The traditional tripartite view of christian history ruled supreme well into what has come to be called the European Middle Ages. Despite the vigor and vitality of the rapidly developing and highly innovative society of post-1000 western Christendom, members of this society continued to believe themselves in a middle period between Jesus’ First and Second Coming, with a far happier future in the offing. During the fourteenth century, the successes of medieval western Christendom began to unravel somewhat, with both natural and human catastrophes interrupting the continuous growth of the preceding three centuries, and new views began to emerge on major issues. Many of these innovative views challenged prior practical and theoretical assumptions regarding Christian life and society. Not the least of these new views focused on the traditional Christian sense of historical development.

An innovative sense of tripartite European history emerged, with non-traditional perceptions of antiquity as the age of Greco-Roman freedom and creativity, a middle period of decline associated with Church-dominated Europe, and an anticipated modern period of return to the freedoms and values of Greece and Rome. This radically new tripartite history evolved from dissatisfaction with and criticism of the existing order. The notion of history divided into this new sequence of ancient, medieval, and modern periods quickly took hold in European and subsequently worldwide thinking, despite the obvious difficulties in applying this scheme to non-European societies. While the division was quickly accepted, assessments of the nature and quality of the three periods have elicited profound disagreement. For our purposes it is important to note the ongoing debate over the middle element in the sequence. For some, the “Middle Ages” constitute a period of abysmal decline, which modernity has attempted to reverse; for others, the “Middle Ages” bequeathed to modernity the noblest achievements of the human spirit.