Catalan map of coast of Africa and kingdom of Mali. Human progress only restarted with the so-called "Renaissance."Ībraham Cresques. Then, writers and historians during the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries cemented this conception in the popular imagination - the ancient world had been destroyed by the "Fall of Rome," leading to a rise of superstition during the Middle Ages. Deriving from the Latin phrase medium aevum ("a middle age"), it was first brought into circulation by writers (primarily in Italy) during the 14th and 15th centuries, who thought their own time was more like ancient Rome than the centuries immediately before theirs. The phrase "Middle Ages" shows off its European origins. Here you found talks on much of what you might expect - the Crusades, Anglo-Saxon literature and the legend of King Arthur, the great ruler Charlemagne, the visionary Hildegard of Bingen, monks and nuns, etc. But you found a lot more too and in every case, what united all the presentations, was an new, expansive understanding of what the "medieval" actually means. And as might be expected from such a diverse group of scholars, the topics of the presentations understandably varied widely. The (loose) theme of "memory" chosen for this year seemed particularly appropriate, given the conference's primary focus on events that happened somewhere between roughly 500-1500 years ago.
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