satisfaction most of the assumed predictions in the biblical texts. Numerous attempts were made, however, to define more closely some of the loose ends, especially the interpretation of Daniel 7, Revelation 6, and the appearance of the antichrist. The general ambiguity of apocalyptic texts tends to allow for their constant reinterpretation by those disposed to see themselves living in the last days and to see their enemies as the antichrists. The ambiguity of the biblical texts had even been heightened in some cases by patristic exegesis. Jerome, for example, had suggested that the ten horns in Daniel 7 might refer to the ten kings who would be the instruments of the Roman empire’s destruction and would be followed by the antichrist. If the Bible were the inspired truth, then these prophecies must have some concrete historical referent, or so reasoned medieval lovers of prophecy.
In addition to biblical prophecies, various other elements contributed to medieval prophetical historiographic interests: numerous Sibylline documents, developing astrological investigations stimulated by Islamic science and the introduction of the astrolabe and the improved ability to calculate astronomical phenomena, and the prophecies of such figures as Merlin and Hildegard of Bingen.69 The most famous apocalyptic historian of the time was Joachim of Fiore (about 1132–1202), whose fame and thought endured long after his passing. Joachim advanced a trinitarian conception of history. The time of ancient Israel and Judah was the age of God the Father, the second age of God the Son began with Jesus, and the age of the Holy Spirit was soon to dawn. The world of the new age was to be the time of the monks and was to be inaugurated by the appearance of a new Elijah and twelve holy men. (Many saw in the mendicant friars of the following decades a fulfilment of his prophecies.) The antichrist was to appear for the first time before the dawn of the final age and the reign of the Spirit. Needless to say, many were later seen as the embodiment of the antichrist; the most frequent candidate being the Muslims, a view already expounded by ninth-century Spanish theologians. The views of Joachimism and prophetic historiography scarcely advanced the cause of Israelite and Judean historiography. They did, however, tend to dispose people towards the future and hope and for several generations occupied the thoughts of many, not the least of whom was Sir Isaac Newton.
Before leaving this section, a few comments should be made about Jewish historiography in the Middle Ages. The surprising factor is that nothing comparable to Christian and Muslim historiography existed in Judaism during this period.70 The primary concerns of medieval Judaism centered upon either halakhic or philosophical-ethical matters. When they appear, historical matters in the Talmud are anecdotal. When the Jewish authorities “discussed the past, particular incidents, rather than its totality, caught their attention.”71 It is possible to take the various writings of a Jewish scholar like Maimonides (1135–1204) and distill from these his comments on and interpretations of various historical events reported in the Bible.72 These are basically retelling, with commentary, of the biblical narratives supplemented by haggadah and chronological notations. From these it is possible to reconstruct Maimonides’s historical worldview, but this is hardly historiography.
One special work deserves mention. This is the Hebrew writing called Josippon, so named because of its association with Josephus. Written in southern Italy in the mid-tenth century, Josippon begins with the table of nations in Genesis 10, contains a discussion of the founding of Rome, and provides a history of the Jews, primarily of the second temple period down to the fall of Masada. The unknown author made use of the Latin version of most of the books in Josephus’s Antiquities and a Latin adaptation of Josephus’s War. The book was widely used in the Middle Ages, was even translated into Arabic in the eleventh, and apparently was supplemented in the twelfth century.73
From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment
The foundations of modern historiography were laid in the Renaissance, which began in Italy in the fourteenth century and spread northward. The militant humanism of this period certainly had its roots in medievalism, in spite of its scorn for the Middle Ages; but its intellectual and technological accomplishments were revolutionary both in themselves and in their implications. One of the products of the Renaissance was history as an independent discipline. A second result was a critical approach to many of the problems and issues of life. The radical consequences of these two developments for the study of Israelite and Judean history, however, were not to be developed fully until the nineteenth century.
During the Renaissance, four elements that pervaded much of the intellectual activity were generative of momentous consequences for future historiography. These were a true sense of anachronism, a renewed interest in antiquarianism, a critical stance towards the literary evidence from the past, and the attempt to understand the causation of historical events through reason.74 One must not, of course, assume that a majority of the educated and scholarly figures of the Renaissance period shared these perspectives, any more than one should assume that after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species everyone gave up the idea that God created humankind in a paradise state.
As was noted earlier, medieval writers as a rule lacked a historical perspective on the past as past, as different in space and time from the contemporary. In the fourteenth century, a historical sensibility began to develop. This appears, for example, in Giotto’s fresco painting in the Arena Chapel at Padua (about 1305), which depicts Pontius Pilate clean-shaven, with garlanded head, and wearing a Roman robe embossed with a golden, imperial eagle. He appears as a figure from the past, not as a contemporary. Petrarch (1304–74) was well aware of the differences between his own day and those of his beloved Rome before the conversion of Constantine. So much so that he described his own times as barbarian and wrote ‘nostalgic’ letters to the classical authors expressing his longing to escape from the present and to find solace in those happier bygone days of old. Renaissance authors slowly recognized that everything had changed over time—laws, words, clothes, customs, arts, and buildings.75 There was, in other words, a historical relativity to all things.
Antiquarianism was a natural accompaniment to the revived interest in the past.76 In the Renaissance, men like Petrarch were not only interested in ancient literary works but in what would be called archaeological remains. Coins, inscriptions, and ancient ruins were of interest not just as relics from the past but as means to reconstruct the past. Petrarch used coins to discover what Roman emperors looked like and in his epic poem Africa drew upon the ruins of Rome, which he had visited, in describing the city at the time of the Carthaginians’ visit. In 1446, Flavio Biondo produced a topographical description of Rome dependent upon both the literary sources and his personal visits to the ruined sites. The fact that Renaissance scholars frequently misinterpreted antiquities or distorted their antiquarian knowledge is beside the point, for the issue is not their correctness in detail but their methodological procedure.
The discipline of documentary criticism was a speciality of many Renaissance scholars, The most outstanding and influential early Renaissance literary critic was Lorenzo Valla (about 1406–57). Petrarch, however, had already (in 1355) used internal and external evidence to prove that a document exempting Austria from the jurisdiction of the Emperor Charles IV was a forgery.77 In 1439, Valla disproved the authenticity of the Donation of Constantine in which Constantine had supposedly assigned temporal power over Italy to Pope Sylvester I and his successors. (Otto of Freising and other medieval authors had suspected that the document was a forgery, as did Valla’s contemporaries Nicholas of Cusa and Reginald Pecock, independently.) “The significance of Valla’s declamation was neither in applying philological criteria, for Petrarch and others, including canonists, had taken this step, nor in denying the authenticity of the document, which had already been placed in doubt; rather it was in exhibiting the whole array of humanist weapons—polemic and personal vituperation as well as criticism stemming from grammar, logic, geography, chronology, history, and law.”78 Valla and others applied their literary criticism to numerous documents, both classical and Christian, to prove their inauthenticity or to elucidate their origin and history. “In 1460, Nicholas of Cusa wrote the Sieving of the Koran (Cribratio Alcoran) which treated the Koran as Nicholas had already treated the Donation. He identified three elements in its composition: Nestorian Christianity, a Jewish adviser of Muhammad, and the corruptions introduced by Jewish ‘correctors’ after Muhammad’s death. This was
