In the decades immediately following the Spanish Civil War, the question of the Renaissance, which had never attracted much scholarly attention even before the war, almost completely disappeared from consideration in Spanish historical thought. Concerned with seeking a psycho-historical explanation of the catastrophic event which had shattered the political and social fabric of their society, historians turned more than ever to the Middle Ages in search of those peculiar strains that presumably shaped the national character and which in turn would provide an answer to past and present events. The reappearance of this romantic search for the elusive “popular spirit” of the nation was nowhere more evident than in the teachings of two major historians who from their exile in the Americas were to exert for quite some time an exorbitant influence on a new generation of scholars both within and outside of Spain.