Understanding of past

To reach some kind of understanding of a period in the past, the Middle Ages say, requires a creative act of the imagination, not unlike that of a novelist, getting inside the skins of their characters or establishing the environment they live in. What must it have been like to be a peasant under a feudal baron What might his beliefs and politics have been Did he, for example, think his situation was simply part of the natural order of things, or that it was grossly unfair and needed to be overthrown So you have to imagine the terms under which life was lived in those days, and learn to feel in a different way about things by putting yourself into a world very different from your own. Now, of course, every age views the past from its own present, and an 18th century historian's concept of the Middle Ages will be very different from that of one from the 21st century, which is why each age has to write its history over again. It's not so much that more facts or evidence come to light, if they do, but that sensibilities change too.