Dante belongs to two epochs—to what, chronology apart, we call the Middle Ages, and to the tendency known as Humanism. The De Monarchia belongs to the Middle Ages that are passing away, the Divine Comedy to the Middle Ages that live on, to dawning Humanism, and to the legacy of the Middle Ages to Humanism.

It is one of the commonest distortions in our historical outlook, and one of the hardest to correct, to consider Humanism as a negation of the Middle Ages. Such an attitude supposes the two epochs in utter antithesis, the second a revolt against the first, a total opposition of values, implying sheer discontinuity between the Middle Ages and Humanism. There are certain historians who go so far as to cut the whole of the Middle Ages out of the process of thought, joining up Humanism to Greco-Roman thought, art and culture, and taking primitive Christianity into account only in so far as showing the influence of Alexandrian philosophy. On the other hand, not a few Catholic apologists not only extol the Middle Ages beyond the warrant of realities, but minimise the negative aspects of that civilization, which they see as entirely and solely Christian. They too admit a discontinuity between the two epochs, with this difference, that they do not believe the thread has ever been joined up, in spite of the tentative of the Counter Reformation, or that, less effectual, of Catholic Romanticism.

Apart from their various controversial aspects, hinc et inde, this conception rules out any sociologico-historical interpretation of human process.