ABSTRACT
The most common misperception about the medieval sense of the past is simply that there was not one. In lacking a historical consciousness, the argument goes, people in the Middle Ages were unable or unwilling to approach the past in its own terms but instead could only see it through the lens of a specifi cally Christian present. Benedict Anderson, in his Imagined Communities, states the fundamental tenets of this position: “Figuring the Virgin Mary with ‘Semitic’ features or ‘fi rst-century’ costumes in the restoring spirit of the modern museum was unimaginable because the mediaeval Christian mind had no conception of history as an endless chain of cause and effect or of radical separations between past and present.”1 Far from being presented in “fi rst-century” garb, Mary would often look particularly contemporary. So, the historical period of Christ’s life (or any period) cannot be depicted as it actually was but only in terms of the present because of the monolithic nature of “the mediaeval Christian mind,” which ceaselessly related all things to its indivisibly dogmatic worldview. Anderson, then, opposes the medieval view of history to that of the modern, which privileges “cause and effect” and “radical separations between past and present.” Such an opposition is stunning in its simplicity! This sort of arbitrary demarcation between medieval and modern (or early modern) often produces a monolithic view of the medieval period. However, the period of time from the fall of the Roman Empire until Petrarch and the Renaissance was not dark and unenlightened, and it was defi nitely not organized under one totalizing, homogenous rule.
