[Cultural Studies is] an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and sometimes counter-disciplinary field that operates in the tension between its tendencies to embrace both a broad, anthropological and more narrowly humanist conception of culture. Unlike traditional anthropology, however, it has grown out of analyses of modern industrial societies. It is typically interpretive and evaluative in its methodologies, but unlike traditional humanism it rejects the exclusive equation of culture with high culture and argues that all forms of cultural production need to be studied in relation to other cultural practices and to social and historical structures. Cultural studies is thus committed to the study of the entire range of a society's arts, beliefs, institutions, and communicative practices. (emphasis mine)
 

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 from themselves.
Brian Stock, "The Middle Ages as Subject and Object: Romantic Attitudes and Academic Medievalism"

In anxiously asserting its own legitimacy . . . Modernity defined itself away from the Middle Ages.
Stephen G. Nichols, "The New Medievalism: Tradition and Discontinuity in Medieval Culture"

Modernism, it could be said, suffered history in public, and struggled against it in art. Postmodernism renounced or parodied history in public, only to be haunted by it in ethics and in conscience. . . . Never but in dreams are we free of history.
Marshall Brown, Preface to The Uses of Literary History

To think historically always involves establishing a connection between [the past's] ideas and one's own thinking . . . To interpret means precisely to use one's own preconceptions so that the meaning of the text can really be made to speak to us.
Hans-George Gadamer, Truth and Method