for the Celts a more illustrious and detailed past and a more glorious and consequential destiny than was the case of any other national historian. Trojan origins, visions and heavenly visitations, and Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table are described in imaginary and graphic contours. “Although some, even contemporary, readers were not deceived by the work, and William of Newburgh, one of the best English historians of the 12th century, denounced it as a tissue of absurdities, many seriously accepted it as history.”58
Scholars are accustomed to speak of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries as a proto-Renaissance, as a time of great progress in learning and culture. Knowles has summarized the humanism of this period by outlining its three dominant characteristics: “first, a wide literary culture,” which demonstrated itself in a “capability of self-expression based on a sound training in grammar and a long and often loving study of the foremost Latin authors”; “next, a great and what in the realm of religious sentiment could be called a personal devotion to certain figures of the ancient world; and, finally, a high value set upon the individual, personal emotions, and upon the sharing of experiences and opinions within a small circle of friends.”59 During this period, the universities at Paris, Bologna, and Oxford were founded. The Crusades to recover the holy land from the Seljukian Turks reached their culmination in the establishment of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem. Contacts between the East and West, in spite of the church split in 1054, produced cross-fertilization between Byzantium and Latin Europe. Aristotelian logic and philosophy, partially through the mediation of the Arabs, began to dominate Western thought through translations and the greater availability of his works.
The introduction of the whole canon of Aristotle to the West was a process continuing over a hundred years. The first wave, that of the logical works, was absorbed easily and avidly . . . The second wave, that of the difficult and profound philosophical works, gave more trouble and was less easily absorbed, though its effects were epoch-making. Finally, the ethical and political and literary treatises presented Europe with a philosopher who regarded human life from a purely naturalistic, this-world point of view . . . the atmosphere, the presuppositions of this great body of thought were not medieval and Christian, but ancient Greek, not to say rationalistic in character.60
Aristotelian thought made possible the birth of ‘theology’ in the systematic and scholastic sense that was to dominate religious studies in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries.61
Aristotle’s thought, it should be recalled, did not encourage historiographic studies. For Aristotle, history was too chaotic: “The historian has to expound not one action, but one period of time and all that happens within this period to one or more persons however disconnected the several events may be” (Poetics 1459a). History also lacked the element of universality: “The historian describes the thing that has been; the poet the kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is more important and philosophic than history, for its statements have universal validity, while those of the historian are valid only for one time and one place” (Poetics 1451b). The urge to systematization is basically anti-historical in perspective.
This period of the proto-Renaissance, in its earliest phase, also witnessed some significant developments in historiography. In England, after the Norman Conquest of 1066, radical changes characterized society and the old cultural systems were challenged. In response to the threat of change, English monastics saw themselves as the custodians of the past and to preserve that past monasteries became the centers of antiquarian concerns.62 Monastic charters were collected, documents transcribed, historical and annalistic texts assembled, buildings and inscriptions studied, and the remains of saints gathered. “The post-Conquest monks were sure that they had a great past, but they were uncertain of their present and future . . . The monastic antiquaries searched the records to give detail and lucidity to their inherited conviction of greatness . . .”63
William of Malmesbury (about 1080–1143), in his ecclesiastical and secular histories of England, demonstrated how such antiquarian material could be used to reconstruct a realistic view of the past. No parallel to such antiquarianism exists before the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the latter was to lack both the passion and purpose of the former.
At least two major theologians and canonists of the twelfth century worked with a concept of development and change in history.64 These were Hugh of St. Victor (about 1096—1141), and Otto of Freising (about 1115–58). Hugh was not strictly a historian, although he wrote a chronicle of world history for use as a student’s handbook in which he stressed the importance of time, place, people, and events for the understanding of history. In his theological works, a dynamic view of history pervades his discussions. His arguments rest on the presupposition that humandkind moved in history from the primitive and simple to the more sophisticated and developed. He sought to outline the various stages, for example, in the history of the sacrament of penance showing that its final form was the product of the needs of the early church. Thus doctrine goes through developmental stages and the needs of human institutions play a role. In his description of the world ages, Hugh’s thought has a certain evolutionary ring. The first age of man, from the fall to Abraham, was “the age of natural law when men groped around for remedies for their ills by the light of reason and experience.” Primitive humandkind developed various sacraments, sacrifices, and offerings to present to their gods. The second age, which began embryonically with Abraham and fully with Moses, was “the age of written law when God intervened actively in human history” and provided humanity with the means of education and sacramental union. In the third age, which began with Christ, grace replaced law and the inspirations of the spirit supplanted the commandments.65 In these ages, humans cooperated with God in a forward movement towards higher forms of human existence. Hugh, in his writings on the liberal arts, argued again for stages in human development from the primitive to the advanced. He declared: “Men wrote and talked before there was grammar; they distinguished truth from falsehood before there was dialectic; they had laws before there was rhetoric; they had numbers before there was arithmetic; they sang before there was music; they measured fields before there was geometry; they observed the stars and seasons before there was astronomy.”66
In technology, it was the operation of human reason that functioned to meet the needs of humans. Physical necessity prompted humanity towards achievement. “There arose the theoretical sciences to illuminate ignorance, ethics to strengthen virtue, and the mechanical arts to temper man’s infirmity.”67 Hugh’s sense of historical development in all categories of life presented a rather optimistic view of the historical process, a view in which novelty was not only accepted but also declared good.
Otto, the bishop of Freising in Bavaria and a member of the imperial family, produced a universal history from creation to his own day relying on the schemes of six ages and four world monarchies. The work is basically Orosian in orientation. In a number of ways, Otto differed from or extended the thought of Augustine and Orosius. He identified the city of God with the church and in Henry IV’s submission to Pope Gregory VII at Canossa in 1077 he saw the triumph of the ‘heavenly’ over the ‘earthly’ city. Although Otto shared the Orosian view of the decline of human rule, he was nonetheless able to affirm, especially in his work on Frederick I, that history was not a tragedy and that empire could be an instrument of peace. Otto gave detailed treatment to the so-called ‘transfer thesis,’ the idea that civilization and empire moved from East to West. The idea was implicit already in Eusebius and perhaps already used at the Frankish court before Otto. He, however, worked out analogies between the ancient empires and those in Europe. The empire of his day was understood as the continuation of the fourth empire—the Roman—which had simply moved westward. Otto applied the transfer theory not only to political power but to religion and education as well: “Note well that all human power and knowledge began in the East and end in the West, so that in this way the variability and weaknesses of all things may be made clear.”68
The Middle Ages witnessed the blossoming of what might be called ‘prophetic’ or ‘apocalyptic’ historiography. The six-age scheme and the four monarchies theory of world history were, of course, derived from biblical texts that were either taken as prefigurations or as predictions. Biblical
