HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

INTRODUCTIONDeborah Mauskopf Deliyannis. . . medieval historiography, by all critical odds, is inauthentic, unscientific, unreliable,ahistorical, irrational, borderline illiterate, and, worse yet, unprofessional. 1In recent years, much has been written about the ‘memory’ of thepast in the Middle Ages. 2 Taken broadly, this includes a considerationof any sort of memorialization of events or persons of the past,from the recitation of the names of the dead at funerary masses, tothe production of images and monuments, to the creation of publicceremonies and rituals, to the recitation of narratives, to the writingof texts. All of these represent strategies by which people, sometimespublicly, sometimes more privately, appropriate the past for theirown purposes.Of these strategies, the one that most explicitly claims to be performingthis function is the writing of historical texts. Historia was atype of writing that had a long tradition in classical antiquity.Moreover, the Jewish and Christian religions were both by definitionhistorical, in that they were based, at least in part, on historical andbiographical texts. Medieval authors inherited both these traditions.There was thus no question, in the Middle Ages, that history shouldbe written, as one suitable strategy for remembering a particular setof events or people. However, history was not recognized as an independentbranch of study; it was usually classified as a branch ofgrammar or rhetoric. Historians came from many different backgroundsand wrote for many different purposes. New forms, andnew ideas of what the content should be, were introduced at variouspoints. Sometimes medieval authors consciously imitated classicalor biblical models, but most authors were more interested inimitating each other.1Spiegel (1983), 43–44.2See Geary (1994); Coleman (1992); Wickham and Fentress (1992); Clanchy(1993).