The starting point of the study is the fundamental challenge of capturing and interpreting the present. In this way, the book connects to current, interdisciplinary debates about presence and contemporaneity. It analyzes models of representation and patterns of interpretation of the present in Northern Italy during the 10th century—a time characterized by power shifts and upheavals, competing claims to legitimacy from Carolingian noble families, social change, and the renewed reception of late antique debates on presence and the present. Exemplarily, the works of the Northern Italian bishops Rather of Verona and Atto of Vercelli are examined, who explored new ways to encapsulate the complexity of their own time and thereby reinvented the writing of the present: category, hypothesis, prediction—these were their responses to the opaque present.