Читать книгу World History For Dummies - Peter Haugen - Страница 40

If history teachers told you that medieval means the period between the fall of Rome (476 AD) and the Renaissance (the 14th century), you could have thrown the author H.G. Wells at them.

Not literally, of course. (Let Mr. Wells rest in peace.) Yet it may surprise students of history and certain teachers to find out that historians disagree about when the period called medieval began. Wells (1866–1946) is better remembered today as a pioneering science-fiction writer, author of The Time Machine and War of the Worlds (1898), but he also wrote a three-volume Outline of History (1920). He begins the second volume of this major history of the world, called Medieval History, at 300 BC with the rise, not the fall, of Rome’s empire.

So what? That’s my point. Wells’s work is just one illustration of the fact that history is full of periods divided by arbitrary lines etched in the shifting sands of time.

Historians have points of view. The good ones have really well-informed points of view, but they don’t all march in intellectual lockstep.