The Teaching of History in the Twelfth Century

Abstract

One of the most outstanding classical scholars in the twelfth century was John of Salisbury, who, steeped in the literature of the Latin writers, seems to echo Cicerol when he remarks that to be properly literate one must be familiar with mathematics and history as well as with the poets and the orators.2 The twelfth century as a whole reflected a deep interest in history and historical writing, to such an extent that Haskins calls it one of the greatest periods of medieval historiography. But history as it was understood by men like John of Salisbury, Hugo of St. Victor, and other learned clerics of the age was the history of St. Augustine, not the narration of past of the Greek and Roman historians. The classical historians had regarded history as a branch of the art of rhetoric, written to please public taste, or to relate anecdotes, or to set examples, or to display the literary powers of the authors.3 Their theory of world cycles, in which the order of the universe was pessimistically regarded as a degeneration from the Golden Age of the past to the Iron Age of the present, and in which the present reproduced the past and the future the present, was supplanted by a new philosophy of history as formulated by St. Augustine. St. Augustine asserted that the whole record of the world turned upon the divine concern for man, which had eventuated in the life of Christ. Prior to this miracle of Incarnation, all mankind had been doomed; after it, all of the elect were to be saved. This securing of happiness in another world to a relatively small part of the human race had now become the purpose of history,4 which was conceived by the Church Fathers to be not a natural development but rather a series of events ordered by divine intervention and revelations, a planned ordo temporum, the chief events of which were set forth in the Bible. St. Augustine's philosophy of history was based upon the chronological system of Eusebius of Caeserea, who formed and joined two parallel chronologies by synchronizing certain outstanding figures and events like Abraham and Ninus, Moses and Cecrops, Samson and the Trojan War.... .' St. Augustine, however, added to this chronological system his theory of the six ages of the world as defined by the crises of Bible