Encyclopaedia of the Middle Ages
By André Vauchez (editor)

General Editor's Preface

The Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages is the fruit of the labours of over 600 scholars from a wide range of disciplines, brought together by a small editorial team, itself supported by thirty subject experts, and by the project management (and financial investment) of the three publishers.

A human and intellectual investment of such importance and length - a space of ten years separates the beginning of work on the Encyclopedia from its publication in English - cannot be the result of mere luck or a happy combination of circumstances. Two main factors have contributed to making the present editorial project possible and even necessary. The first is the extraordinary development that has taken place in medieval studies everywhere, not just in the English-speaking world. A glance at such projects as the International Medieval Bibliography and Medio Evo Latino shows a bibliographical explosion. This rapid growth is accompanied by a renewal of methods and approaches that has affected every medieval discipline, from history and art history to archaeology, philosophy and musicology. The time has clearly come to harvest and publish the fruits of this rich growth, to which most of the contributors to the Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages have contributed.

But this synthesis of the research of the last half-century would have been impossible had not the Middle Ages meanwhile left the twilight in which it had vegetated and had not the perception of it visibly changed. In the early 1960s, the prevalent idea of it was that of an obscure, even obscurantist, period, marked by ignorance.and intolerance and sadly symbolised by the Inquisition. In one generation, thanks to historians to whom we are all in dept, of whom Georges Duby and Jacques Le Goff are merely the most distinguished French names), the Middle Ages have been rediscovered in all their richness and put into a perspective closer to the reality. We do not intend to idealise a period that lasted nearly a thousand years (essentially from A.D. 500 to 1500) and was marked by harsh living conditions and behaviour whose brutality shocks our modern sensibilities, built as they are on ideas of tolerance and ideological pluralism. But what some see as the "darkness" of the Middle Ages should not make us overlook the greatness or undervalue the importance of this varied civilisation. So we have tried to present the whole range of medieval Europe, giving as much space to the East as to the West, and to show that the Middle Ages played an essential role in many fields such as land settlement, agricultural techniques, political institutions and even science. Umberto Eco has rightly reminded us in The Name of the Rose that spectacles were invented in the early 14th century.

The relatively restricted size of this Encyclopedia, when compared to the much more learned ones that have recently appeared in the United States and Germany, forbids us any claim to exhaustiveness, and the choices we have made must be justified. The first of these is that of geographical scope. Writing for a European public primarily concerned with its own history (the work is being published simultaneously in French, Italian and English), our centre of interest has been medieval Christendom - or rather Christendoms -, i.e. a set of regions extending from Iceland to Ethiopia and Central Asia. Articles devoted to other continents or civilisations appear only to the extent that Western Christians were aware of them and took an interest in them. However, the fact that the Encyclopedia is centred on the Christian world has led us to give plenty of space to those peoples and religions that were in contact with it over those thousand years; the Jews, since many of them lived within Christendom itself, and the Muslims, with whom Eastern and Western Christians, though often in conflict, also had fruitful economic and cultural exchanges. We have also taken care to deal with the "pagan" peoples (Lithuanians, Lapps, Cumans, Mongols, etc.) whom the Christians of the Middle Ages sought, with mixed success, to draw into their orbit.

A final requirement has guided the choice of articles and the general orientation: to help Europeans of the third millennium identify with an inheritance that still marks their way of life and some of whose aspects still charm them, but whose meaning escapes them. With this intention, we have deliberately given a privileged place to philosophy, theology, spirituality, liturgy and iconography. In doing so, we have put ourselves into the mind of the time, which - whether Christian, Jewish or Muslim -, while not ignoring or scorning economic and social realities, always tried to put them into a religious, intellectual or moral perspective. We have put special emphasis on those aspects of medieval civilisation that are hardest for most contemporary people - strangers alike to the old humanist and scholastic education and to religious systems or ecclesiastical institutions - to understand. Our hope is that this work, which tries to bring its readers the most exact possible scientific information, will help them understand better what Verlaine called the "enormous, delicate" Middle Ages, which have ceaselessly fascinated the European imagination since the beginning of the 19th century.

André Vauchez

See also: Preface to the English Edition