Historians have strange relationships with the future. Sometimes they are tempted to endow their discipline with a prophetic function, as if they have only to project the changes of the past, which they know and understand, into the future in order to predict what will take place and thus steer future actions.¹ But history never repeats itself, and if thinking about the way past societies functioned helps us to understand our own, it does not provide us with certain knowledge of what is to come. Sometimes, on the other hand, historians turn away from the future and even from the...

The masters of theology at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century considered themselves to be at the summit of a hierarchy of learning, a position which gave them responsibility for the moral welfare of Christian society as a whole.¹ They were therefore obliged to consider the practical moral problems which Christians faced. Using their discussions of these problems, it is possible to address a number of questions about their attitudes to the future. First, did they discuss provision and planning for the future? If so, how did they envisage this future? Could predictions be made and, if so,...

The title of this essay is suggested by a passage in Geoffrey Chaucer’s poemTroilus and Criseyde. As a result of an exchange of prisoners, Criseyde has been transferred from Troy to the Greek camp. While still in Troy, she had promised her lover to return within ten days; but now she finds that the prospect frightens her, and she wishes that she had taken Troilus’s advice and stolen away from Troy in his company. She realises that she made a bad decision:

‘Prudence, allas, oon of thyne eyen thre

Me lakked alwey, er that I come here!

On tyme...

Those who will call this time ancient are . . . you and I. The phrase is used by Dante in a famous passage of theParadisoto indicate his posterity. It is a beautiful phrase,color che questo tempo chiameranno antico, for it implies a keen sense of the future on Dante’s part, and also gives the future a very peculiar connotation, that of an age which looks as it were mainly to the past, at Dante’s own time, and considers it not just old, but ancient. With a single stroke, the line in fact creates the future and...

In 1996, theNew York Times, one of the major newspapers in the United States, celebrated its centennial. By the standards of more ancient civilisations and cultures, this anniversary may seem hardly worth noting, but given the demise of so many newspapers and magazines in the last half century and the reputation of theTimesas the newspaper of record, the achievement of a one-hundredth birthday was worthy of celebration. In honour of the occasion, several special feature issues were given over to a review of theTimes’s coverage of the events of the last century. Most striking, however, was...

The aristocracy has long been one of the most popular subjects among historians working on the Middle Ages. Particular attention has been paid to regions within or bordering the area that corresponds to modern France, and most work has been on the period between the late Carolingian era andc. 1200.¹ An important feature of the study of the elites of the central medieval period is that scholars have not limited themselves to the idea of aristocrats as historical performers within various social, economic, political, and institutional settings. There has been an awareness that our understanding of these people requires...

When Chief Justice Mettingham gave judgment in Michaelmas term 1300 in favour of Ralph de Frecheville and against the dean and chapter of Southwell after the verdict of a grand assize (a jury of twelve local knights) in a long-running action about the advowson of the Nottinghamshire church of Bonney, it was (as we learn from three surviving independent reports of what was actually said in court) that Ralph was to retain the advowson ‘to himself and his heirs quit of the chapter and their successors to the end of time (a remenaunt de mond)’.¹ A similar form of words...

Although the word ‘future’ does not figure in the title of this paper, three words imply a span of time beyond the present which greatly concerned the kings of France in the fourteenth century: endowment, salvation, and patrimony.¹ Kings endowed their queens and favoured servants because they envisioned a time to come, after their own deaths, when these people would find themselves vulnerable, deprived of the protection and wealth they enjoyed while the kings, their husbands and masters, lived. As to salvation, kings attempted to guarantee it for themselves through lavish gifts and pious endowments, to be effected after their...

Dice-games were one of the most popular forms of entertainment in the Middle Ages, and also one of the most heavily criticised. The most common reasons for censure, cited in both secular and religious sources, were the crippling losses, endemic cheating, violence, and crime with which dicing was associated. That these were, and remain today, the main causes for concern over all forms of gambling is indisputable. Greed cannot have been the only or even the main motive to gamble, however, since it will not have escaped even the most ardent (or dim-witted) player’s notice that the most likely outcome...