Piron, Sylvain & Anheim, Étienne
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Core ideas
The two historians, longtime colleagues "in agreement on everything and on nothing", debate when the Middle Ages ends, and through it what a period is. Étienne Anheim recalls that the Middle Ages was named from outside. No one then thought of themselves as medieval; Charlemagne saw himself as continuing Rome, and 12th-century scholars called themselves "moderns", dwarfs on the shoulders of giants. The label was coined by Italian humanists to describe a weak "middle" between two strong periods, alongside "barbarian times", "Dark Ages" and the "Gothic age", and became fixed only in the 19th century. It still serves as modernity's negative "other". The "Renaissance" first meant only a revival of letters and arts, and once that is recognised, earlier renaissances (Carolingian, 12th century) appear. Sylvain Piron shows how national criteria multiply endings: Giotto and Dante around 1300 for Italy, the end of the Hundred Years' War and permanent taxation for France, the Tudors for England, Granada for Spain, Luther for Germany. Antiquity also lasted into the 8th or 9th century around the Mediterranean, as the ruins of Marseille's ancient port show.
The two then search for a positive definition, not a negative one ("societies without a state", to borrow Pierre Clastres). Anheim proposes the Church as an all-embracing social structure (Alain Guerreau's ecclesia). He adds seigneurial, agrarian, parish-based society, which led Jacques Le Goff to a "long Middle Ages" from the 4th century to the time of "our grandparents" in the 19th. Piron objects that Constantine belongs to antiquity and that the 11th century is the real break, with the Gregorian reform, the feudal mutation, villages grouped around church and cemetery, and the revival of towns. Drawing on Norbert Elias, he proposes abandoning the Middle Ages for a "second millennium" of Western history, from 1000 to 2000. In it a non-imperial form, kingdoms becoming nation-states, emerged on the margins of the former empire. The ecological crisis, he argues, also forces historians to give up the narrative of progress built into the Middle Ages/Renaissance pairing, which also hid the "French" sculpture from which Italian painting drew. He sees three great political forms (stateless societies, empires and democratic nation-states), with Russia's war in Ukraine as perhaps the last clash between the imperial form and a nation-state.
Anheim answers as a nominalist: "the Middle Ages ends when we decide it does." Periods do not exist in themselves; they are conventions, never neutral, as the phrase "the beautiful 13th century" shows. They are argued, not arbitrary, and useful only as tools for particular questions, since economic, religious and artistic rhythms never coincide. Both are sceptical about exporting the term to Africa, Japan or China, apart perhaps from the Arab-Muslim Mediterranean, and call for "provincialising" European categories. In the discussion, Filippo Ronconi stresses Byzantium, where 1453 is experienced as the end of the world and a story of decline, not rebirth. An audience member suggests a positive criterion, the near disappearance of slavery as an economic base between antiquity and colonial slavery, which both accept. They end on lived time: the Christian orientation of time towards the end of days, generational events like Francis of Assisi or 1968, and Maurice Halbwachs's social frameworks of memory.
Excerpts
Étienne Anheim on how the label was coined from outside:
“These people considered that those who preceded them lived in a middle age. And by "middle," one must understand very mediocre, or even negative. That is to say, in the minds of those who qualified this medieval millennium, "middle" meant a weak period of history between two strong periods: the time of Greco-Roman antiquity, which became a kind of ideal model of classicism, and the new times that aimed to reconnect with that past.”
Sylvain Piron on the second millennium as a Western dynamic:
“And here, we could see an overall dynamic that is also cultural and intellectual, that goes—my proposal is—from the year 1000 to the year 2000. So, to think about simply forgetting the Middle Ages as a unit, but rather thinking about the second millennium of the Christian era, which would be a history of the West, of this West, of this small West that gradually expanded”
Étienne Anheim's nominalist answer:
“my answer would be a bit different from Sylvain's and would consist of saying, "The Middle Ages ends when we decide it does." So, what do I mean by that? I would like to highlight, let's say, a possible understanding of the notion of the Middle Ages that refers more generally to an understanding of the notion of periodization. Which is, at heart, to consider from a point of view we could call nominalist, that historical periods do not exist in themselves.”