French Literature Reviews - 2026
A. C. Montoya, Medievalist Enlightenment: From Charles Perrault to Jean-Jacques Rousseau
History, Politics and Society
Alicia C. Montoya, Medievalist Enlightenment: From Charles Perrault to Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, ser. "Gallica", 2013.
EAN 9781843843429.
256 p.
Price £50
Publisher's description:
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 Enlightenment, galanterie, was of medievalist inspiration.
Moreover, the academic study of medieval texts underlay modern ideals of scholarship, institutionalized at the royal academies. The Middle Ages functioned polemically as an alternative site, allowing authors to rethink their age's political and social ideologies. At the centre of these debates was the notion of historical progress. Was progress possible, as the philosophes held, or was human history a process of degeneration, with the Middle Ages as a lost Golden Age? From the re-evaluation of the medieval thus emerged not only the seeds of a new poetics, but also the central questions that preoccupied Enlightenment thinkers from Montesquieu to Rousseau.
This book shows how, in order to understand the aesthetic and intellectual transformations that marked modernity, it is essential to examine how this period conceived of the past, and particularly those "Dark Ages" that served as the defining foil for the modern Age of Light.
Alicia C. Montoya is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Literary and Cultural Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen.
Alicia C. Montoya investigates how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French writers engaged with the medieval past during a time traditionally defined by its pursuit of rationalism and modernity. Far from being rejected as a period of ignorance, the Middle Ages served as a vital cultural reservoir that inspired new narrative forms, including fairy tales and epistolary novels. This critical re-evaluation laid essential groundwork for both the birth of Romanticism and the evolution of modern scholarly practices within royal academic institutions. The volume places these literary shifts within broader intellectual debates concerning historical progress and cultural identity.
This scholarly study will interest students and researchers of eighteenth-century French literature, cultural history, and the long genealogy of modernity. By analyzing how canonical and lesser-known authors utilized medieval motifs to challenge prevailing social and political ideologies, the work illuminates the complex relationship between Enlightenment thought and pre-modern traditions. It offers valuable perspectives for those seeking to understand the aesthetic foundations of the period, demonstrating that the construction of modern rationality was deeply intertwined with an ongoing reimagining of the medieval era.