IN OCTOBER 1691, TEN months after the death of the Amsterdam mathematics professor Alexander de Bie, his widow, Maria van Dijck, put up for sale his library of some 1,200 books. The auction took place on the afternoon of 3 October in De Bie's canal house on the Beschuit-markt (in Amsterdam's present-day Red Light district, on the Oudezijds Voorburgwal). Described on the title page as ‘Clarissimi ac Doctissimi Viri D. ALEXANDRI de BIE.P.M. Philosophiae ac Mathematices Professoris Amstelaedamensis Expertissimi’, de Bie had accumulated a largely typical professorial book collection that, as might be expected, contained sizeable numbers of books on mathematics, astronomy and related topics. Besides books, however, the catalogue also listed thirty-three lots of mathemat-ical and astronomical instruments and a small but noteworthy collec-tion of Oriental manuscripts: fifty manuscripts in Arabic, an additional twenty-four incomplete Arabic manuscripts in quarto, fifty-nine Persian manuscripts and four quarto manuscripts whose language the cataloguer – presumably the publisher, the Amsterdam academic bookseller Petrus van den Berge – was unable to identify (‘mss. libri lingua oriental in-4 incogni-tio Charactere’).

Among De Bie's manuscripts, the catalogue listed four Arabic copies of the Qur’an, two in folio format (‘Alkoran Arabicae’), one of which carried supplementary notes, and two in quarto (both ‘Alkoran Arabicae’). In addition, the catalogue reported one copy of Theodor Bibliander's 1543 Latin translation of the Qur’an, which was in fact a reissue of a medieval paraphrase in an undated Basel edition, Leiden University professor Thomas Erpenius's 1617 edition and translation of the twelfth sura (sūrat Yūsuf) and Christian Ravius's bilingual version of the first two suras, originally published in Amsterdam in 1646.

What exactly does the presence in De Bie's library of these five Qur’ans – seven if we include the partial editions – represent? De Bie's biography provides some initial clues. Following his appointment in 1653, supposedly at the instigation of Christian Huygens, as mathematics professor at Amsterdam's Atheneum Illustre – the predecessor of today's University of Amsterdam – De Bie lectured on logic, philosophy, navigation and astronomy as part of his teaching duties. But besides his position as professor of mathematics, De Bie also tutored students in private, specializing in the Oriental languages.

This section of the book originated as a response to several recent developments within the field of medievalism studies. These included, as its most direct catalyst, a conference we organized in July 2010 on “Transatlantic Dialogues/Speaking of the Middle Ages,” at the joint initiative of the U.S.- based group of scholars around the journal Studies in Medievalism and the French-based association Modernités médiévales; the three articles included here are based on papers first presented at that conference – as is Jeff Rider's essay, “The Middle Ages Are within Your Grasp: Motor Neurons, Mirror Neurons, Simulacra, and Imagining the Past.”

The original conference, as well as this section and the simultaneously published volume of the RELIEF journal on French medievalism, aimed at engaging in a dialogue between continental European and Anglo-American traditions of medievalist scholarship. While the Middle Ages we refer to today are European, it appeared that it was Anglo-American scholarship in particular that was developing new ways of conceptualizing this era as the object of a distinct field of medievalism studies, dealing not with “the Middle Ages” but with the imaginative recreation of the medieval past in ensuing periods.

Modern medievalism has tended to have a strong Anglo-American focus, overwhelmingly privileging the study of examples drawn from the Anglo- American world and from English-language arts and literature in particular; medievalist phenomena from other geographic areas subsequently did not receive nearly the amount of attention they might seem to deserve.

This existence of nationally distinct approaches to the medieval certainly seemed to invite further questioning. Papers presented at the 2010 conference illustrate how the dominant Anglo-American paradigm of medievalism studies could be enriched by drawing on insights from other geographical and cultural contexts, not only the French tradition – as the RELIEF issue shows – but also the often underappreciated richness of Hispanic and Luso- phone engagements with the medieval, ranging from the ideologically motivated defenses of the medieval elaborated by Spanish historians exiled in South America during the Franco years, to postcolonial Brazilian “medievalizations” of the country's own geographical peripheries.

This chapter examines how out of the galant, aristocratic engagement with the medieval whose contours I have sketched in the previous chapters, there emerged during the first decades of the eighteenth century a new, scholarly approach to the Middle Ages. This new, academic medievalism had its institutional basis at the Académie royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. Originally founded by Louis XIV to compose Latin commemorative inscriptions in his honour, during the eighteenth century the Academy evolved into a full-fledged scholarly body, focusing more exclusively on historical and philological activities, and shifting its emphasis from classical to medieval subjects. This process was accelerated by a royal reform that took place in 1701, made official by lettres patentes and new statutes in 1716, and was finally consolidated by the creation of a new academic journal in which the academicians could publish their findings, the Histoire et Mémoires de l'Académie royale des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, that began publication in 1717 and continued uninterrupted until the revolutionary era. After the first important papers by Abbé de Vertot starting around 1705 (but published only a decade later), medieval studies entered a decisive new phase in the 1720s and 1730s, when they were taken up by an illustrious group of scholars that included Denis François Secousse, Jean-Baptiste La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, Antoine Lancelot, Camille Falconet, and the comte de Caylus, among others.

Of the scholars affiliated with the eighteenth-century Académie des Inscriptions, Sainte-Palaye has traditionally been singled out and hailed as the most important medievalist, if not the actual founding father of modern medieval studies, well before the advent of the more well-known nineteenth-century French philologists such as Gaston Paris and Joseph Bédier.

Perceptions of medieval literature, far from being a simple matter of philological interest, have historically been fraught with ideological implications. Thus, for example, when, announcing the advent of romanticism, Madame de Stael famously proposed that “romantic or chivalric literature is indigenous to us‘. she was not only celebrating the birth of a literary movement. She was also saying something about the literature that was, according to her, most appropriate for the French national-political context of her day. Opposing Napoleon's neo-classicist ideal, the Middle Ages stood in her writings for an alternative, freer model of art and power. Likewise, when, following France's 1870 defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, scholars and writers such as Gaston Paris self-consciously set out to professionalize the study of medieval literature, it was often with explicitly nationalistic intentions. And at yet another crucial historical junction, during the rise of fascism in the 1930s, the medieval past, as exemplified by its literary traditions, again became prominent in some writings, where it was made to embody the ideals of different parties. The Middle Ages are a site of ideologically laden critical debate par excellence for, when speaking of them, very often it is of ourselves that we are really speaking. Thus, reflecting this intrinsic ideological aspect, I prefer to use the adjectival “medieval” rather than the more absolute “Middle Ages” in order to convey this sense that the medieval is as much a quality ascribed to certain artefacts or phenomena as it is a historical marker.

In a provocative book about “the hidden agenda of modernity”, Stephen Toulmin has argued that modernity entailed a major philosophical shift. This was a shift from the oral to the written, from the particular to the universal, from the local to the general, from the timely to the timeless, and from humanism to rationalism. The new modernity, whose rise Toulmin dates back to the major works of Descartes in the 1630s and 1640s, was marked by the “pursuit of mathematical exactitude and logical rigor, intellectual certainty and moral purity”. While earlier thinkers had questioned the value of abstract theory for concrete human experience, the new philosophy instead sought to describe the world by recourse to timeless, abstract universals. And while older traditions had taken into account the historical embededness and circumstantial character of particular practices, valuing the transitory for itself, the new worldview privileged structures that were perceived as unchanging, overriding historical context or situatedness. Modernity, in short, entailed the replacement of an organicist paradigm by a newer, Cartesian paradigm of rationalist idealism, analytic separation between fields, and between the observing subject and the world that was the object of his observation.

Viewed against Toulmin's account of the making of modernity, the literary medievalism of the early Enlightenment may at first sight appear to be an expression of the older paradigm. Indeed, medievalism too privileged orality, the particular and local, the historically situated, and praxis over abstract theory. Medievalism, according to this reading, offered another path to understanding, which rejected the analytical detachment first proposed by Descartes and imitated throughout the ensuing age of Reason. Medievalism instead foregrounded organicist or contextualized understanding, performativity, affective engagement and notions of continuity, even of simultaneity between past and present.

Understanding the medieval as essentially a moral-literary concept, late seventeenth– and early eighteenth-century readers perceived it to be exemplified above all by one genre: the roman. In contrast to ecclesiastic historians and antiquaries who, like Mabillon, worked on charters, registers and capitularies that they did not explicitly designate as medieval, it was to the roman that most other, non-professional or semi-professional readers turned when speaking of this period. Chapelain derived his arguments in favour of a reassessment of the medieval from his reading of the thirteenth-century Lancelot. Likewise, when commenting on the particularly French spirit of gallantry (esprit de galanterie) in his Esprit des Lois, even the immensely learned magistrate Montesquieu referred to practices described not in historical documents, but in popular chivalric fiction. That roman was often synonymous with “medieval” was signalled by the first edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (1696), when it listed as examples of the term's usage “Old romans (les vieux romans). Modern romans. The roman of Lancelot du Lac, of Perceforest. The roman de la Rose. The roman of Amadis. A new roman. The roman of Astrée, of Polexandre, of Cyrus, of Cassandre”

But if the medieval was invariably defined in relation to the genre of the roman, then what did this imply for the way that readers approached real examples of medieval narrative fiction? This chapter will explore how, during the early period covering the 1680s to the 1700s, the roman or chivalric romance (roman de chevalerie) was read by contemporary readers, and how these readings related to other conceptualizations of the medieval. This is a vast subject, and one on which much basic research in book history needs still to be carried out before a synthetic overview is possible.