Obscurantism In The Middle Ages

The discovery of the Individual has already been the centre of many debates among scholars, who have largely argued about the beginning of that peculiar process and its circumstances. That was to begin with Jacob Burckhardt (1860) who stated that, from the Renaissance onwards, human beings ceased to consider themselves only as part of a clan, a race, a social status, but as well as distinct individuals, with specific and unique features. In his work, Burckhardt has a severe discourse towards Middle Ages:
In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness – that which was turned within as that which was turned without – lay dreaming or half-awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. (…) In Italy, this veil first melted into air (…), man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as

However, this view of the Middle Ages, covered by a veil of ignorance and obscurantism, and that of the Renaissance, enlightened by the insights of arts and self-awareness, has become conventional in common imaginary. Hopefully, some scholars have held a diametrical opposite opinion about the Middle Ages, arguing that this utopian conception of the Renaissance was a Myth (Burke, 1997). Thus, the so-called Dark Ages have also been told to have been the theatre of the discovery of the Individual, especially in the period from 1050 to 1200 (Morris, 1972). Indeed, the latter precisely described the radical shifts in the interpretations of personal faith in art and literature during that specific period. Due to those significant changes, scholars like Morris or Gurevich even call this period the 12th century Renaissance, which is meaningful and eventually contradicts the statements that resume the Middle Ages to a Dark Age (1972,