What do we call the Middle Ages in French?

The story behind the answer

Because French treats this historical period as a proper noun with a fixed, conventional label. Historians and textbooks use that standard name (capitalized, with a circumflex in âge); alternatives like “période/ère médiévale” are merely descriptive phrases, and “temps médiévaux” is not the idiomatic title of the era.

The term traces back to Renaissance humanists’ Latin medium aevum, marking the centuries between Antiquité and Renaissance. In French historiography it typically spans the 5th to the late 15th century and is often subdivided into early, high, and late phases—an age of castles and cathedrals, feudal bonds, scholastic learning, and, notoriously, the Black Death.