National Middle Ages or imperial present? The time in the libels published under Charles V

This paper aims to sketch out the copresence of two paradigms for the exploitation of time in the news printed to relate, justify and glorify the actions of Charles V: the classical historia magistra vitæ and a less commonly known presentist stance.
This paper will first show the fertility and imperial specificities of the exploitation of the Italian, Spanish, Dutch and German Middle Ages to legitimize the project of universal monarchy: what practices were at work and what political discourse did they legitimize? Secondly, it will explain why presentism is the necessary corollary of the union under Charles V’s single government of an unprecedented ensemble of states: such a modern entity paradoxically abolished the possibility of writing the history of this monarchy and limited historiography to the praise of the present in its a-historical perfection.
This paper will show how these two paradigms either compete or combine in accordance with imperial actuality: do some events lend themselves particularly well to the exploitation of one paradigm of another? By answering these various questions, I hope to show how past, present and future meet in imperial ideology and to shed new light on the understanding of time in the early 16th century.