Écrire le temps au Moyen Âge

Abstract

This article aims to understand the relationship which historians have with the category of time. Fernand Braudel’s approach to this question in his writings on the ‘longue durée’ constitutes an epistemological break within the discipline, and contributes to modifying its relationship with the other human and social sciences. The medievalist Jacques Le Goff is part of this tendency. For him, it is a question of knowing what intentions and needs correspond to the attempts at periodisation made by the people of the Middle Ages. The historians of the first centuries wanted above all to situate events in Christian time. Their concern is to bring human time back to a Christian conception: that of a time that has an origin, a creation, defined by God with an essential discontinuity: incarnation and time unfold with a direction and are oriented towards an end. However, from the 12th century onwards, a new kind of historiography emerged, linked to the crusades. This led to the practice of history often written by the protagonists and/or witnesses—or by a memorialist. This implies a new periodisation: that of events witnessed by people, and the history of the crusaders within a biblical timespan. How can we reconcile human time and sacred time? In the 13th and 14th centuries, in a context of state building, monarchs favoured works whose aim was to organise the time of history according to their reign. Then, in the last centuries of the Middle Ages, the cities of the West became places where numerous chronicles and urban manuscripts were written. Time was written from its origins on an urban scale. The aim is therefore to identify the effects of memory and historicity, in short, the norms of organisation and conception of time that reveal in their own way the ideological intention of a work.

Keywords

• periodisation
• duration
• Christian time
• sacred time
• chroniclers
• history