Structures of Time in

Medieval Historiography

Gabrielle Spiegel*

Medieval historical texts typically deploy a variety of temporal structures

that underlie their literary narratives and generate both modes of emplotment
and ideological messages. There are three dominant regimes of temporality
that appear in these texts, often present in conjunction with one another:
a strict series of events, paratactically presented without causal connection
between the events that make up the series temporum; a cyclical view of
history, originating ultimately in Greek and Roman historiography; and a
far-reaching typological, or as Auerbach called it figural, construction of
events in which antecedent events become prophecies of later ones, which
represent their fulfillment. In addition, later medieval texts tend to be
modeled on genealogical patterns.
  This article investigates the ways in which these temporal schemes are
utilized, where, despite the inherent contradictions among such temporal
structures, they nonetheless appear together and collaborate in promoting
a particular vision of history in the Middle Ages.

It has long been my belief that medieval and postmodern forms of

historical consciousness are similar in ways that the fundamental narrative
of modernism’s break with the medieval past finds hard to credit and
that, in fact, it is modernism that represents the odd moment in Western
civilisation’s conception of history. Nowhere is this clearer, I believe, than
in the domain of time, understood both experientially and philosophically.

* Department of History, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 North Charles Street,

Baltimore, MD 21218. E-mail: spiegel@jhu.edu

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22    Gabrielle Spiegel

And it is these similarities between postmodern and medieval views of

time that I would like to explore in my article today.
We may take as emblematic of a postmodern approach to the
conceptualisation of historical temporality the work of Reinhart Koselleck,
and in particular, his book Futures Past on the Semantics of Historical
Time. For Koselleck, the rupture between traditional understandings of
time—whether the cyclical views embraced by the Greeks and Romans or
medieval futuristic eschatology predicated on a belief in the ultimate end
of time—and modernity’s notion of time as a single linear, progressive
and interconnected process, with a sense of the future as a domain of
infinite possibilities, came during what he identifies as the Sattelzeit,
the ‘saddle’ or transitional period running from approximately 1750 to
1850. It was the Sattelzeit that, in its ultimately classic Rankean form,
marked the beginning of what he calls the ‘temporalization of history’,
a process characterised, as he says, by ‘the destruction of the exemplary
nature of past events and, in its place, the discovery of the uniqueness of
historical processes and the possibility of progress’.1 Whereas classical
and medieval civilisations could look to the past for paradigmatic moral
lessons to guide the future, seeing historia as the magistra vitae (history
as the teacher of life), the advent of the ‘Neuzeit’ (modernity) transformed
the very nature of time, during which the future appeared to be both
unknown and approaching at an accelerated speed. From the modernist
perspective, then, time itself became historical, neither sacred nor natural,
and as a result, history was subject to a mode of temporalisation detached
from a naturally forming linear chronology. Moreover, this ‘Neuzeit’,
or modernity, founded itself on a break with the past, and this rupture
between past and present itself became the founding gesture of modern
historiography. But Koselleck insists that the modernist idea of progressive
time as it became embedded in Rankean historicism failed to register
the fact that acceleration betokened a present compounded of ‘many’
layers of time, or what he calls the Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen,
a ‘simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous’.2 Once the multiplicity of time

1
Koselleck, Futures Past on the Semantics of Historical Time: 36.
2
Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: 8 and 95ff. The notion of overlapping
multiple layers of simultaneous forms of temporality thus revises older notions of periodisation
in which particular eras embrace particular understandings of time, particularly as it applies
to historical development and understanding. On this, see Hartog, Régimes d’Historicité

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 Structures of Time in Medieval Historiography   23

is grasped, Koselleck argues, it becomes possible ‘to grasp history as a

process freed of immanent forces, no longer simply deductible from natural
conditions, and hence no longer adequately explained in their terms’,3
thus, in some sense, transcending both nature and society.
In this essentially postmodern understanding of time and history, not
only has the notion of the necessary rupture between past and present
that Michel de Certeau4 stipulated as the founding gesture of modern
historiography been abandoned, but also a new consideration of multiple
temporalities, persisting as ‘layers of time’, has come to the fore in recent
discussions of historical time. As Koselleck describes it, time is ‘multi-
layered’, governed by ‘dichotomies between [the] natural and historical,
extra-linguistic and linguistic, diachronic and synchronic time’.5 For
Koselleck and others who seek to reverse the older notion of neutral time,
therefore, time itself has its own historicity (and indeed, its own tempo,
accelerating as rapid change overtakes the world) and our understanding
of it will, of necessity, change with the times. In many ways, this view

Présentisme et expériences du temps. Moreover, Hartog believes that we are currently

experiencing history solely in its present dimension. The reason for this, as he argued in
the paper ‘The Future of a Very Old Name’ presented to a conference on ‘The Future of the
Theory and Philosophy of History’, organised by the International Network for Theory of
History, that took place in Ghent in July, 2013: ‘It is as if the present—of finance capitalism,
the information revolution, the Internet, globalization, but also the crisis in 2008—has
absorbed the (more or less obsolete) categories of the past and future. It is indeed as if the
present has become its own horizon, has withdrawn into a perpetual present.’ I would like
to thank Professor Hartog for sending me a copy of his paper. For a discussion of Koselleck
and Hartog, see Murdrovcic, ‘Time, History, and Philosophy of History’. For some recent
anthropological approaches to the question of time, see Munn, ‘The Cultural Anthropology
of Time: A critical Essay’ and Born, ‘Making Time: Temporality, History and the Cultural
Object’. Younger scholars have built on Hartog’s notion of the primacy of presentism to
argue that ‘a presentist regime of historicity…implies a new way of understanding time,
an abandoning of the linear, causal and homogeneous conception of time characteristic of
the previous, modernist regime of historicity’. On that basis, they argue for a new form of
historiography ‘beyond history and memory’, to which they give the name of ‘mnemohistory’,
a term originally offered by Jan Assmann. See Tamm, ‘Beyond History and Memory: New
Perspectives in Memory Studies’.
3
Ibid.: 104.
4
See de Certeau, The Writing of History.
5
On Koselleck’s theory of temporalities, see Jordheim, ‘Against Periodization: Koselleck’s
Theory of Multiple Temporalities’. For a discussion of Koselleck’s position in relation to
other attempts to re-examine the relationship of past to present, see Kleinberg, ‘Introduction:
The New Metaphysics of Time’.

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24    Gabrielle Spiegel

of the multiple character of time, and hence of our experience of it, can
be seen as early as Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean
World in the Age of Philip II, in which he noted the tripartite character of
historical time as composed of the longue durée, a series of conjunctures
(or cyclical periods) and histoire événementielle.
Comparable in some ways, at least in its insistence on the persistence
of the past in the present, is the recent work of Frank Ankersmit and
what I tend to think of as the ‘Groningen’ school of the philosophy of
history, as can also be seen in the work of Eelco Runia, Hans Ulrich
Gumbrecht6 and to a lesser extent Ewa Domanska,7 who similarly argue
on behalf of the presence of the past. In their work, the past itself—not
merely its remnants, monuments or ongoing influence—is conjured into
being by the historian’s contact with its traces, a process that Ankersmit
has argued is precognitive, whereby the past surges into the historian’s
consciousness through a process that Ankersmit calls ‘sublime historical
experience’. Such an experience overcomes the ‘otherness’ and distance
of the past and brings it ontologically into the present, hence available
to be experienced. Or as Ankersmit asserts: ‘Since what is being

6
Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning cannot Convey.
7
See, for example, Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience and Ankersmit,
‘“Presence” and Myth’. In addition to the book cited above, see Gumbrecht, ‘Presence
Achieved in Language’ and Runia, ‘Spots of Time’; Runia, ‘Presence’; Domanska, ‘The
Material Presence of the Past’. For a discussion of Ankersmit and Runia and the differences
between their approaches to the presence of the past, see Froeyman, ‘Frank Ankersmit
and Eelco Runia: The Presence and the Otherness of the Past’. Runia believes that the
trope of metonymy effects the translation of the past to the present, hence effecting the
contemporary presence of the past, but as Anita Kasabova has indicated, ‘metonymy
is a form of linguistic exposition that operates semantically and not physically’. See
Kasabova, ‘Memory, Memorials and Commemoration’: 335. By ‘semantic’, she means
that it represents an access to the ‘sense’ of the past, rather than the past itself (ibid.:
338). The same argument could be applied to Ankersmit’s notion of representation as
bringing about the ontological transference of the past to the present, hence its persistence.
Largely absent in these discussions is the question of memory and its relation to historical
consciousness, although the very notion of the persistence of the past would seem to imply
memorial channels as avenues of continuity. For a theoretical overview of these related
issues, see Spiegel, ‘The Future of the Past’. Needless to say, there is a massive literature
associated with memory in relation to the Holocaust and, more recently, to the question of
transitional justice, on which see, for example, Bevernage, History, Memory and State-
sponsored Violence Time and Justice. For a methodological critique of memory studies,
see Kansteiner, ‘Finding Meaning in Memory’.

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represented is part of reality, the same must be true of its representation…

the ontological status of being part of reality is…transferred from the
represented to its representation’.8
Similarly, Eelco Runia has argued for the presence of the past that makes
itself known via the ‘Simultaneousness of continuity and discontinuity’
in historical consciousness specifically. For Runia, the transference of
presence is effected via the trope of metonymy (technically defined as a
name change in which ‘the name of an attribute or adjunct is substituted
for that of the thing meant’—so a whole/whole substitution, in contrast to
synecdoche, which consists of a part/whole substitution). And in this context,
metonymy functions through its tropological transference of meaning and,
ultimately he claims, being, to generate what Runia calls ‘presence in
absence’, thus entwining present and past in what he characterises as
‘a wonder of continuity as well as an orgy of discontinuity’.9
Ankersmit et al. thus focus on sense perception as the source of both
knowledge and, ultimately, a kind of transcendence of the separation
of past and present in the claim that the past can be recuperated in the
present. While many historians would agree with Michael Roth that ‘the
acknowledgment of the past in the present is a necessary ingredient of
modern historical consciousness’ and, hence, Roth suggests, ‘of modern
freedom’,10 it is not equally certain that all would endorse the possibility
of a ‘sublime historical experience’ of it. From a theoretical point of view,
these strivings to re-experience the past represent a clear departure from
the modern, positivist notions of the ‘death of the past’, although exactly
how such experiencing of the past occurs remains somewhat unclear,
at least to those of us who have yet to partake of it. In a general sense,
however, I would agree that it is the multiple-layered understanding of
time which is now structuring postmodern accounts of temporality and,
if one were needed, offer a theoretical perspective on the play of time in
medieval historiography.
As in the case of postmodern historiography, medieval historical
texts typically deploy a variety of temporal structures that underlie their
literary narratives and generate both modes of emplotment and ideological
messages. There are at least three dominant regimes of temporality that

8
Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience Cultural Memory in the Present: 56.
9
See Runia, ‘Presence’: 6 and 9.
10
Roth, Memory, Trauma, and History Essays on Living with the Past: 85.

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appear in these texts, often present in conjunction with one another: (a) a
strict series of events, paratactically presented without causal connection
between the events that make up the series temporum; (b) a cyclical view
of history, originating ultimately in Greek and Roman historiography and
transmitted to Christian historiography via Eusebius, in which history
bears witness to the rise and fall of communities and (c) a far-reaching
typological, or as Auerbach called it figural, construction of events,
derived from the Biblical exegesis of the relationship between the Old
and New Testaments, in which antecedent events become prophecies of
later ones, which represent their fulfilment but which are not connected
to the earlier events in any direct, causal manner. In this schema, the
governance of historical events lies outside time itself in the will of
God, but achieves its enactment only within historical time itself, a fact
that made typology ultimately capable of being secularised and used
to determine the significance and tendency of political events as well.
Hence, to these historiographically recognised structures of what we
might call a specifically ‘Christian’ approach to time, one might also add
genealogical time, which adapts and restructures time in the interest of
modes of legitimation that favour secular authority.
As anyone who has ever read a medieval chronicle is acutely aware, its
dominant mode of representation appears to favour, in the words of Nancy
Partner, ‘intelligible sequence, firmly linked to ‘meaning’ in history’, that
series temporum or sequence of morally meaningful events that made up
the res gestae constituting the historian’s object of study. Narrative structure
in most medieval historical texts, as in medieval literature more generally,
consists of a series of episodes or tableaux serially ordered in paratactic
juxtaposition along a temporal axis not of fixed dates (i.e., chronology) but
of sequences. Because the connection between these juxtaposed scenes is
serial rather than causal—parataxis being the grammatical term for hard
narrative juxtaposition without causal or temporal links or grammatical
subordination—the overall effect of such organisation is to produce a non-
developmental, episodic narrative informed by a theme that is continually
re-expressed in separate events. Perhaps the classic examples of such a
structuring of time are medieval annalistic chronicles. More significantly,
it is the pattern found in early medieval historical texts like Gregory of
Tours’ History of the Franks, which is notable also for the vividness of its
portrayal of events and persons. Indeed, what mattered most to medieval
readers was not logical explication but acute observations of human

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behaviour whose Christian and moral meaning could, thereby, be more

easily discerned. Both Latin and vernacular historians created narratives
formed of a series of episodic units that aimed at presenting sharply
defined, visualised scenes and exemplary heroes in action-oriented, rather
than logically analysed, sequences, preferring what Auerbach termed ‘visual
plasticity’11 to historiographical explanation. The result was a narrative
made up of chronologically strung out but causally unrelated series of
events, which developed along a more or less clearly defined temporal
axis that alone functioned as the ordering principle of presentation. So
pervasive is this style of historical narration that one is forced to conclude
that it represented a clear aesthetic choice on the part of both writers and
audiences in the Middle Ages.
To modern eyes, the medieval historian’s purely serial, seemingly
plotless mode of writing history seems chaotic, if not altogether senseless.
But the surface barrenness of many texts simply requires that we learn
to read them with different eyes. Beneath the digressive veneer of their
discourse, most medieval historians firmly emploted their texts to produce
structures of moral meaning and ideological arguments, for few historical
texts in the Middle Ages were written out of disinterested curiosity about
the past. In some texts, devices such as the symmetrical balancing of
good and evil exempla, the creation of bipartite narratives, repetition
and the thematic interlacing of event-clusters served as cohesive forces
in otherwise dispersed narratives, testifying to the historian’s intentions
and controlling sense of design. Once we learn to understand a medieval
chronicle’s structural characteristics and narrative and temporal economy
as the submerged vehicle of its meaning, the richness of the historian’s
enterprise suddenly becomes much more apparent.
A good example of the combination of paratactic sequencing with an
underlying cyclical and typological view of history is offered by Bede’s
Ecclesiastical History of the English Peoples.12 Although Bede shares
with Gregory many common traits, notably a strong tendency to combine
history and hagiography, political narrative and miraculous events, oral
testimony and textual learning, his Ecclesiastical History blends all of
these elements so seamlessly, with such a strong narrative drive and
purpose that he has won near unanimous acclaim for his historiography.

11
Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.
12
See Bede, A History of the English Church and People.

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Bede’s overall design is provided by the title of his work, which

is borrowed from Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History, indicating the
theological and providential scheme that frames his narrative of the
‘English people’, offering in the microcosm of English history an
instance of the broad providential scheme that Eusebius first laid out.
Just as Eusebius saw in Roman history the hidden hand of God guiding
events to create the conditions necessary for the introduction and spread
of Christianity, so Bede presents the passing of dominion in England from
the Britons to the Anglo-Saxons as a result of God’s providential action,
which condemned the Britons to fall before the conquering invaders
because they refused to preach the word of God. Throughout, Bede
interweaves hagiographical accounts of saints’ lives, narrates dreams and
miracles and foregrounds theological issues as central to his story, all the
while pursuing the political history of England. Thus underlying, and
structuring, his paratactic presentation of English history is both a cyclical
understanding of the rise and fall of nations as due to God’s judgment and
a typological understanding of the destiny of a people as elected by God
to fulfil his purposes for mankind.
That a monastic chronicle such as Bede’s would have transferred a
typological interpretation of history to his account of the (specifically)
Ecclesiastical History of England is perhaps not surprising. But as I have
argued, it is precisely this typological understanding of time, combined
with the paratactic account of daily happenings and an underlying cyclical
interpretation of national histories emblematised in the change of dynasties
that structures the presentation of even the most seemingly political histories
of the Middle Ages such as the Grandes Chroniques de France.13
In these sorts of texts, what is involved is the secularisation of typology,
its application to the material supplied by human activity rather than sacred
events, in which the present came to be viewed as a fulfilment not only
of sacred prophecies, but also of other events themselves. Thus, when the
chroniclers drew analogies between their rulers and David, Alexander
the Great, Constantine or Charlemagne, they were not merely ascribing
a particular list of attributes to their subject. They were affirming a positive,
virtually causal relationship between what David or Constantine had done

13
On the Grandes Chroniques de France, see, Histoire et Culture historique dans
l’Occident médiéval and Guenée, Le métier d’historien au moyen âge Etudes sur
l’historiographie médiéval sousla direction de Bernard Guenée. See also Spiegel, The
Chronicle Tradition of Saint-Denis.

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and the deeds of the ‘new David’. The record of the past was seen as
having a relation to the present that was more than morally prescriptive,
if less than what we would consider as scientifically causal. In this way,
the past not only explains the present, but it also exercises an indirect
influence over contemporary events. And one could argue that it was this
very sense of an implicit relationship to what had happened before that
made it unnecessary for medieval historians to investigate the immediate
causes of occurrences.
The typological nature of medieval historical thought also helps to
explain its weak sense of chronology. To date an event precisely in the
past means fixing its significance as a distinct object separated from the
present. But typology wishes to break down the barriers between past
and present to draw events out of the past and make them live in present
experience. It operates with what Tom Driver calls the ‘principle of
contemporaneity’ in which ‘time and historical occurrence refuse to take
their place in a chronology of the past. The event which was meaningfully
enters the now’.14 The result of this procedure, then, is to generate precisely
the sort of Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen, the ‘simultaneity of the
nonsimultaneous’ 15 that Koselleck theorises for postmodernity.
Perhaps a more interesting—and unanticipated—example of this
complex melding of temporalities and divine causality can be seen in
Galbert of Bruges’s The Murder, Betrayal, and Slaughter of the Glorious
Charles, Count of Flanders.16 Long prized as a virtually journalistic
account of the assassination of Charles by the Erembald clan in Bruges
and, hence, as the closest thing to a purely secular history that we possess
for the Middle Ages, both Jeff Rider and Robert Stein have demonstrated
the extent to which Galbert’s narrative of the events in Bruges discloses
not only the greedy political machinations driving the Erembalds’ actions
but, as Rider has argued, are also shaped by Galbert to demonstrate a
providential pattern based on the combination of the Petrine injunction
to obey all secular authority and Exodus 20.5, ‘I am a jealous God who
punishes iniquity’, hence on God’s moral judgement.17
14
Driver, The Sense of History in Greek and Shakespearean Drama: 53.
15
The Practice of Conceptual History: 8.
16
For a recent translation of Galbert’s text, see Galbert of Bruges, The Murder, Betrayal,
and Slaughter of the Glorious Charles, Count of Flanders. See, in addition, Rider, God’s
Scribe: The Historiographical Art of Galbert of Bruges, which offers an entirely novel
view of Galbert.
17
See Rider, God’s Scribe: 50–76, especially Chapter 3: ‘The Comfort of History’.

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In Stein’s analysis, Galbert joins concrete physical description of events

with moral evaluation so skillfully that ‘the ethical significance of the
performance of social bonds and their violent disruptions are themselves
part of the historiographical pattern by which Galbert intends to signify
the meaning of the assassination and its aftermath’,18 one that, needless to
say, leads to the fall of the Erembalds. For Stein, it is Galbert’s ability to so
closely wed moral evaluation to description that generates the impression
of absolute transparency in his text (hence the sense of journalistic
reportage in the text), enabling the moral and symbolic significance
to emerge from what Foucault would term its ‘reality effect’ (l’effet du
réel). Yet in Galbert’s account, the temporality of events is joined to—and
ultimately overridden by—the hand of God and the Erembalds receive
their just punishment in accordance with the moral laws that govern the
shape of history.
To these three dominant modes of structuring time, or what in
modern terms might be called, following François Hartog, ‘regimes of
historicity’,19 one should also add the genealogical patterning of the past.
Genealogy intrudes into historical narrative at precisely the time when
noble families in France were beginning to organise themselves into
vertical structures based on agnatic consanguinity, to take the form, in other
words, of lignages.20 Genealogy was both cause and consequence of this
development, for its appearance as a literary genre in the twelfth century
signalled the lineage’s consciousness of itself and, to a certain extent, as
Duby has remarked, was able to create this consciousness and to impose
it on members of the lineage group.21 Written above all to exalt a line and
legitimise its power, a medieval genealogy displays a family’s intention to
affirm and extend its place in political life. As genealogies were amplified
in the course of the twelfth century, pushing out in every direction, filling in
each sequence with more detail, adding names of younger sons, daughters
and ancestors not previously mentioned, the profile of the family tree

18
Stein, ‘Death from a Trivial Cause’.
19
Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time.
20
On this development, see the important studies—Duby, Structures de parenté et noblesse
dans la France du Nord aux XIe et XIIe siècles’ and Duby, ‘Remarques sur la littérature
généalogique en France aux XIe et XIIe siècles’. They have been translated into English
and appear in Duby, Chivalrous Society. For a different view of the relation of genealogical
literature to social developments, see Genicot, Les Généalogies.
21
Duby, ‘Structures de parenté et noblesse’: 268.

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became a skeleton of aristocratic society, revealing the multiple threads

which crossed and recrossed, binding regional nobilities into ever more
integrated congeries of family relations.
Raised to the royal level, genealogy took on the overtones of a dynastic
myth, synonymous in many respects with the central myth of French
kingship as the unbroken succession of the trois races of France. But
whether aristocratic or royal, genealogies were expressions of social
memory and, as such, could be expected to have a particular affinity
with historical thought, and, at least to a certain extent, to impose their
consciousness of social reality and its temporality upon those whose task
was to preserve for future generations images of society in the record of
history. Through devising (and often forging) genealogical links between
families and dynasties, the past is structured as a linear series of exemplary
deeds performed by one generation flowing seamlessly after another in
orderly succession, as if the synchronic assemblage of meaningful acts
which history can and should relate were diachronically projected onto
the screen of the past. Hence even here, in the most seemingly socially
oriented versions of medieval historical consciousness, genealogy
functioned as symbolic form, a conceptual metaphor for the passage
of time—with all its legitimising effects—and thus a way to pattern
historical narratives and to formulate their expressive meaning. For
through the imposition of genealogical metaphors on historical narrative,
genealogy becomes for medieval historiography a thematic ‘myth’ but
also a narrative mythos, a symbolic form that governs the very shape and
significance of the past.22
In that sense, medieval historiography insisted upon on what Koselleck
has called ‘the futurity of the past’,23 a vision that represented not only
what had been done, but how the past itself persisted in the present and
governed the future. Thus medieval historiography, like postmodern
historiography, entails a view of the layering of multiple temporalities
embedded in historical process and practice. If we accept this view of
the handling of time in medieval chronicles, we can begin, perhaps, to
apply to medieval historical writings the same philosophical principles
that inform Koselleck’s view of historical time.

22
On the genealogical patterning of medieval chronicles, see Spiegel, ‘Genealogy: Form
and Function in Medieval Historical Narrative’.
23
Koselleck, Futures Past: 22.

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———. 2012. Sublime Historical Experience. New York: Columbia University Press.
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and revised by R.E. Latham. London: Penguin.
Bevernage, Berber. 2011. History, Memory and State-sponsored Violence Time and Justice.
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Born, Georgina. 2015. ‘Making Time: Temporality, History and the Cultural Object’,
New Literary History, vol. 46(3): 361–86.
de Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Writing of History. Translated by Tom Conley. New York:
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