Popular Attitudes Toward Islam in Medieval Europe

Abstract

In the past historians and literary scholars have exhibited a tendency to view the European Middle Ages from a universalist viewpoint, generalizing about all of Europe and much of the Middle Ages. Historians characterized the Middle Ages in terms of ecclesiastical hierarchy and doctrinal unity. For quite some time, there was a notion that medieval Europe was governed by something called a feudal “system.” These ideas can still be found in textbooks and introductory surveys, although the authors of these textbooks have, by and large, replaced them with more nuanced interpretations. Similarly, literary criticism was, at one time, dominated by the Princeton school of D. W. Robertson, which read medieval literature almost exclusively in terms of scripture, Augustinianism, and the central concept of charity. This, too, has been replaced by a more sophisticated sense of the complexity of medieval literary production.