Unsurprisingly, perhaps, medievals tended to refer to themselves as moderns.

There is some debate (and no consensus) as to if there is a premodern idea of "history", and, if so, when it started. After all, for us moderns to call something "history" is to make a claim of radical disjuncture and separation, because history is what came before and is what is no longer. So the act of calling something history is the act of creating a clear dividing line between yourself and it. And history can be deployed in two ways, and each way in either temporal direction: a thing was (not) then and is (not) now; or a thing (was then)/(is now) and (is not now)/(was not then).

Some examples:

• In Timothy Mitchell's Rule of Experts, the author shows how references to Ottoman practices as "feudal" were deployed to legitimize colonial rule. "Feudalism" was a thing that existed then (in Europe, and then was Bad) and does not now (Europe claims, which makes Europe better).

• In contemporary discussions of race, most historians place the development of racialized thought in the 14-16th centuries. But as Cord Whitaker has noted, this argument is also the subtle assertion that there were no black people in the middle ages, and allowed the unquestioned assumptions of the middle ages as a white space. A black knight, after all, has white skin. "Race" was not so then, but it is so now.

• When John Boswell looked at premodern homosexual relationships, he argued that it was then and is now (and therefore it is OK), an attempt to refute the argument that it was not then and is now (and therefore it is not OK).

Patrick Geary's Phantoms of Remembrance argues that the sort of manipulation to disjoint what what from what is can first be detected around the turn of the first millennium AD. He's not entirely wrong, but Brown et al.'s Documentary Culture and the Laity shows a systematic bias in archival preservation that would seem to have been continuous through the early middle ages.

So maybe we can talk about medievals having an idea of "history." If so, it's harder to talk about their ideas of periodization. There is some tendency to talk about "ages of man", but many of these are theological, not historical. Most stem from biblical exegesis, particularly of the Book of Daniel, and are generally apocalyptic and exegetical, defining the present with respect to the future rather than to the past.

There is also an interest, particularly in the later middle ages, in genealogies. There are many extant roles which trace royal genealogies back to Adam and Eve, which would seem at first glance to be a historical argument in the modern sense: it was then, and is now. But this imposes our own ideas onto the past, for the importance of biblical figures is not primarily in the continuity, but in the fact that they are biblical figures.

The strongest "historical" metaphor in the middle ages is that of decline, and most learned men and women from 500 to 1500 would have been aware that Rome was then and is not now. But they would also have been aware that Eden was then and is not now, and so decline from an antique past is also a natural decline dictated by theological reality. Nor would medieval intellectuals assign particularly breaks which offer discontinuities in this decline, i.e. what we would now call periodization.

So, in short, ideas of "history" and "period" are not at all stable across time, and premodern discussions of history were inextricably tied to discussions of theology.