The term "Middle Ages" first began to be common in English-language history-writing in the early nineteenth century.
Henry Hallam's 1818
View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages has been seen as a key stage in the promotion of the term, along with
Ruskin's 1853
Lectures on Architecture. The term
medievalist was, correspondingly, coined by English-speakers in the mid-nineteenth century. The concept of the Middle Ages was first developed by
Renaissance humanists as a means for them to define their own era as new and different from what came before—whether a renewal of Classical Antiquity (the
Renaissance) or what came to be called
modernity. This gave nineteenth-century
Romantic scholars, in particular, the intellectual freedom to imagine the Middle Ages as an
anti-modernist utopia—whether a place nostalgically to fantasise about a more conservative, religious, and hierarchical past or a more egalitarian, beautiful, and innocent one. The most important example of this use of the Middle Ages was the nation-building that surrounded the
unification of Germany. Narratives which presented the nations of Europe as modernizing by building on, yet also developing beyond, their medieval heritage, were also important facets underpinning justifications of
European colonialism and
imperialism during the
New Imperialism era. Some scholars of the medieval era in the
United States also used these concepts to justify their
westward expansion across the
North American continent. These colonialist and imperialist connections meant that medieval studies during the 19th and 20th centuries played a role in the emergence of
white supremacism. However, the early twentieth century also saw the increasing professionalisation of research on the Middle Ages. In this context, researchers tended to resist the idea that the Middle Ages were distinctively different from modernity. Instead they argued the so-called '
continuity thesis' that institutions conventionally associated with modernity in Western historiography like nationalism, the emergence of states, colonialism, scientific thought, art for its own sake, or people's conception of themselves as individuals all had a history stretching back into the Middle Ages, and that understanding their medieval history was important to understanding their character in the twentieth century. In the wake of the
Second World War, the role of medievalism in
European nationalism led to greatly diminished enthusiasm for medieval studies within the academy—though nationalist deployments of the Middle Ages still existed and remained powerful. The proportion of medievalists in history and language departments fell, encouraging staff to collaborate across different departments; state funding of and university support for archaeology expanded, bringing new evidence but also new methods, disciplinary perspectives, and research questions forward; and the appeal of interdisciplinarity grew. Accordingly, medieval studies turned increasingly away from producing national histories, towards more complex mosaics of regional approaches that worked towards a European scope, partly correlating with post-War
Europeanisation. Amidst this process, from the 1980s onwards medieval studies increasingly responded to intellectual agendas set by
postmodern critical theory and
cultural studies, with
empiricism and
philology being challenged by or harnessed to topics like the
history of the body. In the twenty-first century,
globalisation led to arguments that post-war Europeanisation had drawn too tight a boundary around medieval studies, this time at the borders of Europe, with Muslim Iberia and the
Orthodox Christian east seen in western European historiography as having an ambivalent relevance to medieval studies. Thus a range of medievalists have begun working on writing
global histories of the Middle Ages—while, however, navigating, the risk of imposing Eurocentric terminologies and agendas on the rest of the world. By 2020, this movement was being characterised as the 'global turn' in Medieval Studies. Correspondingly, the
UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, founded in 1963, changed its name in 2021 to UCLA Center for Early Global Studies. ==Centres for medieval studies==