either out of concern for the preservation of their manuscripts or
simply because they hoped to sell them for money. Among the
intellectual loot that accrued to the west in this way were works
that had hitherto been almost unknown by western readers. By
happy coincidence, this rediscovery of the classical past occurred
just as, in the mid-fifteenth century, Europeans began to command
the technology of the printing press. This enabled many new
editions (and translations) of ancient authors to be mass-produced,
and thus reach wider audiences than would have been possible
under the medieval system of copying manuscripts (Bolgar 1954:
276–80).
With the Renaissance, moreover, a new view of history
came to predominate, sounding the death knell of the Christian
‘seven ages’ model that had predominated throughout the middle
ages. As the European intelligentsia began to see themselves
as participating in a rebirth of classical culture, they began to
see the period between the fall of the Roman empire and their
own time as belonging to some sort of interlude, falling as a
middle age between two apogees of human development. From
this emerged the division of history into ancient, medieval, and
modern epochs, and with it new humanist, secularized standards
of historical research (Hay 1977: 27–9, 90–1). Pagan antiquity,
in all its aspects, came to be considered as a respectable area of
intellectual endeavour, and with it flourished a new tradition of
painstaking research into antiquity known as ‘antiquarianism’
(Momigliano 1990: 54–79). At the forefront of such antiquarian
endeavours was the classification not just of the literary remains
of classical antiquity, but of its physical artefacts too. Indeed, it
is with the Renaissance that we get the first stirrings of modern
archaeological method (Schnapp 1996: 122–38).
Yet it would be wrong to imagine that these trends resulted
in the intellectual marginalization of Christianity. Quite the
contrary: the scholars involved in humanist endeavours were
themselves Christians, and their revived interest in the ancient
world was extended to Christian antiquity also. Their rediscovery
of the early Christian world shared many of the features and trendsTHE HISTORICAL QUEST FOR EARLY CHRISTIANITY
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