ABSTRACT

Despite the widespread view that it did not exist in Christian medieval thought, relativism is frequently encountered there, but it had different uses from relativism today. It was used by Aristotelian specialists to allow them to develop Aristotelian sciences on their own terms, irrespective of Christian teaching. Moral thinkers devised schemes of relative morality for those who, by the accident of their births, were excluded from the absolute scheme of moral judgement that opened the way to eternal salvation. Ethnography did not usually lead medieval thinkers towards cultural relativism, but it did commonly lead to a weaker, universalizing relativism, in which common values are discerned beneath practices that superficially differ sharply from our own.