Published in The Medieval Aesthetics

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The Middle Ages, in their lengthy centuries of existence, sum up a polysemous era. It is an epoch that bridges the gap between a preceding time, which it knows and from which it extracts enhanced knowledge and experience, and a succeeding time, which it ignores as a human period but knows at a suprahuman level, a knowledge coded as the end of times, which they consider imminent, although that imminence may take centuries to come true. Polysemous because, in spite of appearances, and much interpretation with an ideological bias that considers it a monolithic era ruled by just one way of thinking and acting in consequence, it treasures and displays literatures expressed in languages that, later on, will come to light in their full richness with the dawn of nationalities, philosophies that, though influenced by their theological and Greco-Latin root, become prodromes of future thought, technological and architectonic changes that will last indelibly. It was an age that possessed extended self-awareness, in contrast with the following ones, which reprocess it at a more and more accelerated pace and occasionally downplay its importance. It believed it was the owner of absolute truth; in this respect it does differ from subsequent times, except for the means it implemented to defend it, given that those “subsequent times”, in spite of disowning it, do not usually resign themselves to the fragility of the knowledge it obtains and resort to inquisitorial methods to defend it. The subtitle of this essay refers to the exorbitance that characterized the end of this era, depreciated or appreciated depending on the spirit of those times succeeding it, which means that each period reinterprets it, the destiny of everything human, which, from “our perspective”, medieval people sought to overcome.