From Lateness To Waning To Crisis: the Burden of the Later Middle Ages

Abstract

Abstract The common view of the Late Middle Ages as a time of decay is due to the very lateness imposed on this period by the idea of a Middle Ages, especially in the form of the "Waning model" created by Johan Huizinga in The Waning of the Middle Ages. The consequent "crises" predicated of most late-medieval phenomena, including the whole period, appear under critical analysis either as phantoms or as moments of progressive development. This discredits both the Waning model and the "Middle Ages" out of which it proceeds; they can best be replaced by the scheme that posits an "Old Europe" from the eleventh century to the eighteenth. Here the Middle Ages vanish and the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, redeemed from the curse of lateness, appear with the twelfth and thirteenth as Early Old Europe.

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