The Middle Ages after the Middle Ages

Abstract

Abstract This chapter reflects on popular memories and various manifestations of interest in the real or imaginary Middle Ages which circulated in the past three centuries. Often connected with political agendas that one tends to classify as “medievalism,” they bring in some important fragments of Central Europe’s “culture of memory” and ways in which modern colonial establishments use its past, “softly” shaping it to justify the recent revival of dictatorship in modern Central Europe. As far as one can reconstruct from modern collections of folklore, some medieval figures—popular saints, celebrated heroes, and rulers—came to be associated with folkloric motifs known world-wide, used as early as the late Middle Ages. Another form of medievalism, the Gothic Revival, reached the region in the mid-nineteenth century, when it was already in decline in Western Europe. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the major occasions for medievalist events were the millennial celebrations connected with the founding of the states in Central Europe more or less a thousand years earlier.