summarizing the early church’s historiographic legacy to the Middle Ages, three additional factors should be noted. In the first place, the theory of the plenary inspiration of Scripture had become widespread by the fifth century CE. Such a view of the origin and nature of the Bible stifles any drastic critical approach to the biblical materials. Since the Bible was and remains the basic source material for the history of Israel and Judah, such a position almost by necessity means that the historian retells, expands, elucidates, and harmonizes the biblical source material but does not deal with it critically. Secondly, the hermeneutical principles widely employed in the church allowed the interpreter to find several meanings in any given text: the historical and various mystical, analogical, figurative, and allegorical senses. This multiple layer method of interpretation was indebted not only to Greek allegorical treatments of epic and mythical materials and to rabbinic exegesis but also to the philosophical–allegorical interpretation of Aristobulus and Philo of Alexandria.38 The allegorical approach to biblical interpretation meant that interpreters did not have to confront directly the problems and difficulties within the biblical text. When in doubt, appeal could be made to the rule of faith and the established tradition: Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est.
Thirdly, hagiography (the writing of accounts of the lives and sufferings of saints) had become widespread in the fourth and fifth centuries, perhaps influenced to a degree by the Hellenistic conception of the divine man. Athanasius’s Life of St. Anthony and Sulpicius Severus’s Life of St. Martin of Tours are good examples. These hagiographies were eulogistic and rhetorical biographies that offered a sort of dateless and timeless semi-historical work. They actually functioned to draw people away from the matter-of-fact world and pointed to that transcendental realm that impinged upon historical reality. Eusebeius, in his life of Constantine, demonstrated how difficult it was to write a Christian biography of a person involved in affairs military, political, and economic. Hagiography was concerned with different matters. Yet hagiography was to be standard fare in medieval times and in its own way an impediment to the development of serious historiography.
What the early church transmitted to the Middle Ages did not encourage the development of serious historiography. No developed Christian historiography comparable to the work of Herodotus, Thucydides, or even Livy, Tacitus, and Josephus, was passed on unless Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History be the exception. Augustine, Orosius, and their contemporaries had not dialogued with the secular historians of the pagan revival in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, such as Ammianus Marcellinus. These were left “to die from natural causes.”39 The works of the Greek and Hellenistic historians belonged to the pagan past and in the West could quickly sink into a long dormant eclipse. Source and textual criticism were suffocated by the weight of a totally inspired collection of Scriptures, and allegorical interpretation was at hand to provide any needed escape valve. Concern with the transcendental, with the sacred side of the historical process, with the philosophical-eschatological dimensions oriented people towards the other world and away from the questions of human causality and action.
The Medieval Period
Three major types of historical tradition during the medieval period have been distinguished by Southern: classical, early scientific, and prophetic.
The aim of the classical imitators was to exemplify virtues and vices, for moral instruction, and to extract from the confusion of the past a clear picture of the destinies of peoples. The aim of the scientific students of universal history was to exhibit the divine plan for humanity throughout history, and to demonstrate the congruity between the facts of history revealed in the Bible and the facts provided by secular sources. As for the prophetic historians, their aim was first to identify the historical landmarks referred to in prophetic utterances, then to discover the point at which history had arrived, and finally to predict the future from the still unfulfilled portions of prophecy.40
Much of medieval historiography can be analysed in these categories.
A characteristic of practically all historical works during the Middle Ages is what has been called “history without historical perspective.”41
The student of medieval historiography must learn to do without perspective in historical presentation. A medieval writer could distinguish stages in the history of salvation, but they were religious stages. He did not discern change or development in temporal history. He saw continuity in customs and institutions . . . Roman emperors are made to talk and behave like medieval rulers. Alternatively, a writer learned in the Latin classics tended to make medieval rulers talk and behave like the Caesars. The historian did not only look back to the Old and New Testaments for parallels and precedents; he lived in an expanding Bible. The writer of a saint’s Life felt that he was adding a new page to the Gospel story; the recorder of a warrior’s deeds was continuing the tale of ancient and Old Testament heroes. Past and present interlock: ancient precedents imposed themselves on the present; the past resembled the present as the historian saw it. He had no sense of anachronism.42
This lack of any sense of the past as past is vividly reflected in medieval art, which portrayed ancient kings, prophets, and saints in the dress, armament, and physical setting of medieval times.
Before examining some of the historical works of this period related to the history of the study of Israelite and Judean history and to historiography in general, some particular comments should be made. First of all, distinction must be made between the European West and the Byzantine East. In the West, Greek literature fell into temporary oblivion; in addition to the basic patristic literature, the primary classical sources used and imitated were Roman. The most widely used of Roman writers were Suetonius, Sallust, Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, and Livy. This meant, of course, a strong emphasis on rhetoric to which history was a sub-genre. In the East, the Byzantine scholars were heirs to the classical Greek traditions, Hellenistic historiography, and early Christian historical writings due to the survival of the Greek language. In the East, however, the writings of Polybius and Plutarch had a significant impact that influenced historical writing towards contemporary history and biography. In the West, the lower level of literacy prejudiced much historiography towards the miraculous and mythical. The rise of territorial states in the West produced a desire to relate national and contemporary history to the general sweep of sacred history.
Secondly, medieval historical works as a rule dealt with pedestrian matters such as city and monastic records and annals, with propagandistic concerns as in the case of royal biographies, or with pietistic orientations exemplified in the lives of saints and other writings of a hagiographic character, as well as in the devotional use made of the biblical traditions. Most of these works contribute little or nothing to either the development of historiographic methodology or to the study of Israelite and Judean history.
Thirdly, the medieval period was no cultural and educational monolith. The concept of the Middle Ages as a barbarian period of constant decline is a legacy from Renaissance historiography. Two periods, the Carolingian in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, and the twelfth century have rightly been described as periods of true renaissance.
In the early medieval period, four historians are pre-eminent: Gregory of Tours (about 540–94), Isidore of Seville (about 560–636), the Venerable Bede (about 673–735), and Paul the Deacon (about 720–800). Each of these produced histories that, to a lesser or greater degree, filled out the shadowy past of their people by drawing up a historical pedigree that traced its origins to some great but misty figure or people of the past. (Virgil had done this for the Romans in his account of Aeneas and the Trojans who settled in Latium; and Jordanes, who died about 554, had traced the Goths back to the biblical Magog and the Scythians in his rewriting of Cassiodorius’s De Origine Actibusque Getarum.) Of these, Isidore and Bede are of interest for the history of the biblical period.
In his Chronica Majora, Isidore borrowed from several earlier Christian chronographers and produced a chronology extending from creation to 615 CE. In his universal scheme, Isidore devised the practice of dating everything backward and forward
