Melchior Goldast

The political theorist and historian Melchior Goldast appears to have coined the variation medium aevum (“a middle age”) in 1604; shortly after, in a Latin work of 1610, the English jurist and legal historian John Selden repeated medium aevum, Anglicizing the term in 1614 to middle times and in 1618…

…German medieval history compiled by Melchior Goldast (d. 1635). The initiator of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica was Karl Freiherr vom Stein (d. 1831), leading early 19th-century German statesman and reformer, who, after retiring from politics in 1816, exercised his patriotic energies in stirring up interest in German history. He founded,…