ABSTRACT
The visions of the Middle Ages summoned up in the early nineteenth century are segments of a new panorama of world history, outlined by an earlier generation of historians, but colored and elaborated with telling effect by the Romantics. For medievalism played a more important role in 'pre-Romanticism' than in Romanticism itself. G. M. Trevclyan attributed 'almost wholly to the Waverley novels' the difference in historical outlook between Gibbon and Macaulay - Gibbon who wrote as if every Roman emperor, every Gothic chieftain and every hermit of the Thebaid was a man of the eighteenth century, and Macaulay who never failed to stress the difference between the mentality of his own time and that about which he was writing. The transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century could be not merely sensed but seen at every level of society and throughout the whole of Europe, if nowhere more conspicuously than in France.
