History writing in the Middle Ages did not belong to any particular genre, language or class of texts. Its remit was wide, embracing the events of antiquity; the deeds of saints, rulers and abbots; archival practices; and contemporary reportage. This volume addresses the challenges presented by medieval historiography by using the diverse methodologies of medieval studies: legal and literary history, art history, religious studies, codicology, the history of the emotions, gender studies and critical race theory. Spanning one thousand years of historiography in England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland, the essays map historical thinking across literary genres and expose the rich veins of national mythmaking tapped into by medieval writers. Additionally, they attend to the ways in which medieval histories crossed linguistic and geographical borders. Together, they trace multiple temporalities and productive anachronisms that fuelled some of the most innovative medieval writing.

Based on new readings of some of the least-read texts by some of the best-known scribes of later medieval England, Scribal Authorship and the Writing of History in Medieval England reconceptualizes medieval scribes as authors, and the texts surviving in medieval manuscripts as authored. Culling evidence from history writing in later medieval England, Matthew Fisher concludes that we must reject the axiomatic division between scribe and author. Using the peculiarities of authority and intertextuality unique to medieval historiography, Fisher exposes the rich ambiguities of what it means for medieval scribes to "write" books. He thus frames the composition, transmission, and reception--indeed, the authorship--of some medieval texts as scribal phenomena. History writing is an inherently intertextual genre: in order to write about the past, texts must draw upon other texts. Scribal Authorship demonstrates that medieval historiography relies upon quotation, translation, and adaptation in such a way that the very idea that there is some line that divides author from scribe is an unsustainable and modern critical imposition. Given the reality that a scribe's work was far more nuanced than the simplistic binary of error and accuracy would suggest, Fisher completely overturns many of our assumptions about the processes through which manuscripts were assembled and texts (both canonical literature and the less obviously literary) were composed.

In recent times postmodernism has influenced all areas of the humanistic disciplines, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about the meaning of historical evidence and our ability to read and interpret it. Medievalists have been notably present in these debates, bringing 'the linguistic turn' to medieval sources and renewing a traditional field with non-traditional subjects and approaches. Writing Medieval History surveys those aspects of theory and its related new subject matters that have become part of the mainstream discipline of medieval history. This book is organized around three major themes: the self or recognizing people in premodern society; literary techniques for reading historical texts; and historicizing sexuality and gender. Within each section are essays on subjects such as the social self, uses of psychoanalysis, and sex and gender in medieval life. This text clearly articulates concepts, defines critical vocabulary and demonstrates how the theory is applied in practice.

"From the Anglo-Saxons to the Renaissance, from chivalrous knights to Genghis Khan, students will improve their knowledge of medieval times while learning to write with Structure and Style. This theme-based writing curriculum offers a full year of instruction for students in grades 6-8 and is perfect for homeschoolers, homeschool co-ops, tutors, and hybrid schools. Working through all of IEW's Units 1-9, students learn to take notes, retell narrative stories, summarize references, write from pictures, compose essays, and more. Includes vocabulary cards, literature suggestions, and access to helpful PDF downloads. This book is designed to be used by an instructor who has been through or is currently viewing the Teaching Writing: Structure and Style video course." -- Amazon

The priorities of medieval chroniclers and historians were not those of the modern historian, nor was the way that they gathered, arranged and presented evidence. Yet if we understand how they approached their task, and their assumption of God's immanence in the world, much that they wrote becomes clear. Many of them were men of high intelligence whose interpretation of events sheds clear light on what happened. Christopher Given-Wilson is one of the leading authorities on medieval English historical writing. He examines how medieval writers such as Ranulf Higden and Adam Usk treated chronology and geography, politics and warfare, heroes and villains. He looks at the ways in which chronicles were used during the middle ages, and at how the writing of history changed between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.

Authoring the Past surveys medieval Catalan historiography, shedding light on the emergence and evolution of historical writing and autobiography in the Middle Ages, on questions of authority and authorship, and on the links between history and politics during the period. Jaume Aurell examines texts from the late twelfth to the late fourteenth century—including the Latin Gesta comitum Barcinonensium and four texts in medieval Catalan: James I’s Llibre dels fets, the Crònica of Bernat Desclot, the Crònica of Ramon Muntaner, and the Crònica of Peter the Ceremonious—and outlines the different motivations for the writing of each. For Aurell, these chronicles are not mere archaeological artifacts but rather documents that speak to their writers’ specific contemporary social and political purposes. He argues that these Catalonian counts and Aragonese kings were attempting to use their role as authors to legitimize their monarchical status, their growing political and economic power, and their aggressive expansionist policies in the Mediterranean. By analyzing these texts alongside one another, Aurell demonstrates the shifting contexts in which chronicles were conceived, written, and read throughout the Middle Ages. The first study of its kind to make medieval Catalonian writings available to English-speaking audiences, Authoring the Past will be of interest to scholars of history and comparative literature, students of Hispanic and Romance medieval studies, and medievalists who study the chronicle tradition in other languages.

Writing the Barbarian Past examines the presentation of the non-Roman, pre-Christian past in Latin and vernacular historical narratives composed between c.550 and c.1000: the Gothic histories of Jordanes and Isidore of Seville, the Fredegar chronicle, the Liber Historiae Francorum, Paul the Deacon’s Historia Langobardorum, Waltharius, and Beowulf; it also examines the evidence for an oral vernacular tradition of historical narrative in this period. In this book, Shami Ghosh analyses the relative significance granted to the Roman and non-Roman inheritances in narratives of the distant past, and what the use of this past reveals about the historical consciousness of early medieval elites, and demonstrates that for them, cultural identity was conceived of in less binary terms than in most modern scholarship.