How can we gain access to the Middle Ages and Renaissance? One of our main types of evidence for those periods has always been the histories written at the time: literary works, that is, that themselves looked back at past events and personalities, whether recent or at greater distance in time, and usually conscious of their own retrospection. This module looks both at the ways that history was written in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and at the ways in which the past was used to construct the present of medieval and renaissance history-writers. In small groups, we will look in detail at some of these original texts (in translation) and students will have the opportunity for one-on-one input from tutors in order through the semester to develop a long essay on a particular theme, text or group of texts.