Written By: Tara Laize
We’ve all heard that story. One morning, Europe woke up. After a thousand years of darkness, blind faith and plague, humanity suddenly opened its eyes: Florence, Leonardo, the printing press, the perspective — in short, the Renaissance. This luminous metaphor has survived the centuries, engraved in textbooks and museums. But what really happened on the day when “the Middle Ages died”?
The Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt said in 1860, was “the discovery of the world and of man.” His book, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, elevated Florence to the cradle of modernity, where the individual would have been freed from religious tutelage and where art would have finally mirrored reality. For there to be a renaissance, the Middle Ages had to die. Donald Sullivan, in The End of the Middle Ages: Decline, Crisis or Transformation?, recalls how this “death” was a convenient invention. Since Petrarch in the fourteenth century, we have not stopped declaring the end of a bygone age. Humanists, reformers, and Enlightenment philosophers have defined their identities by distinguishing themselves from a caricatured past: that of a superstitious, hierarchical Europe. The “death of the Middle Ages” is therefore not a historical fact, but a founding myth- that of progress.
Today’s historians know it: the dividing line between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is blurred and often arbitrary. The modern bank was born in medieval Italian cities long before Leonardo da Vinci. The university, the bureaucracy, the great commercial cities — all this still belongs to the “world before.” Even the thirst for knowledge attributed to humanists has its roots in medieval scholasticism and in Arabic translations of Aristotle. What is called rebirth is therefore less a rupture than a rearrangement. Peter Burke, in The Global Renaissance, speaks of an “acceleration” rather than a “birth”: the continuity of a long movement of intellectual and commercial exchanges on a global scale. At the time when Florentine printers were disseminating Cicero, Muslim, Chinese and Indian scholars were also perfecting text criticism, cartography, and moral philosophy. Burke emphasises the Eurocentric value of the historical definition of ‘Renaissance’, as it asserts the “rise of the West” and its impact on the rest of the world. The Renaissance was not a European miracle, but a global crossroads.
So, why do we need this narrative of a before and an after so much? Because modern Europe has been built as a stage on which we played out the exit from one world and the entry into another. The Middle Ages, in this dramaturgy, is the character that had to be put to death for modernity to exist.
Randolph Starn, in Renaissance Redux, paints the Renaissance as a primitive scene in European historiography, a moment to which historians keep returning, out of fascination or denial. Every century, we play the same piece again: we overthrow Burckhardt, we resurrect him, then we start over. The very idea of rebirth has become a historiographical ritual: to kill the past to better celebrate its return.
However, it must be admitted that something played out at the end of the Middle Ages. Not a sudden death, but a transformation. In the last decades of the fifteenth century, Europe was undergoing a climatic, demographic, and religious upheaval. The Italian Wars, the plague, and peasant revolts undermined feudal structures; the church cracked, currency circulated faster, and printing democratised the written word. It was a time of instability when the old world unraveled without disappearing.
Contemporaries are aware of this. Huizinga, in the Autumn of the Middle Ages, saw in these years “the splendour of a sunset”, not the dawn of a new day. What dies then is not the Middle Ages, but a particular way of believing, governing and feeling. The “end of the Middle Ages” is a moment of ambivalence: devotion and rationality, faith and fear, beauty and violence are intertwined.
If the Renaissance was never a real birth, it remains a living myth because it speaks to us: of our desire to start over, to free ourselves from the past. To abandon the word “Renaissance” is to risk losing a symbolic reference point that structures our entire conception of time.
Perhaps then we must stop looking for the day when the Middle Ages died — and accept that it never was. Its institutions, its myths, its faith and even its imagination still inhabit our modernity. The rebirth, in fact, is not an event of the past: it is a look. The one by which Europe told itself as a miracle, and the world as its heritage. It’s time to look up from this blinding light to see what it has erased.
Bibliography
Burckhardt, Jacob. La civilisation de la Renaissance en Italie (1860).
Randolph Starn, “Renaissance Redux.” American Historical Review (1998).
Donald Sullivan, “The End of the Middle Ages: Decline, Crisis, or Transformation?” The History Teacher (1981).
Peter Burke, The Global Renaissance, Journal of World History (2017).
Johan Huizinga, L’Automne du Moyen Âge (1919).
John Hale, The Civilisation of Europe in the Renaissance (1994).
Featured Image Credit: Sky History UK. (n.d.). Homepage. Retrieved November 14, 2025, from https://www.history.co.uk/
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