 In their attempts at finding alternative ways of understanding reason and its relation to life, art and feelings, the Romantics also tried to recuperate or rediscover elements from what had been regarded as the irrational and mythical spirit of the Middle Ages. Schlegel uses the term ‘Romantic’ to denote the very specific historical and stylistic discrepancy between German and Modern art, on the one hand, and Ancient and Classicist art, on the other. Schlegel argued that German culture, which he defined as having a natural inclination toward the Romantic (LDA: 439), was indebted to all the cultures which preceded it. But he specifically laid the roots of the so-called ‘Romantic spirit’ in chivalry, i.e., in the union of the heroism of the northern conquerors with the humanistic principles of Christianity. Schlegel associated chivalry and the Middle Ages in general with a certain form of purity that manifests itself (1) in a more spiritual understanding of love and female worth, to the extent that one could talk of a fusion between the metaphysical longing for the infinite (or God) and the erotic longing for a woman; and (2) in a ‘heroic’ morality. It is a morality “that never calculated consequences, but consecrated unconditionally certain principles of action” (LDA: 8). On the other hand, though, Schlegel’s genealogy of the ‘romantic’ would be incomprehensible without paying attention to his openness to and interest in other cultures and languages. Thus, the ‘Romantic spirit’ is also found in the works of Shakespeare, and sought in the spirit of romance cultures and languages, which, for Schlegel, are the result of a fusion between Latin and Teutonic languages, in a similar way as German Romanticism “is the fruit of the union of the peculiarities of the North with fragments of antiquity” (LDA: 5).