, ed. Eugene Smelyansky. Readings in Medieval Civilization and Cultures, XXIII. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2020, xviii, 280 pp., 12 b/w ill.

One of the most fascinating questions in all cultural-historical investigations might be how to evaluate a certain period from our modern perspectives. In the past, we have often heard of the ‘dark ages’ as a term for the early, but even for the high Middle Ages, a notion which has been so thoroughly debunked by now that we do not need to go into any further details here. Yet, already the Renaissance thinkers and poets were most eager to put down the previous period and used the epithet of ‘Gothic’ for the older art and architecture, and denigrated medieval literature at large, while we today accept the term as fitting and even ‘positive’ certainly adequate for that entire post-Romanesque art.