Is it really true? Do we belittle those of the Enlightenment period and it's artists and thinkers scientists and composers? I think we make fairer judgements of different periods of history based on fairly objective grounds. A lot of embellishment and imaginative reconstruction of the past no doubt, but not always negative.
We consider ourselves the heirs of the enlightenment and renaissance, so we continue their tradition of looking down on the Middle Ages, and we think of it as a rational time of progress. This despite the fact that both time periods brought plenty of irrational behavior, with things like alchemy to occultism to witch hunts, and also brought fun things like slavery and racism (earlier people made differences between people of course, but not yet based on race and skin color). But we prefer to forget all that and pretend the Middle Ages was the backwards, superstitious time, despite it being the time during which the Church outright said and taught that witches and demons and magic are just nonsense.
