When Did the Middle Ages End?

[A] The question is not about a date but about what a date is for. Historians answering 1453, 1492 or 1517 are not disagreeing about what happened in those years, but about which kind of change may divide one age from another. [B] A period is a claim about significance wearing the clothes of a fact about time. Its usefulness is real and easy to underrate: without divisions there is no syllabus, no shelf, and no way of saying that something is characteristic of its moment. [C] Its cost is that the line, once drawn, begins to do work nobody intended, and people on either side of it are read as though they belonged to different species. [D]

The sharper objection is not that the boundary is arbitrary but that one part of Europe drew it for its own purposes and exported it. The scheme comes from Italian writers who wished to present themselves as the end of a long interruption; it fits Italy tolerably and much of the continent badly. Carried outside Europe it fails altogether, yet it survives in the naming of departments and journals everywhere. The reasonable position is not to abolish the divisions, which would leave the subject unable to generalise, but to keep in view what they are: instruments made for a purpose by interested people, and therefore instruments that can be set down.