The past in the middle ages

Abstract

In spite of the great variety of historical writing in the middle ages it has often been maintained that certain attitudes to the past were held in common between 500 and 1500 A.D. A sort of medieval vision of the past has been conjured up which is alleged to have been providential, if not apocalyptic, universalizing, Christocentric and strongly periodized. Medieval ideas about the past, as expressed in a handful of well-known writers, including Bede, Caffaro, Otto of Freising, Matthew Paris and Ranulph Higden, are considered here particularly with reference to the structure of the past, namely how, if at all, it was thought of as divided into periods, and its content. God's role in human history, it is argued, was neglected in practice; it was not the Christian Church which provided the medieval ‘universal’ historian with his main subject matter, but classical Rome; it was Rome, too, which was his inspiration and supplied his models.

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