Some important historians and their works in medieval Europe

The oldest Christian histories were universal histories written for the simple purpose of satisfying the demand to integrate Biblical history (which was not at all clear in its temporal exactness) into an ancient chronology, involving a vast pre-Christian past and spread over various eras.

Contemporary political developments in Europe principally that of the formation of vast feudal lordships and monarchies also cast their shadows over the writing of history. Historiography, thus also became charged with the task of establishing a concurrence between these various Christian and secular traditions.

Thus, Meister Eckhart (c.1260-1327), while locating Christ as the centre of salvation history also used the new formations of political power as his reference points. Otto of freezing (c.1111-1158) composed his history of the world in 1146, usually called The Two Cities. Though he adopted a theological concept of history, he also concluded each book with a narrative of political change in history thereby indicating the transistorizes (metabolites) of the world.

This fluid sense of chronological boundaries is also visible in the chronicles of the high middle Ages. Here two chronological systems dominated: the incarnation era and the registering of reigns and pontificates, and numerous chroniclers strove to establish a factual as well as a narrative unity of these elements. This resulted in a belief in the natural changeability and the ephemeral nature of history as such, because all earthly things were ruled by time. For the medieval chroniclers, historical change was primarily a cycle of growth and decay of regents and kingdoms.

The medieval concept of the past thus was determined by an extremely peculiar, ambiguous, even paradoxical, mixture of belief in historical progression on the one hand and its immutability on the other, of an epochal change and at the same time a continuity of times and historical situations. In the final analysis, it lacked a sense of the truly historical characterization of the past.

However, owing to its emphasis on verifiability of the chronological arrangement, this understanding cannot be classified as being truly timeless, but in various ways it nevertheless lacked a sense of assigning a specific peculiarity to each passing epoch. The past was perceived as a (temporal) development corresponding to the speculum, the earthly time, with an unchanging character and essence.

This engendered a widespread tendency to order historical events according to their respective time which was in no way seen as contradictory to the opposing tendency to detach the subject matter of the same events from their chronological order. Regarding the medieval concept of the past, time was an essential part of earthly existence, yet at the same time it was a symbol of the eternal world. Historiographical thinking was combined with the theological needs of history. However, the fact that change occurred was also undeniable.

Even in the Bible the coming and going of three world-empires had been described, and, since St Augustine (354-430) no one would deny the changes that had occurred or were going to occur in consequence of the advent of Christianity. Also, St Augustine had given a perfectly acceptable explanation for historical change. He had argued that only God had perfect ever-lasting stability, whereas change in the temporal world was the consequence of the very imperfection of human existence.

The Bible in the middle ages was seen not simply as a literal description of the unfolding of a Christian religion, but also as a chronicle of a succession of spiritual parts. The diverse texts of the Christian tradition were unified in the Bible, thus giving it a coherent history in a historiographical frame of reference which was blended with a unified system of symbolisms, so uniting history with tradition and representation.

The acceptance of Catholicism strengthened this historical homogenization, for one of its core elements was its character of being a universal religion which had little space for the particularistic rules, norms and values of specific groups. The earliest Christian historical works were chronologies designed to link events from scripture with political events, and to create a universal history of humanity.

Though the belief in the divine origin of the rulers militated against fundamental principles of Christian theological doctrine, the past was constituted by the narratives which were written down in the Holy Scriptures, and assigned no value to the particularistic traditions which were transmitted within political groups. Also, the Christian Church enforced the rule that believers in the Christian faith had to respect the Holy Scriptures as the ultimate source of both tradition as well as justice. Church history thus could now become universal history.