It might help to push the premise of your argument back in time and start with the origin of the idea of the “Middle Ages,” which is actually an idea developed in the Renaissance. The great humanist scholar Petrarch is as good a place to start as any. Petrarch (1304-74), was the center of a circle of scholars who were all obsessed with classical Latin culture and the hunt for accurate texts, the literary cornerstones of the Italian Renaissance. A fascinating character himself, he was deeply disillusioned by and contemptuous of his own time, a time that seemed to him, and others like him, so vastly inferior to the glories and urbanity of Greco-Roman antiquity. He was one of the first to speak of his age as a time of darkness. “I should have preferred to have been born in any other period than our own,” he wrote. “In order to forget my own time, I have constantly striven to place myself in spirit in other ages.” His and others’ study of, especially, Roman history, led to new ways to characterize the progression of history. “What happened,” they wondered, “that caused such a break from the glories of Rome?” (one of the innovations of Renaissance humanists was the introduction of the study of history as a vital element of a liberal arts education.) A papal secretary named Flavio Biondo (1392-1463) wrote his History of the Decline of the Roman Empire where he argued that the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 signaled the end of the Empire. But his own era was busily recovering the literary legacy of that age. So between ancient Rome and the era of the Renaissance there was a “Middle Age” of decline. The 16th-entury artist and biographer Vasari explicitly spoke of the art of his age, modeled on classical aesthetics, as a “renascita” or “rebirth.” In 1604 a German legal historian, Melchior Goldast, coined the phrase medium aevum (middle age/era), a term that a Dutch professor named Christoph Keller (“Cellarius”) popularized in The Nucleus of Middle History between Ancient and Modern in 1675. So historians from Petrarch forward had implanted the notion that the Middle Ages was a backward period of decline between themselves--“The Renaissance”--and antiquity. (It’s worth noting that the bread and butter of the first wave of the Italian Renaissance was the recovery and study of classical Latin texts, more than three quarters of which were preserved by medieval scholars. When Renaissance book hunters found these texts, they thought the 9th-century manuscripts they were reading, whose handwriting was so much more elegant and legible than their own, was in fact the penmanship of ancient Roman writers.)

This is where the Enlightenment enters. Its preeminent spokesman, Voltaire, in his Essay on Manners and the Spirit of Nations (1715) thought it necessary “to know the history of that [middle] age only in order to scorn it”; for him, even in the 15th century, the heart of the Renaissance, “barbarism, superstition, and ignorance covered the face of the earth, except in Italy.” Later in the 18th century the historian Edward Gibbon, in his famous Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire wrote that “[t]he darkness of the middle ages (my emphasis) exhibits some scenes not unworthy of our notice.” The perceived crudity, barbarism, and superstition of the Middle Ages went against everything they valued—Reason. The modern historian Brian Stock, an important student of the historiography of the Middle Ages, neatly sums up the evolution of the idea of “Middle Ages” up to the 19th century: “The Renaissance invented the Middle Ages in order to define itself; the Enlightenment perpetuated them in order to admire itself; and the Romantics revived them in order to escape themselves.”

Enter Jacob Burckhardt, the Swiss historian whose The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) widely popularized the Renaissance as a great turning point, a rejection of medieval “barbarism” and “superstition” (the exact kind of “barbarism” and “superstition” that, on the flip side, so appealed to the Romantics, many of whom turned against the Enlightenment’s adoration of Reason, though this is a vast oversimplification). Burkhardt’s estimation of the Middle Ages in contrast to the Renaissance: “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.” Naturally, historians of the Middle Ages, inspired in part by nationalism and its celebration of national identity, which led to the publication of national historical archives, rejected Burckhardt’s bleak assessment of their area of interest. The chief historian who challenged Burckhardt was Charles Homer Haskins whose book, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927) argued that a fascination with classical antiquity, the cornerstone of Italian Renaissance humanism, was in fact going strong among 12th-century scholars, who in fact did the groundwork on which the Italian Renaissance built. Lynn Thorndike, his contemporary, argued along the same lines. With the publication of more editions of national archives and the development of more “objective” techniques of historical methodology, the study of medieval history flowered in the 20th century, so much so that now most scholars would be reluctant to draw hard lines between the two eras despite discernible differences. Richard Southern's lifelong study of medieval scholastic humanism vastly developed Haskin's ideas. Ronald G. Witt’s The Two Latin Cultures and the Foundation of Renaissance Humanism in Medieval Italy (2011) is perhaps the most recent magisterial study of this hazy dividing line.

Some sources: Brian Stock, Listening for the Text: On the Uses of the Past for the evolving idea of the Renaissance. Richard Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe and Ronald Witt as mentioned for medieval humanism.

EDIT: Fixed a couple of typos.

A specifically English fascination with the early medieval period begins in the late 18th century but really crescendoes in the later half of the 19th. In fact, the Victorian fascination with King Alfred in particular culminates in popular celebrations to mark the millenium of both his accession to the throne in 1871 and his death in 1899.

The phenomenon begins in the 1890s with the lawyer and historian F.W. Maitland, who sparks a popular interest in the Anglo-Saxons with his works such as The History of English Law before the time of Edward I and The Constitutional History of England. As the Victorian period gets underway, this historical preoccupation is increasingly co-opted to a political bent; England needs a national hero like the French have Joan of Arc, and the English etablishment need a way to claim their cultural and moral superiority to European rivals. As British Imperial architecture turns to the classical world for inspiration, so historically it turns to the Anglo-Saxons, and Alfred in particular.

In political structures like the federated hegemony of Mercia and the witan of Wessex, Victorian historians such as Walter Besant saw proof that England really was the 'mother of democracy' and the''birthplace of freedom'. In Alfred specifically was found a hero of English, or wider British, values, practically deified by historians such as Thomas Hughes or James Frye. From the Eighth Century Renaissance emerged an Alfred as champion of education and educational reform; his legal code set the precedence for English common law and fairness; and in his translations of books and religious works in particular were laid the foundation stones of Anglicanism. Alfred was even co-opted in Imperial undertakings: as Alfred had freed England from the Vikings and brought fairness, freedom and prosperity to all, so it was only right that that freedom be extended to all by means of Empire.

The counterpoint to this lionisation of Alfred into a nationalistic myth-hero, of course, is the necessary demonisation of that which came after and required the current British government to be rediscovering and re-establishing Alfredian values. The Norman Conquest of 1066 and the subsequent rest of the entire medieval period was indeed portrayed as one increasingly legally and socially repressive, and as the opression of an idyllic England by a tyrannical French elite. That the majority of the British elite were still descendants of those tyrannical French was an irony completely overlooked in a narrative which portrayed the purported re-emergence of traditional Englishness after foreign oppression as a justification for Empire, mercantilism and the British political and legal establishment.

Some interesting reading can be found in Parker's England's Darling: The Victorian Cult of Alfred the Great.

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