Europe Throughout The Middle Ages

Literature review

The paper Perception of Europe throughout the Ages will focus on what was seen as Europe, starting with the ancient Greeks, continuing with the Romans, the Byzantine Empire, throughout the Middle Ages until the Renaissance, where the sense of Europe as a cultural cohesive entity took shape. What was seen as Europe from antiquity through Renaissance? In order to answer this question, I will focus my research on literature in this field. The literature is about the history of Europe, and the Idea of Europe, in order to find out how it was perceived during each era. The different writers will have some different views.

G. Delanty, Formations of European Modernity. A Historical and Political Sociology of Europe (London 2013),

European Identity is also a social construction, but quite a weak one. Europe is way too diverse to form a true unity or shared identity; its different cultures are simply too little alike.

Until the 18th century Europe is strictly a geographical term.

What Europe does share, however, is its history. Europe has a long, old history. In this history, the peoples, states and centres of power focussed their efforts mostly on each other: especially since the peace of Westphalia they had to hold each other in check.

What many Europeans consider Europes’ accomplishments are actually learned from Islamic culture; in Renaissance the rediscovery of Antiquity was through Arabic translations of ancient texts, and a lot of scientific and technological knowledge was acquired from contact with Islam.

A. Pagden, ‘Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent’, in: A. Pagden (ed.), The Idea of Europe. From Antiquity to the European Union (Cambridge

Thus, this part is more about how Christianity was a very important aspect of European history than how Europe was defined in the early to mid-Middle Ages. However, this part is still very useful for getting an idea of the importance of Christianity in Europe and the basis this set for unity and division later on. The third part of the submission handles how Europe came to see itself as civilized, a society with a high level of development. In this part there emerges a notion of identification with each other, especially in Western Europe. This indicates a beginning of a European identity, where Europe gets an emotional value, which is very useful for my research.

All texts underline the importance of Christianity in European identity and the idea of Europe, and also make clear that much of Europe’s scientific advancements were a result of contact with Islamic culture. Another important development is the emergence of a cultural affection throughout Europe for each other that really came to fruition late in the Renaissance, at the start of the