Publication, "Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500-1500"
Edited by Elizabeth Tyler (CML York), Jennifer Jahner (CalTech) and Emily Steiner (Penn), with contribution by Elizabeth Tyler.
CML’s Elizabeth Tyler (York) has co-edited Medieval History Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500-1500 with Jennifer Jahner (CalTech) and Emily Steiner (Penn).
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.
The volume includes 27 chapters, ranging from Gildas to accounts of the War of the Roses. Elizabeth Tyler’s chapter on the ‘Cross-Channel Networks of History-Writing: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’ takes a very CML approach, opening up how the chronicles of early medieval England were enmeshed in the multilingual fabric of Europe from Ireland to the Bosporus and alert to the linguistic politics of history-writing across Latin Europe.
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.
The volume includes 27 chapters, ranging from Gildas to accounts of the War of the Roses. Elizabeth Tyler’s chapter on the ‘Cross-Channel Networks of History-Writing: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’ takes a very CML approach, opening up how the chronicles of early medieval England were enmeshed in the multilingual fabric of Europe from Ireland to the Bosporus and alert to the linguistic politics of history-writing across Latin Europe.