Michael Edward Moore

The “Long Middle Ages” indicates a span of time extending from Antiquity, across the Middle Ages, to the Early Modern period. The author tries to understand factors of historical continuity binding this period together and the periodic scenes of violent change that disrupted societies and traditions. The Long Middle Ages were established on classical and biblical foundations, while each generation interpreted and expanded on those origins. The cohesion of the Long Middle Ages was brought about by continuous acts of reflection and renascence. Scholarly practices and ideas of Antiquity were taken up in the monasteries and cathedral schools of the Middle Ages, while during the Renaissance, and then the Baroque period, thinkers looked back to Antiquity and to the Middle Ages. Continuity and Rupture in the Long Middle Ages is an interdisciplinary approach to intellectual history, which puts the history of ideas in the context of cultural, political, religious, and legal history. Medieval history is the central moment, while continuity and change are found in traditions extending from the Lord’s Prayer (AD 30) to Jean Mabillon (AD 1632–1707) and onward to moderns like Ernst Cassirer and Paul Ricoeur. Readers will discover new significance in historical figures like the Venerable Bede, Boniface of Mainz, Charlemagne, and Pope Formosus – in the laws of medieval kings and bishops – and institutions like the monastery of Cluny. These essays, gathered together for the first time in this Variorum volume, offer powerful new interpretations for students and researchers in the fields of medieval studies, legal and literary interpretation, legal history, and the history of European intellectual life from ancient to modern times.

Religion, Law and Interpretation

Continuity and Rupture in the Long Middle Ages

Scott Wilson

Nicola Masciandaro

Anna Klosowska

Volume 5 of the journal Glossator. Contents: What Separates the Birth of Twins - Jordan Kirk Prosopopeia to Prosopagnosia: Dante on Facebook - Scott Wilson When You Call My Name - Karmen MacKendrick All That Remains Unnoticed I Adore: Spencer Reece's Addresses - Eileen A. Joy Plato's Symposium and Commentary for Love - David Hancock Dreaming Death: the Onanistic and Self-Annihilative Principles of Love in Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet - Gary J. Shipley On Not Loving Everyone: Comments on Jean-Luc Nancy's "L'amour en eclats [Shattered Love]" - Mathew Abbott The Grace of Hermeneutics - Michael Edward Moore Tearsong: Valentine Visconti's Inverted Stoicism - Anna K osowska"

Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary

If modernity is a messianic concept of time, open to an unknown future, then our connection to the present must be restrained. Perhaps we are only sojourning here, poised and waiting for the end of time. On the other hand, just as urgently as during the Renaissance, it would seem that the “heart of modernity” is open to the “heart of antiquity.” The capacity of ruins to communicate, and the interest of ancient writings might be marvelled at again. Nicholas of Cusa demonstrated that a return to antiquity could lead to the discovery of new paths during a historical period of spiritual disquiet and political crisis. In this far-reaching essay, historian Michael Edward Moore examines modernity as an historical epoch following the end of the medieval period — and as a “messianic concept of time.” In the early twentieth century, a debate over the meaning and origins of modernity unfolded among the philosophers Ernst Cassirer, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Hans Blumenberg. These thinkers tried to resolve the puzzle of the fifteenth-century master Nicholas of Cusa. Was Cusanus the last great medieval thinker, his ideas a summa of medieval tradition? Or was he a mysterious epochal figure, seated at one end of the bridge leading to modern thought? Nicholas of Cusa lived during a time of historical and existential crisis, or kairos, when medieval governments and cherished sources of unity were shaken. Likewise, the debate over his significance took place during a later phase of crisis for Europe, in the decades before and after the Second World War, when the collapse of European civilization was witnessed. Moore argues that modernity, so intently examined as an historical and spiritual problem, has significance for our contemporary sense of crisis.

Michael Edward Moore

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