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Medieval Historical Writing

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lightbulbAbout this topic
Medieval Historical Writing refers to the practice of documenting and interpreting historical events, figures, and contexts during the Middle Ages (approximately 5th to 15th centuries). This field encompasses various genres, including chronicles, annals, and hagiographies, often influenced by religious, political, and cultural factors, reflecting the values and beliefs of medieval society.
lightbulbAbout this topic
Medieval Historical Writing refers to the practice of documenting and interpreting historical events, figures, and contexts during the Middle Ages (approximately 5th to 15th centuries). This field encompasses various genres, including chronicles, annals, and hagiographies, often influenced by religious, political, and cultural factors, reflecting the values and beliefs of medieval society.

Key research themes

1. How did court patronage and imperial ideology shape medieval historical writing in different cultures?

This theme explores how historians in medieval societies, particularly within imperial courts like the Ottoman Empire and English royal circles, produced historical narratives constrained by political power structures and patronage. It focuses on how imperial ideology, notions of royal authority, and court affiliations influenced both the content and form of historical texts, including mechanisms of self-censorship, the framing of political critique, and the centrality of capital cities or seats of power as narrative vantage points. Understanding these dynamics reveals the intertwined relationship between history writing and the maintenance or contestation of secular authority in medieval contexts.

Key finding: This study uncovers that Ottoman historical writing was predominantly conducted under direct or indirect court patronage, leading to the embedding of imperial ideology as a compulsory framework from the 15th century onwards.... Read more
Key finding: Analyzing William of Newburgh’s historiography illustrates the use of royal juxtaposition and narrative focalization to implicitly evaluate kingship qualities, heavily framing political events through the prism of royal... Read more
Key finding: The research reveals that Hugo Falcandus’s twelfth-century Sicilian narrative, although initially perceived as devoid of religious framework, subtly encodes ideological shifts where critique of secular power relations is... Read more
Key finding: This volume demonstrates how medieval writers negotiated historical and fictional elements in narratives, often shaped by courtly or ideological affiliations, illustrating that historical narratives were flexible tools... Read more

2. What role did manuscript culture and reading/writing practices play in the production and reception of medieval historical texts?

This theme investigates the materiality of medieval historical writing by focusing on manuscript compilation, annotation practices, literacy, and reading cultures. It encompasses how multi-text codices, scribal communities, and their annotation techniques contributed to the shaping, transmission, and reception of historical narratives. These practices embody not merely mechanisms of textual preservation but active intellectual engagements, reflecting scholarly methods, communal identities, and evolving literary norms that influenced both the form and interpretive possibilities of medieval historiography.

Key finding: The research identifies medieval multi-text codices as complex cultural artifacts where historical texts coexisted with diverse literary and devotional works, enabling scholars to study the compilation, reorganization, and... Read more
Key finding: This study reveals that early medieval manuscripts were sites of dynamic annotation practices, with margins and interlinear spaces systematically designed for scholarly commentary and textual interaction. The presence and... Read more
Key finding: This synthesis highlights literacy as a multifaceted cultural phenomenon in medieval Europe, where reading and writing extended beyond individual skills to encompass socially and ideologically contextualized practices. The... Read more
Key finding: Exploring medieval educational methods reveals a pedagogical model akin to modern writing workshops, emphasizing active student engagement, imitation of models, and collaborative textual production. These practices... Read more

3. How have computational and comparative authorship analyses advanced the study of medieval Latin historical texts?

This theme addresses recent methodological developments in computational authorship analysis applied to medieval Latin documents, focusing on techniques such as authorship attribution and verification. By employing curated datasets of epistolary and literary texts, this research provides quantitative frameworks to investigate questions of authenticity, authorial identity, and textual transmission, thereby influencing the critical assessment and scholarly interpretation of medieval historiographical and literary corpora.

Key finding: This paper presents two specifically curated datasets of medieval Latin epistolary and literary texts, enabling researchers to apply computational authorship verification methods. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy... Read more

All papers in Medieval Historical Writing

Автор на основе хроник Жана Фруассара прослеживает развитие идеи крестового похода в XIV в. В данной концепции выделяется образ «короля-крестоносца» как руководителя успешного крестового похода. На примере экспедиции 1390-1391 гг. в... more
Seminario di approfondimento II. Paleografia II, Scuola di Archivistica, paleografia e diplomatica dell'Archivio di Stato di Mantova
Introduction Ovidiu Cristea and Liviu Pilat The history of the Black Sea may be considered as alternating between an “inner lake,” when a single empire establishes control over the sea and its surrounding areas, and that of an “open sea,”... more
Studium niniejsze poświęcam niedługiemu wyjątkowi z drugiej księgi ważnego, obszernego, a niedostępnego póki co po polsku dzieła „De sacramentis christianae fidei” Hugona ze Świętego Wiktora, mianowicie części zatytułowanej „O poświęceniu... more
The article is devoted to the forms and methods of using Pliny the Elder’s (c. 23–79) Natural History as a source of some episodes described in the medieval chronicle Estoria de Espanna (EE), compiled in the vernacular (Castilian)... more
The paper is devoted to characterize the Spanish Early Medieval hagiography as a special genre of Medieval historical writing, as a history (or biography) of saints. The peculiarities of the Spanish Lifes of Saints are studied in the... more
Hugo Falcandus, the author of the Liber (or Historia) de Regno Siciliae (1154–69), is a contentious figure among historians of the twelfth century. Often disgruntled and embittered, he wrote about the reigns of two Sicilian kings, William... more
Russian commented translation of some fragments of the so named "Crónica del Moro Rasis" ("Chronicle of the Moor Rasis"), a 15th century Castilian translation of the lost Arabic original of the 10th cen. Русский комментированный перевод... more
The author of the article tries to emphasize the part of some formal characteristics of manuscripts in the process of medieval chronicles analysis. The subject of the analysis is the cap. 1025 of the “First General Chronicle”, which... more
The article is dedicated to the problem of the reconstruction of the biography of the early medieval king Leovigild (568-586), who vas a governor of the Visigothic Kingdom of Toledo. His image was transformed by the centuries of the... more
Estoria de España es una de las obras maestras de la historiografía medieval castellana y una de las primeras crónicas de la Europa occidental escrita en lengua vulgar (en castellano medieval). Estoria de España fue compuesta por la... more
El objeto de la investigación es el problema del carácter de la evolución de la naturaleza del poder real en la Hispania visigoda de la segunda mitad del siglo VI. Cronologicamente este periodo sigue a la época de la história visigoda... more
The article examines the interpretation of Pompey the Great's (106–48 BC) image, in the medieval chronicle “Estoria de Espanna”, which was compiled in the vernacular (Castilian) language after 1270 at the court of Alfonso X the Wise, king... more
Цель статьи – показать влияние средневековой историографии, написанной на разговорных языках, на формирование негативных представлений о мусульманах и исламе в латинской Европе. Подчеркивается, что такие сочинения имели много более... more
Из «Истории Испании» («Первой всеобщей хроники», 1272). Пер. со старокастильского и комм. О.В. Аурова 82 Из «Истории Испании» («Первой всеобщей хроники», 1272). Битва при Лас-Навас-де-Толоса Перевод со старокастильского, вступительная... more
Listen bilden ein historisches und kulturelles Kontinuum in der Schriftverwendung und stellen auch in mittelalterlichen Libri vitae das grund-sätzliche Ordnungsmedium dar. Die Bücher wurden im späten 8. und frühen 9. Jahrhundert in... more
forthcoming in: in: Des chartes aux constitutions. Autour de l’idée constitutionnelle en Europe (XIIe-XVIIe siècles), ed. François Foronda and Jean-Philippe Genet

(Paper of 2014)
Studie była publikována v Moskvě roku 1960 v časopise ,,Sovětská archeologie" / The study was published in Moscow in 1960 in the journal ,,Soviet archeology".
La vitalité des recherches sur l'écrit cistercien ne s'est pas démentie au cours des dernières décennies ; elle s'est illustrée par de nouvelles éditions de sources, une attention accrue portée aux « pancartes » monastiques, documents... more
This paper explores the tendency for English historical narratives of the late twelfth century to develop rounded portraits of royal characters by juxtaposing one or more kings. Linguistic choices could combine with the selection and... more
This book chapter investigates the way in which chroniclers in thirteenth-century England understood the political conflicts between Henry III and Simon de Montfort. It focuses on the use of biblical models for interpreting the changing... more
Even if silver was not the only determining factor in the game of power, it played a substantial role in negotiating the dynamics between rival groups and inside clan structures, mediating the complex interactions of propaganda, material... more
Conference Report: 'Indigenous Ideas and Foreign Influences - Interactions among Oral and Literary, Latin and Vernacular Cultures in Medieval and Early Modern Northern Europe' by Catalin Taranu
Emperor Alexius I Comnenus granted to the Republic of Venice a generous chrysobull of privileges and property in return for the latter's support in Byzantium's war with the Normans. Despite more than a century of criticism, scholarly... more
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