Chapter Twelve
TRANSFORMATION
In oral cultures, if people think about the past at all, they tend to imagine it as much like the present. This is true even when they know of ways in which it wasn’t. Europeans throughout most of the Middle Ages had had little sense of the past being different; but this was about to change. The introduction of clocks, an increase in the rate at which things changed, and new educational opportunities, prompted scholars to a thorough investigation of the past. In Italy, particularly, there had been any number of impressive remains lying about as reminders of the Roman Empire – a world so different from anything people knew in their own day. Only now, though, did these old stones begin to impact people’s imaginations once again. The educated, who’d hardly been unaware of ancient Rome, now began to be fascinated by it, and wanted to know more.