'Dreaming of the Middle Ages': An unpublished

fragment*
UMBERTO ECO

I once wrote a long essay in which I said that we are living in a new
Middle Ages. But by that I meant an era of transition, of political,
cultural, and technological transformation between the end of a worldwide empire and the rise of a new political balance a very pluralistic
period in which the whole deck of historical cards is shuffled and no
nostalgia for the past is allowed. My Middle Ages were a realistic period
of nostalgia for the future. But the Middle Ages, we have seen, can also be
taken as a model for a Tradition that assumes, by definition, to always be
right. These Middle Ages are forged by the Merchants of the Absolute,
and we must challenge them, under the standard of a New Critique of
Impure Reason.
What our so-called post-modern era has in common with the Middle
Ages is its encyclopedic voracity and flexibility. Okay. And it is legitimate
to privilege the cathedral of Strassbourg, celebrated by Goethe, over the
boring geometries of the Renaissance. But we cannot forget that Galileo
was right, and no dream can convince us that he was wrong.
Thus, long life to the Middle Ages and to the dreaming of them,
provided that it is not the dream of reason. We have already generated
too many monsters.
Note
* This fragment consists of the concluding remarks to Professor Eco's 'Dreaming of the
Middle Ages', which was delivered in Bloomington, Indiana at the Ninth Annual
Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America (October 1984). A text ofthat speech, minus
these concluding statements, was published in 1986 as 'Dreaming of the Middle Ages* in
Travels Through Hyperreality, 61-72. New York: Harcourt.
Umberto Eco (b. 1932) is Professor of Semiotics at the University di Bologna. Among his
many distinguished publications are A Theory of Semiotics (1976), The Role of the Reader
(1979), and Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984).
Semiotica 63-1/2 (1987), 239.

0037-1998/87/0063-0239 $2.00
Mouton de Gruyter, Amsterdam

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