Medievalist Enlightenment: From Charles Perrault to Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The influence on Enlightenment thought of medievalism has been underestimated; it is here reappraised and its significance brought out.

Literary medievalism played a vital role in the construction of the French Enlightenment. Starting with the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, it influenced movements leading to the Romantic rediscovery of the Middle Ages, and helped to shape new literary genres, from the epistolary novel to the fairy tale and opera. Indeed, the dominant mode of the early ...