This dissertation investigates the formation of the idea of the Middle Ages in Bengal during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It explores the processes and intellectual debates through which modern historical time, understood as teleological, stagist and rooted in the notion of progress, was naturalized in this region. In particular, "Medieval Landscapes" explores these processes by examining the history of the region of Nadia in central Bengal, focusing mainly on two aspects of it: the natural landscape of the region, and the cultural production of the royal court of Nadia, as well as its reception in the Bengali nineteenth century. This dissertation argues that the narratives of natural decay written about Nadia situated the fortunes of the region as a place intimately linked to the fate of its royal court—known as the Nadia Raj—and vice versa. In that sense, the declining yield of cultivable lands in Nadia, the silting of its rivers, and the demise of the political power of the Nadia Raj, all became aspects of a single, unified understanding of historical time: the naturality of the teleological passage from medieval times to modernity. "Medieval Landscapes" shows how the conflicted relation of colonial historiography with the political, cultural and even natural past of Nadia, along with its engagement in attempts to theorize the modern divide as a moral and political distance from these pasts, generated the temporal boundaries of what would be known as the "Medieval period'' of Bengal's historiography.