About Heroic Citizens, Brave Knights and Loving Shepherds:Images of the Middle Ages in France before the Revolution of 1789

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Focusing on literary and cultural history and drawing on especially literary, but also historiographic and philological texts, this project examines the images of the Middle Ages in France during the Age of Enlightenment - particularly in the second half of the eighteenth century - within the context of cultural memory discourses held about the national past. Furthermore, the project is based on the observation that the reception of the Middle Ages is neither exclusively monopolized by the militant branch within the French Enlightenment, the 'philosophes', who tended to portray this image as negative with the intention to discredit it, nor revalued for the first time by the Romantics after the French Revolution by introducing idealized images of the Middle Ages into the collective memory. Rather, the period of the Ancien Régime already witnesses a diverse and varied consideration of the medieval past and thus an imaginary (re-)construction of the Middle Ages in various disciplines and at different textual levels. These images of the Middle Ages are considered manifestations of different, but nonetheless coexisting French memory cultures, which have to be analyzed both from a coherent cultural sciences perspective and in the context of questions related to the origin and the development of historical consciousness, the formation of academic institutions and research areas as well as the blossoming of several literary trends. At the same time, when analyzing these cultures, a distinction needs to be drawn between the proponents of separate images and consumers' needs. The project's aims are, on the one hand, to work out the plurality and diversity, but also the functionality of the images related to the Middle Ages in the eighteenth century and, by revealing these characteristics, to relativize the 'philosophers'' monopoly regarding cultural memory in the Age of Enlightenment as well as the Romantics' contribution to the rehabilitation of the Middle Ages after the Revolution at the beginning of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, within this general context of intellectual and ideological history, history of literature and history of science, a detailed analysis of the corresponding texts belonging to different genres will be conducted to illuminate their model qualities, i.e. the functionally determined constructivity of the inherent images oscillating between the two extremes of the 'Dark Ages' and the exemplary representation of the 'bon vieux temps'.