Bridgewater State University Virtual Commons - Bridgewater State University History Faculty Publications History Department 2014 "Knowledge Will Be Manifold": Daniel 12.4 and the Idea of Intellectual Progress in the Middle Ages J. R. Webb Bridgewater State University,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/history_fac Part of the History Commons, and the Medieval Studies Commons Virtual Commons Citation Webb, J. R. (2014). "Knowledge Will Be Manifold": Daniel 12.4 and the Idea of Intellectual Progress in the Middle Ages. In History Faculty Publications. Paper 38. Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/history_fac/38 This item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts. “Knowledge Will Be Manifold”: Daniel 12.4 and the Idea of Intellectual Progress in the Middle Ages By J. R. Webb Je l’offre [ce livre] surtout a` mes critiques, a` ceux qui voudront bien le corriger, l’ameliorer,´ le refaire, le mettre au niveau des progres` ulterieurs´ de la science. “Plurimi pertransibunt, et multiplex erit scientia.” (Jules Michelet, Histoire de France, 1, 1833) Thus wrote Michelet to open his monumental history of France. By deploying this prophetic line from the book of Daniel in support of a positivistic approach to historical science, he was participating in a discourse on this perplexing passage that spanned nearly two millennia. He perhaps surmised this, though he probably did not know how deeply the passage penetrated into the intellectual tradition of the West or that he was favoring one interpretation of it over another.1 It is the trajectory of the interpretations of Daniel 12.4 in the Latin West from their first formulation in late antiquity that concerns the present exploration.