ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to address the difficulties, explaining why Judeo-Christian and Islamic approaches to the past and the future are so vital to an understanding of historiography throughout the long centuries of the antique and medieval periods right up to the early modern. It deals with the transmission of ideas; particularly, of course, ideas on how to write history. The chapter explores Venerable Bede who as a seventh-century Christian historian developed a remarkable technique of reading sources. Christian eschatology in the Middle Ages, however, looked not only to the past but the future, and so connected both the past and the future through the processes of historical change. The ancient writings were more often than not neglected in the Christian years of the Middle Ages until their revival during the period we have come to know as the Renaissance. Many historians would point to phases of cultural renewal and would certainly not reject the Middle Ages as 'dark' and regressive.
