The Humanist View of History

The humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries did not see themselves as starting something new so much as restoring something old. They believed that true civilisation had existed once, in the classical world of Greece and Rome, and that it had been lost. Their entire view of history was built on this idea of a great rupture — a long stretch of darkness that had to be ended.

That darkness, they argued, had set in after the collapse of the Roman Empire. For the thousand years that followed, the humanists claimed, the Church had exercised such complete control over men's minds that all the learning of the Greeks and Romans had been blotted out. This was their justification for calling the period the 'Middle Ages' or the 'medieval period' — a millennium of stagnation sandwiched between two great eras. They used the word 'modern' for the period from the fifteenth century onwards, the age in which they believed learning and civilisation were finally being revived.

The humanists' periodisation ran as follows:

Notice how the labels grow less harsh as the centuries advance. The earliest stretch, right after Rome fell, was the 'Dark Ages' — the deepest pit of ignorance. The later stretches, while still medieval, were at least given names that suggested some structure and development. The whole scheme was a story of decline, stagnation, and eventual recovery.

Later scholars, following the humanists, unquestioningly assumed that a 'new age' had begun in Europe from the fourteenth century. For a long time this division of history into ancient, medieval, and modern was accepted without serious challenge. …