The Teaching of History in the Twelfth Century

Extract

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 Cicero 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. 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 events” 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. 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.