THE HISTORY OF
MEDIEVAL EUROPE
CHAPTER I
THE STUDY OF HISTORY
History has to do with the past of humanity. Every phase of man's life and every human interest of the present has its background and previous development which may be historically considered. Definition
of history
We study the history of English literature, for example, or we may take courses in universities in the history of architecture, or in church history, or in the history of diplomacy, or in the history of education. These are specialized branches, devoted each to some one department of human affairs. History in the broad and general sense includes all these particular "histories" and many others. It aims to understand and to picture the entire life of the various races and groups of mankind at all times throughout the course of long ages.
We sometimes speak of the history of plants or other non-human beings—of natural history. But a subject like geology, although it deals with changes in the Natural earth's crust, and surveys Natural
history;
history
and geology
a period of appalling length stretching back for hundreds of thousands of years before the advent of human life upon this planet, is not history in the usual sense, since it is not directly concerned with mankind. In so far, nevertheless, as the earth's surface, being man's home, affects his destiny by its changes, geology and its branch geography are sciences useful to the historian. Geology often renders a special service to historical chronology by enabling one to tell the approximate age of human remains and monuments found embedded in different strata of the soil.
