“The Renaissance invented the Middle Ages in order to define itself: the Enlightenment perpetuated them in order to admire itself; and the Romantics revived them in order to escape from themselves. In their widest ramifications ‘the Middle Ages’ thus constitute one of the most prevalent cultural myths of the modern world.”
Brian Stock, Listening for the Text, 68 (as quoted in David Aers, “A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the ‘History of the Subject’” from Culture and History 1350-1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, 192)
