The self-understanding of modernity is that it asserted itself as a definite break with the immediate past, and that the latter, variously labelled as the 'Dark Ages' or the 'middle ages', came to constitute the field of otherness against which all that was modern was to emerge. A simple set of dichotomies was then constructed in which all negative attributes were relegated to the epoch that was conceived as a hiatus in the course of civilization: blind faith, unreflecting prejudice, stagnation, absence of learning and free inquiry, superstition and so on. Even the rationalism of medieval schoolmen was overshadowed by their obedience to a Church authority that was viewed as arbitrary, mindful of its own political interests, and ultimately dedicated to holding knowledge and its pursuit under tight control.

A new world was born: one based on reason. The irrational past had to be destroyed for reason to exist, to make a fresh start and build the world anew. Reason then courageously fought the residues of irrationality in modernity to give us an enlightenment world. Many of us still live in the house of modernity.

It is only with the first crisis of modernity, precipitated by the extravagance of reason in the course of the French revolution, that a reexamination of the middle ages appeared possible and desirable. The impetus may have come from the Romantic reassessment of reason and the distrust of its claims to universal application, but it was quickly taken over by the very sort of rationalism that the Romantics rightly feared the most: instrumental (economic) reason in the service of the nation-state.

So what is crucial to modernity is the notion of an abyss between the periods of the pre-modern and modern. This abyss is what is preserved ; has to be preserved, for modernity to retain its identity.

And yet we know that if the culture of early modern times marks such an abrupt departure from what preceded it, then this rupture must have had its seeds in the culture of the middle ages. If that is the case, we do not have a break but a more or less orderly, or rather a discontinuous, development from the middle ages to early modernity.

What has happened from this crisis of modernity turning out to be otherwise than what it said it was, is that heterogeneity is now everywhere. Everyone now reads according to his or her situation and from different perspectives and so we have be a multiplicity of readings rather than one grand linear narrative. And so we have stepped into the postmodern and learn to live with difference.