The social sciences in general were in a poor state of development in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. While legal science made some progress on the problem of evaluating the testimony of witnesses, history did not. As is well known, medieval histories, chronicles, travelers’ tales, bestiaries, and so on generally combine the perfectly true with the totally impossible, with little attempt to sort out the two. In the absence of any generally recognized concept of probability, readers’ attitudes to the contents of such works could only oscillate unstably between credulity and skepticism.
