Pre-modern people believed that the history of the world held transparent meaning. History displayed the working out of the plans, and the judgements, of God. Divine sovereignty dictated not only the history of human salvation through the progressive revelation of the divine purposes, but also the rise and fall of peoples and empires. Consequently, preachers, theologians and historians turned to Scripture for guidance as to how the divine plan was working itself out. The Christian reading of Scripture became absolutely fundamental to the structure and understanding of human history. In the early modern period the reading of world history acquired, like nearly every other intellectual activity, a confessional and dogmatic edge. Antagonists in the tormented ideological struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries appealed to the Bible to prove that their objectives and their experiences – including their sufferings – had been written up in prophecy and could be integrated into a comprehensible pattern of human destiny. However, the quest for biblical endorsement of partisan views of history ultimately disillusioned those who tried to fathom it out. The quest for scriptural clues to world history took on a tragic aspect as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries progressed. The more closely scholars examined the sources, the more elusive the old certainties about world history seemed to become. Ultimately, in the late eighteenth century some thinkers confronted the fact that the world was vastly older than the Bible suggested; that human history could not be crammed in to fit schemes derived from ancient Hebrew prophecy; and that even the universe itself might be a self-sustaining system of vast antiquity, built by the forces of chance and evolution.

The medieval prologue

The European Middle Ages bequeathed to the Renaissance era certain assumptions about the cosmos. First, the universe was a relatively small place, composed of the Earth at the centre with two or three elemental spheres around it: wrapped around the Earth were the spheres of the planets (including the Moon and the Sun); beyond those in turn, a slightly variable range of outermost concentric spheres (firmament, primum mobile, empyrean) of which only the sphere of fixed stars was visible from the earth.