AGES AND RENAISSANCE
Readings
• Procopius, The Secret History (550 CE)
• Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical
History (325 )
• Augustine of Hippo, The City of God (413-
26)
• Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah (1377)
• Niccolo Machiavelli, The History of
Florence (1525)
• Jean Bodin, Method for the Easy
Comprehension of History (1566)
Middle Ages Historiography
• What are the Middle Ages?
– Between the Classical and the Renaissance
• Dates: from fall of Western Roman Empire (5th
century) to beginning of Early Modern Period (16th
century)
– Sometimes referred to as Medieval period or
Middle Ages Historiography
• Very telling to understand what various
historians think mark the END of the Middle
Ages
– 1453 Turkish capture of Constantinople
– 1453 End of Hundred Years' War (Anglo-French)
– 1455 Invention of moveable type printing press by
Johann Gutenberg
– 1485 Battle of Bosworth (fall of Richard III & rise of
Tudors in England)
– 1492 Reconquista (fall of Muslim Spain)
– 1492 Columbus’s first voyage
– 1517 Luther’s 95 Theses and start of Protestant
Reformation
– 1571 Battle of Lepanto (stopping Ottoman expansion
in Mediterranean).
Middle Ages Historiography
• What identifies the intellectual world of the
Middle Ages?
• Knowledge held in the hands of the
Church (because there was ONE church
then, headed by the Pope)
– Time of mass illiteracy
– And also orthodoxy – from Greek orthos
("true” or "straight") + doxa (opinion or
teaching)
• historiography was mostly the province of the
Church, taking the form of theological writings
History in the Middle Ages
• The Western Roman Empire disintegrated in the 5th
century AD
– traditions of classical education and literary culture, of which
historiography was part, were disrupted and attenuated.
• Literacy became one of the professional skills of the
clergy,
– and clergy carried on the task of preserving and expanding a
learned, religious culture.
• Many monasteries kept chronicles or annals,
– often the anonymous work of generations of monks,
– which simply recorded whatever the author knew of events, year
by year, without any attempt at artistic or intellectual elaboration
• The concern with separating fact from fiction and legend
often disappeared in medieval historiography.
Middle Ages and Classical
Tradition
• The work of Classical and Early Christian
historians, however, were preserved in
monastic libraries
• and even inspired some early medieval
writers to emulate them
– Bede the Venerable, an English monk, wrote
The Ecclesiastical History of the English
People (731)
• a medieval version of Eusebius
– integration of secular and ecclesiastical history
» natural and supernatural events,
» in a forceful and intelligent narrative.
1. The Early Christians
• Herodotus, Thucydides, and Tacitus were all
“pagans”
– and their works were almost entirely secular
– focused almost exclusively on the role of war in the
state.
• Pagans who wondered about human destiny or
morality would look to philosophy, not history, to
answer these questions.
• With the conversion in the 4th century of
Emperor Constantine the Great,
– Christianity attained legal status
– and increasing influence in the Roman Empire
• This introduced new subjects and approaches to
history.
Procopius of Caesarea (ca. 500 – ca. 565)
• The Secret History (550 CE)
• Account of his deep disappointment in
Byzantine Emperor Justinian and his wife,
Theodora
– As not truly Christian (and this makes it a
great place to start on Middle Ages
historiography)
• But also, focused on the private world of
the leaders as source of their actions.
Procopius of Caesarea (ca. 500 – ca. 565)
• The Secret History also includes “magical” accounts:
• “…some of those who have been with Justinian at the
palace late at night, men who were pure of spirit, have
thought they saw a strange demoniac form taking his
place. One man said that the Emperor suddenly rose
from his throne and walked about, and indeed he was
never wont to remain sitting for long, and immediately
Justinian's head vanished, while the rest of his body
seemed to ebb and flow; whereat the beholder stood
aghast and fearful, wondering if his eyes were deceiving
him. But presently he perceived the vanished head filling
out and joining the body again as strangely as it had left
it.”
Eusebius of Caesarea (~275 – 339)
• ca. 324: an ecclesiastical history: Church
History (Historia Ecclesiastica)
– the growth of the church from its origins,
– through generations of persecution and
martyrdom,
– to the triumphs of his own day.
Eusebius of Caesarea (~275 – 339)
• A radically new kind of history
– ignored the traditional classical restrictions of
subject and style.
• Eusebius described religious life,
– books, and ideas,
– and people of no political importance;
• included documentary evidence
– in fact, many early church texts survive only because
they are quoted in Eusebius
• and considered the major questions of human
existence
– thought in the Classical tradition to be the province of
philosophy
Height of Western Middle Ages
• In the 5th century
– Augustine of Hippo (known by Christians as
St. Augustine, patron saint of brewers,
printers, theologians, sore eyes)
• City of God (413-26)
• history of the interaction of Christian and
secular history.
Aurelius Augustinius,
Augustine of Hippo (354–430)
• Historian and philosopher of the Roman Catholic
church, but also claimed by Protestants as one
of the theological fountainheads of Reformation
teaching on salvation and grace.
– African by birth
• a Bishop in the Early African Church
– Roman by education,
– Milanese by baptism
• His Confessions is often called the first Western
autobiography.
Augustine
• born in 354 in Tagaste, a provincial
Roman city in North Africa.
• raised and educated in Carthage.
– mother, Monica (Saint Monica), was a devout
Catholic
– father, Patricius, was a pagan
– but Augustine followed controversial “cult”
Manichaean religion
• although he later turned away from it; City of God
is written AGAINST it.
Augustine
• Augustine’s education and early career was in
philosophy and rhetoric, the art of persuasion
and public speaking.
• He taught in Tagaste and Carthage,
• but later went to Rome, the capital
– met the prefect of the City of Rome, Symmachus
– He appointed him professor of rhetoric for the imperial
court at Milan.
• THE most visible academic appointment in the Latin world
– but stressful and busy
– in Confessions, laments that as he went to give a huge lecture
to the emperor, he passed a drunken beggar who “had a less
careworn existence than he.”
Augustine
• in Milan, also, he came under pressure to
convert to Catholicism
– from his mother, Monica
– but more importantly from the bishop of Milan,
Ambrose
• Ambrose was a master of rhetoric like Augustine
• but older and more experienced.
– Augustine is shaped by Ambrose's sermons,
and other studies, and then moves away from
Manichaeism
Augustine
• BUT, instead of becoming Catholic like
Ambrose and Monica,
– he converted to a pagan Neoplatonic
approach to truth
– Neoplatonists believed human perfection and
happiness were attainable in THIS world, not
only heaven
– Perfection and happiness could be achieved
through philosophical contemplation.
Augustine
• In Milan, Augustine's mother arranged a
society marriage for him
– so he abandoned his concubine of ten years
(who was also the mother of his son)
– but also had to wait for two years for his
fiancé to come of age
– so he had a two-year affair with a third woman
• his famous prayer: "Grant me chastity and
continence, but not yet" [da mihi
castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo].
Augustine’s Conversion
• detailed in his Confessions
• Summer of 386
– read an account of the life of Saint Anthony of the
Desert which greatly inspired him
• Augustine underwent a profound personal crisis
– and decided to convert to Christianity,
– abandon his career in rhetoric,
– quit his teaching position in Milan,
– give up any ideas of marriage (much to the horror of
his mother),
– and devote himself entirely to serving God and the
practices of priesthood, which included celibacy.
Augustine in Africa
• Baptized in Milan in 387, then left for
Africa
– his mother and son both died that year
– Augustine was without family
• Became a priest in Hippo (now Algeria)
– Preached
– killed in 430 during the seige of Hippo by the
Vandals.
City of God
• Not only a theological tract;
• Also overtly political and historical,
– suggesting ways that current Christian rulers
should think of their states
– and ways that humans remember and think
about the events of the past.
– FOR EXAMPLE:
Augustine on Original sin
• Augustine stressed the presence of
original sin
– And in this differed with Eastern Orthodox
theologians
• What is the political use of original sin?
– All non-Christians are thus “pre-Christians”
awaiting conversion
Augustine on Just War
• Advocated the use of force against
breakaway, nonorthodox groups, asking
"Why ... should not the Church use force in
compelling her lost sons to return, if the
lost sons compelled others to their
destruction?"
Augustine on time and memory
• God exists outside of time in the "eternal
present"
– time only exists within the created universe.
• Augustine writes of walking up a flight of
stairs and entering the vast fields of
memory
– so memory is a place/thing with actual
dimensions
– that survives the death of the rememberer
Augustine’s Legacy
• Augustine’s thought will have tremendous
influence over later thinkers
– such as the idealists (Kant, Hegel, Marx)
• His chief argument:
– the State of the Classical tradition is replaced
by the Church
– and the relationships between men or among
nations become that between man and God.
But this was the West
• In stark contrast, historiography in the East
moved forward as a continuation of the
Classical traditions.
– separating fact from fiction and
documentation remained important
– Largely the work of Muslim scholars
– Important to remember the continuity of
Muslim philosophy, science, and history
• Did not experience the interruption of the West
No comments:
Post a Comment