Taking Heaven by Violence: The Middle Ages in the Making of the West

In grand narratives of Western Civilization, the Middle Ages pose a problem. On the one hand, the very concept of the medieval, from its first formulation, was deployed as a negative term imputing barbarism, ignorance, and superstition to the millennium intervening between idealized antiquity and the present moment. On the other hand, by the very logic of that same formulation, the Middle Ages are positioned at the heart of Western Civilization and its historical development. As a result of...