traces the idea of the “Dark Ages” from the 14th century onward and considers the context in which it became quite widespread from the 18th and 19th centuries to the present day. However, the existence of a counter-myth in the form of the romantic idealization of the Middle Ages as a time of lost pre-modern innocence is also emphasized. The process of industrialization and modernization of (primarily English and Western) European societies in the 18th and 19th centuries and the enthronement of science and progress as leading social principles brought about an (only seemingly) unexpected consequence. Social change provoked nostalgia for an idealized and more simple pre-modern past which gave rise to the Gothic genre that introduced the (at that time socially subversive) element of “horror”. However, at the same time it engendered a romantic and nostalgic depiction of “olden times” which attracted a serious (mostly female) literary public. Even more important is the fact that the elements of the Gothic genre still exist in popular culture to this day through transmission into other popular culture venues, such as literature, cinematic and television content or video games. The extreme dual understanding of the Middle Ages between, metaphorically speaking, fairy tales and horror initially seems confusing, but in reality these images represent two opposite sides of the same coin. Finally, the paper seeks to answer the question of why the Middle Ages are imagined in the ways they are imagined, while notions about the Middle Ages are understood as an integral part of modern (secular) mythical discourse that legitimizes (post)modernity through the construction of extreme medieval otherness. Like it or not, the real or imagined medieval past is a recurrent and in some aspects even dominant feature of the (post)modern popular imagination. It would appear that it will remain so in the future, especially in the dynamic and newly developing post-COVID-19 world order.