We have long thought of the Renaissance as a luminous era that marked a decisive break with the past, but the idea of the Renaissance as a distinct period arose only during the nineteenth century. Though the view of the Middle Ages as a dark age of unreason has softened somewhat, we still locate the advent of modern rationality in the Italian thought and culture of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Jacques Le Goff pleads for a strikingly different view. In this, his last b...
Table of Content
A Note on the Translation
Preface
Acknowledgments
Prelude: Periodization and the Past
1. Early Periodizations
2. The Late Appearance of the Middle Ages
3. History...
About the author
Jacques Le Goff (1924–2014), for many years director of studies at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, was a highly influential member of the...