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6 Current Res. J. Soc. Sci. & Human. 1 (2023)

handle is hein.journals/crjssh6 and id is 1 raw text is: ISSN: 2581-8422, Vol. 06, No. (1) 2023, Pg. 01-12 Current Research Journal of Social Sciences journalofsocialsciences.org The Problematic Nature of the So-Called Paradigm Shift in Cultural-Historical Terms: The Staying Power of Medieval Literature until Today ALBRECHT CLASSEN Department of German Studies, University of Arizona. U.S.A. 1 Article History Published on : 24 February 2023 As much as we have used the notion of the paradigm shift since Thomas Kuhn had coined that phrase in 1962, it has also hampered us in many ways to understand cultural continuities, traditions, literary patterns, and the staying power of the book markets and public tastes throughout the centuries. One of those major paradigm shifts was the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, or the early modern age, and we have happily lived by the notion that by ca. 1500 profound changes in literary tastes, world views, themes, and narrative topics occurred, leading to the ultimate death of medieval culture and literature. Undoubtedly, the invention of the printing press by Johann Gutenberg in ca. 1450 meant a major transformation in the way how texts were disseminated, but recent research has begun to indicate that this did not mean at all the end of all those texts written and published prior to the late fifteenth century, whether as manuscripts or as incunabula/early modern prints. This study will illustrate this phenomenon in light of a number of specific cases (literary, philosophical, religious, etc.) that prove the existence of a tremendous stream of texts that continued to appeal to readers far into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The situation on the early modern book market changed, of course, but not at all as dramatically as the traditional concept of the paradigm shift has implied. And we can also identify specific cases where the essential ideas developed in the Middle Ages carried on well into the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, if not until today. When Europeans suddenly learned of the existence of America, this triggered a shattering of all of their geographic notions and forced yet another paradigm shift after a series of other major changes in the history of mentality. In fact, we could easily claim that much of human history has been determined by the constant break-up of traditional worldviews, by upheavals in the political arena, and by revolutions in the sciences and medicine (Classen, ed., 2019). Both the Enlightenment and the subsequent American (1786) and CONTACT Albrecht Classen º aclassen@email.arizona.edu 9 Department of German Studies, University of Arizona. U.S.A. Scc © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Enviro Research Publishers. This is an @ Open Access article licensed under a Creative Commons license: Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY). Doi: 10.12944/CRJSSH.6.1.01

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