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

该项目侧重于文学和文化史，特别是文学，但也史学和语言学文本的绘图，在启蒙时代的法国中世纪的形象-特别是在十八世纪的下半叶-在文化记忆话语的背景下举行的国家过去。此外，该项目是基于这样一种观察，即中世纪的接受既不完全由法国启蒙运动中的激进分支垄断，也不是浪漫主义者在法国大革命后第一次通过将理想化的中世纪形象引入集体记忆来重新评价。相反，旧制度时期已经见证了对中世纪过去的各种各样的思考，从而在不同的学科和不同的文本层面上对中世纪进行了想象中的（重建）。这些中世纪的图像被认为是不同的，但仍然共存的法国记忆文化的表现形式，这必须从一个连贯的文化科学的角度和有关的起源和历史意识的发展，学术机构和研究领域的形成，以及几个文学潮流的蓬勃发展的问题的背景下进行分析。与此同时，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，找出与十八世纪中世纪有关的图像的多样性和多样性，同时也找出其功能性，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，以及浪漫主义者对革命后中世纪复兴的贡献。世纪。另一方面，在思想史、文学史和科学史的大背景下，对不同类型的文本进行详细分析，以阐明它们的典型特征，即在“黑暗时代”和“美好时代”两个极端之间摇摆的内在意象的功能决定的建构性。

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'.