Trivium

Randolph Starn. Who's Afraid of the Renaissance? in The Past and Future of Medieval Studies (John van Engen ed.) University of Notre Dame Press (1994).

There is some risk that histories of "Old Europe" would become merely accumulative, antiquarian, and annalistic, or like the new ethnic republics, fiercely separatist and partisan. Histories post-modern style, where everything wrought in the past is at once indiscriminately and historical and available in the present, have no anachronisms, and this would put historians out of work. Then too, the absence of overarching narratives promotes a kind of historiographical horror vacui and the proliferation of any number of particular tales. I don't know which prospect is more alarming: that historians will run out of new topics or that they will come up with ever more trivial ones.