Medieval Historiography as Modern Political and Social Thought

Abstract

It is necessary to begin with a disclaimer: a completely relativist appraisal of medieval historiography is out of order. Historical scholarship has advanced to its present state of knowledge and sophistication in large part because of the critical examination of primary sources. Twentieth-century scholarship has benefited from the exhaustive labours of scholars sincerely convinced that the particular questions which they were moved to pose of the past were the most meaningful and instructive to mankind. Serious historians the men who have helped us to illuminate the past in all its richness and perplexity have seldom been vulgar apologists for the contemporary establishment, either intellectual or political. Neither have they, on the whole, been conscious propagandists for some existing or hoped-for social order. Nevertheless the study of medieval history has always been strikingly conditioned by contemporary social needs and intellectual fashions, in the twentieth century as in previous eras. It is well known that the image of the Middle Ages which obtained at any given period in early modern Europe tells us more about the difficulties and dilemmas, the intellectual commitments of the men of the period than it does about the medieval world itself. The Renaissance thinkers who first branded the Middle Ages as 'barbaric' and 'dark' were men in rebellion against certain aspects of scholasticism and clerical authority. To justify their own departure from prevailing intellectual orthodoxies, they found it psychologically necessary and didactically useful to project their disdain backwards in time and pronounce a thousand years in the history of European man as boorish and intellectually retrograde.