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 book, he argues
persuasively that many of the innovations we associate with the
Renaissance have medieval roots, and that many of the most
deplorable aspects of medieval society continued to flourish during
the Renaissance. We should instead view Western civilization as
undergoing several "renaissances" following the fall of Rome, over
the course of a long Middle Ages that lasted until the
mid-eighteenth century. While it is indeed necessary to divide
history into periods, Le Goff maintains, the meaningful
continuities of human development only become clear when historians
adopt a long perspective. Genuine revolutions-the shifts that
signal the end of one period and the beginning of the next-are much
rarer than we think.
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