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In a notable collection of medieval studies,l the late Albert Pauphilet devoted his first chapter to 'Le Mythe du Moyen Age'. He was there concerned primarily with the diversely coloured pictures which, over the last 400 years, succeeding generations of scholars, artists, and writers have presented of that falsely designated 'period', the very name of which implies the notion of a uniform interregnum extending over a millennium of Gothic twilight which elapsed between the end of Classical Antiquity and the so-called Renaissance century. Before we smile tolerantly at the errors of our predecessors we should perhaps remember that, although in recent years we in the Modern Humanities have begun to share the concern of our colleagues in the historical sciences for the flux rather than for the so-called 'periods' of history, we still tend in our literary studies, if only subconsciously, to perpetuate an erroneous concept by our retention of the traditional terminology; that, as specialists in the various vernacular literatures, we tend to distort even further the fallacious term, on the one hand by narrowing it so that, in French studies for example, we concentrate on the period I150-I300 to the virtual exclusion of the germinal post-Carolingian period and of the discordant fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and, on the other hand, by applying it to cultures which scarcely knew the Classical Antiquity on which the term itself necessarily depends. More seriously perhaps, in the expanded world of the twentieth century, we are still profoundly conditioned in our humanistic vision by the intellectual outlook of the Middle Ages which saw in Christian Europe, and in Christian Western Europe in particular, the centre of the civilized world beyond which lay only the untutored lesser breeds without the moral law. It is paradoxical, too, that, while we look back to the Hellenic and Latin sources of our Western culture, in our medieval studies we still continue in large measure to follow our medieval ancestors by ignoring or disdaining Byzantium.
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