In light of the conclusions reached in the previous chapters and the knowledge gained through the fragments, the author addresses the issue of Ephorus’ universality. He tries to understand which reasons led Polybius to mention Ephorus as his only predecessor; and he sets Ephorus’ universality in the context of the historiographical thought of the fourth century BC, to better appreciate its novelty.

A rich and varied corpus of written material has survived from medieval Ireland, much of it concerned with providing an extended account of Ireland’s past. Through the technology of writing, a constructed history was created in which the art of writing itself functioned as process and as theme. Inscriptions and manuscripts bear witness to the mechanics of writing, while the development of letters and language is explored in origin-stories in significant ways. The power of the word was important, but so was control of the landscape, ordering society, taming space. Land-clearing, building settlements, and refining tools form a prominent strand in the account of Ireland’s beginnings, particularly in medieval Irish narratives of place; how fire was mastered; when and why were mills introduced. In explaining the past and so shaping the present, the technology of writing presented a story of technologies of other kinds, a selection of which is presented in this chapter on technology, writing, and place in medieval Irish literature.

Chapter 8 examines and partially defends Durkheim's functionalism as practiced in The Division of Labor in Society. His position is reconstructed with an eye to determining which aspects are worth retaining for a contemporary theory of social pathology, including the functionally organized nature of society. Focusing on claims regarding the moral function of the division of labor, it examines epistemological issues bound up with ascribing functions to features of society, including the relation between functional explanation and functional analysis and the role played by historical narratives. Durkheim's method is a complex holism whose claims depend less on single facts and individual arguments than on the plausibility of the whole picture that emerges from mutually reinforcing arguments, empirical facts, interpretive suggestions, and analogies. Thus, Durkheim's method for ascribing functions to social phenomena bears similarities to other interpretive enterprises, from the reading of texts to the construction of theories in the natural sciences.

Chapter 10 reconstructs Durkheim's conception of sociology as a science of morality, which includes three tasks: orienting our conduct via an account of a morally healthy society; illuminating the connection between social functioning and morality (explaining why moral and social health are the same; and explaining why the moral ideals animating a given society do so and how they vary with changing social conditions. Durkheim's science of morality is similar to Marx's historical materialist account of morality, although the former leaves the moral authority of the rules it explains largely intact. While Durkheim's accounts of specific pathologies imply a critique of certain social rules, they do not discredit the fundamental norms at work in the societies he studies. The chapter concludes that Durkheim does not adequately explain how historically specific moral systems can claim a moral authority irreducible to the narrowly functional value they have for social reproduction.

Chapter 7 treats two philosophers who directly influenced Durkheim: Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. Looking at their use of the society–organism analogy, their versions of functional explanation and functional analysis, and their conceptions of what a scientific sociology must be like helps one to understand both the content of Durkheim's positions and why he held them. Three types of functional explanation employed by Comte are relevant: two forms of existential functional explanation as well as functional analysis, which makes no claims regarding the existence of what it analyzes but "explains" what it is by specifying the function it serves and showing how its features are suited to accomplishing that purpose without implying anything about how it originated or why it persists. The chapter argues that Comte and Spencer rely too heavily on the society–organism analogy, leading to an overly biologistic understanding of normative critique available to social pathologists.

This chapter examines J. S. Mill’s writings on universal history, beginning with his reviews of Jules Michelet, François Guizot, and Henry Buckle, and ending with Alexis de Tocqueville’s prophetic account of democracy and Mill’s timely socialism. Barrell argues that we must take seriously the two historical perspectives from which Mill theorised politics: the first looked to the special causes which determined the timeliness or untimeliness of a given doctrine, reform, or phenomenon, while the latter looked to general causes and the region of ultimate aims. The first depended logically on the second. Any attempt to historicise the study of politics – by making laws relative to time and place, for example – must reckon with civilisation’s provisional trends. The debate surrounding Mill’s universalism and relativism, Barrell concludes, can be helpfully understood in these terms. While Mill’s argument is difficult to credulously follow, his intentions were clear: general and special circumstances always coexisted, and because they coexisted the past was both irreducibly distinct and uniform in its development. One consequence of this intellectual remapping might be to re-establish continuities between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in keeping with Mill’s self-professed eclecticism.

Monastic writers have long been considered the prototypical writers of history in the Middle Ages. This essay asks just how writing about the past related to the monastic life, in the myriad ways that nuns and monks practiced it in Ireland and Britain in the Middle Ages, and how history-writing was part of a broad array of memorial practices over the whole period. The concept of memory offers a practical context for considering the full range of historical production in monastic archives: romances, lais, sagas, and letters alongside chronicles, saints’ lives and cartularies. Since memory was also a major means of interaction between monastics and seculars, memory also clarifies the fluid boundaries between so-called monastic and secular forms of history.

To understand fully English medieval history writing, it is necessary to recognize the ways in which Christians interpreted universal history as teleological, as ranging from creation to doomsday, and as including both past events and future expectations of the Last Days. This essay surveys the apocalyptic nature of universal history based on four scriptural structures: the two dispensations encapsulated in the Christian Bible and symbolized by Synagoga and Ecclesia; the Pauline Three Laws (ante legem, sub lege, and sub gratia); the visions of Daniel interpreted as prophesies of four sequential kingdoms concluding with Rome; and creation week considered as an analogy for Six Ages of the World. The essay then examines in greater depth the intertwining of history and apocalyptic prophecy in two English manuscripts: the thirteenth-century Gulbenkian Apocalypse illustrating the Latin commentary on Revelation by Berengaudus; and a fifteenth-century Carthusian miscellany depicting the Middle English Revelations of Pseudo-Methodius.