Introduction and Periodization

The so-called ‘Middle Ages’ covers an entire millennium from 500 to 1500 A.D., and is a historical denomination based on convention and unanimously accepted by scholars. This general time period includes numerous and profound changes in western culture, a culture which had already seen the formation and diffusion of philosophy in Greece and Rome: the breakup of the Roman Empire with the separation of the Eastern Empire at Byzantium, the formation of the Gothic kingdoms, and the rebirth of the Empire under Charlemagne in the 9th c.; the diffusion of Christianity and, in the 7th c., the birth of Islam; the institutional development of the Church as a source of political power and conflict with lay power beginning in the 10th c.; demographic, economic, and political growth after 1000 A.D., and the communal movements in the cities; the reformation of an expansive commercial network and the development of a monetary economy; the struggles against Islam for supremacy in the Mediterranean; and the formation of national states. Alongside these changes in the geopolitical order and strongly linked to them, we also find linguistic developments with the evolution of vulgar Latin towards the romance languages and the rise of the German, Celtic, and Anglo-Saxon languages.

The development of philosophy in the Medieval period can be analyzed on the basis of two factors: the first is external or ‘sociological,’ and is bound to the availability of texts and to the institutional forms of their circulation and fruition; the other is internal, and is connected to the evolution and organization of the disciplines and to doctrinal development in a strict sense, namely theological, philosophical, and scientific. Until the middle of the 11th c., the external factor is predominant, while after this date a space for autonomy of thought appears which encourages the cultural renovation of the 11th and 12th c., and which is facilitated by increasing contact with Islamic and Jewish cultures and by new translations. Finally, in the period which stretches from 1200 until the end of the Middle Ages, the birth of the universities creates the external conditions which are in turn extremely favorable to the internal evolution, diffusion, and production of philosophic and scientific thought in different contexts and in languages other than Latin, thus promoting the acceleration and articulation of Scholastic doctrines.

Starting with the 14th c., and contemporaneously with the evolution of various currents of Scholastic philosophy, the so-called Humanistic movement begins, which develops outside the university environment and is characterized by a strong polemical attitude towards the philosophy and theology then prevalent in the universities. Therefore, in the last two centuries chronologically pertaining to the Middle Ages, a portion of philosophic thought undergoes an evolution which is already ‘modern.’ On the other hand, Scholasticism survives inside the curriculum of the universities all the way to the modern age properly so-called, the 16th and 17th c. (the second Scholasticism).