In any period men’s thoughts about the past tend to harden and simplify into conventional praise or disparagement. This in turn, as fashion and then prejudice, affects the present and the future; until a new generation finds it an intolerable cliche. It is then criticized and perhaps discarded. Modem scholars cannot stomach the old cliches about the Renaissance. To go further back, Voltaire’s generation sneered at Dante, whom it did not read, and thought Gothic a style for barbarians; and both these views, with their implications, had become conventional, not to say stale, by the mid-eighteenth century. When, with the new century, the tide turned, the motive was largely religious; a revival of Christian piety, a new interest in theology. But the new outlook could be equally one-sided. Pugin thought Gothic the only Christian style in building and Ruskin thundered against the neo-classical style of the Renaissance—‘pagan in its origin, proud and unholy in its revival, paralysed in its old age . . . an architecture invented, as it seems, to make plagiarists of its architects, slaves of its workmen, and sybarites of its inhabitants’. And from this attitude, become in turn a convention as stale as neo-classicism, we inherit (do we not?) much highly unpractical ugliness. Nor is the association of prayer with pointed arches quite dead yet.

The present century’s slow movement away from Gothic in ecclesiastical architecture has not however implied any loss of interest in the Middle Ages on the part of scholars or indeed of the educated public in general. Far from it. Never have the philosophy, art and literature of the Middle Ages been so thoroughly studied or keenly appreciated as in recent years.