HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

6 DEBORAH MAUSKOPF DELIYANNISThe chronicler counts years of the incarnation of the Lord and monthsand days within years, and briefly recounts the deeds of kings or princeswhich took place in them, and also records events, portents, or miracles.There are, however, many authors writing chronicles or annalswho exceed those limits ...for while they want to compile a chronicle,they proceed in the manner of historians, and what they shouldsay briefly, with a simple manner of writing, they try to swell withelaborate words.Note that this was not the same as the distinction between historiaand annales given by Isidore, which had to do with subject matter,not format.However, only some medieval historians announced that they wereobserving this distinction, and for many, these rules were not followed.Moreover, this distinction omits other forms of writing aboutthe past, such as biography (including saints’ lives). 18 Many historiansmixed format or subject matter or both in one text—a littlehagiography, a little annal, a little universal history, a little eyewitnessaccount, a little brevity, a little prolixity. No one seems to haveplayed by any “rules” for writing history. This is perhaps fundamentallybecause there was no such thing as a professional historianat any time during the Middle Ages. In the earlier Middle Ages,people who wrote historical texts were scholars, monks, bishops,clerks, and government officials, and they wrote exegesis, poems,panegyrics, scientific or computational texts, and legal documents inaddition to works that memorialized the past. Even in the laterMiddle Ages, when scholarly professionalization began, there was noplace for the historian as such, although certainly historical textswere welcomed, and even frequently commissioned for particularpurposes. 19There is considerable criticism of ‘positivist’ ideas about genre,and modern scholars tend to reject the idea that there were suchthings as historiographical genres in the Middle Ages. 20 But in fact,what constitutes a genre? Can a historian write in a genre if hedoesn’t know he is doing so? Can a historian think he is writing ina genre but actually be missing most of its constituent elements? Inother words, to what extent does the existence of a genre presup-18See Lifshitz (1994).19Cf. Guenée (1980), 44–76.20See, for example, Lifshitz (1994); Roest (1999); etc.