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

专注于文学和文化史，特别是文学，但也史学和文献学文本绘图，这个项目检查中世纪在法国启蒙时代的图像-特别是在18世纪下半叶-关于国家过去举行的文化记忆话语的背景下。此外，该项目基于这样的观察，即中世纪的接受既不是由法国启蒙运动中的激进分支“哲学家”独家垄断的，他们倾向于将中世纪的形象描绘成负面的，意图诋毁它，也不是法国大革命后浪漫主义者第一次通过将中世纪的理想化形象引入集体记忆来重新评价中世纪。更确切地说，古代雷姆时期已经见证了对中世纪过去的多种多样的考虑，因此在不同的学科和不同的文本层次上对中世纪进行了想象（重新）建构。这些中世纪的形象被认为是不同的，但仍然共存的法国记忆文化的表现，必须从连贯的文化科学的角度来分析，并在与历史意识的起源和发展、学术机构和研究领域的形成以及几种文学趋势的蓬勃发展有关的问题的背景下进行分析。同时，在分析这些文化时，需要区分独立形象的支持者和消费者的需求。该项目的目的是，一方面，找出与18世纪中世纪有关的图像的多样性和功能性，并通过揭示这些特征，相对化启蒙时代“哲学家”对文化记忆的垄断，以及浪漫主义者在19世纪初革命后对中世纪复兴的贡献。另一方面，在知识分子和思想史、文学史和科学史的大背景下，将对属于不同流派的相应文本进行详细分析，以阐明它们的模式品质，即在“黑暗时代”和“美好时代”的两个极端之间摇摆的固有图像的功能确定的建构性。

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'.