The ‘Middle Age’

Abstract

The first two sections of the chapter illustrate continuity with late antique and classical historiography in the areas of History as Identity, History as Memorialization, and History as Lesson. Remaining sections show that within historically oriented medieval thought there were three tendencies for which the medieval world is not generally renowned: the conceptualization of human cultural difference over time, with its associations of an awareness of anachronism and accompanying debates over the relevance of the past to the present; a literal sense of the past, with its associations of specificity and accuracy; and the capacity for often quite sophisticated source criticism. As we traverse time and place, distinctions between Latin and vernacular Histories also become relevant, as do distinctions between, say, monastic Histories and urban Histories, or baronial and royal genealogies. Each of these sorts of History had the potential to imply a different scale and periodization of time—a different ‘temporality’—as did technical and economic developments. A section is devoted to religious hermeneutics and theological–philosophical shifts, some of which cohered with Christian History as Speculative Philosophy, some of which ran separately to it, and some of which stood in tension with it. In the eleventh–thirteenth centuries the clergy made a great contribution to developments in source evaluation, and increasingly their endeavours took account of the different contexts in which the sacred texts had been written and those in which they were read.