world of religion and morals derives from the dualism of Aquinas's thirteenth century when popes and universities confronted kings and parliaments and the scholastics struggled to reconcile Aristotle and the Bible.
The rebirth of western civilization and continuity since that time are the reasons why the medieval world is supremely important if we want to understand our own origins. But it is the historian's business to describe the differences in the past, which are less easy to grasp than the similarities, and without which the shape and movement of an earlier society are unintelligible. David Whitton begins his chapter in this book with a description of the world of a great twelfth-century magnate, Henry the Lion, in which the importance of kinship relations and the claim to religious sanction mark a political system different from any that we can know today. Earlier in the book Edward James tells us about Rædwald and Dagobert in seventh-century East Anglia and Gaul, whose kingship was still more remote from modern governments. In other chapters we meet Cathars and Hussites whose medieval nonconformity has something in common with the piety we can meet today but in other respects is mysterious to us. To grasp the lineaments of a distant age we have to balance the similarities which arise from common humanity and a constant inheritance of ideas against the acute distinctions caused by differences of social structure and intellectual traditions. Medieval Europe is not as difficult for us to understand as ancient China or India but it presents a very substantial challenge to interpretation. The devotion of the medieval knight to a life of chivalric warfare and courtly intercourse or of a medieval hermit to a life of constant prayer and total seclusion presents us with ideals of conduct which we cannot easily understand.
The picture which we can now construct of the medieval world is based very largely on the researches and rethinking of the last hundred years. It is very different both from Gibbon's grand dismissal of superstition and from Scott's romantic attachment to Gothic glories. Our present vision of that world is based partly on the printing of vast quantities of medieval documents ranging in type from the narrative chronicles, in
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