So my title, my talk this evening, and when Father Shafkin first invited me to give a lecture about the Middle Ages,

one of the things that he wanted me to do was simply to lay out, you know, some of the many contributions that the Middle Ages have made to the enduring legacy of Western civilization, to European and North American

societies and culture in ways that have redounded down for the centuries, over against

what he's absolutely right about, tends to be a sort of stereotype about the Middle Ages

in which they're regarded as really best forgotten, and it would be good if they had never existed at all.

But I said to him, you know, I think it could be more helpful

if I address some of these issues by talking partly about those stereotypes themselves.

What kind of images are at play when we're talking about a very positive, exaggerated counter image of the Middle Ages on the one hand, or a denigratory, dismissive view on the other.

And that's why my title is rather cumbersome, long, but meant to convey that, which is the Middle Ages, colon,

eight dark ages of superstitious backwardness,

rolls right off the tongue, doesn't it?

Golden Age of Catholic Harmony, or neither.

Hint, I'm going to go for the neither.

All right.

My main area of scholarly expertise, as Father Schaevkin mentioned,

is the Reformation era, the 16th and the 17th centuries in Western Europe. But that world begins very much in the late Middle Ages. And so in order

to understand the world that I'm principally interested in, the 16th and the early 17th centuries,

it's absolutely crucial

to understand what was going on prior to that, namely late medieval Christianity is crucial

for understanding both the Protestant and the Catholic Reformation of the 16th century.

And so, although I am not, and I don't claim to be, I would never assert, and my medievalist colleagues

would, they would jump all over me if they knew that I would say I'm a medievalist as well.

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