HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

INTRODUCTION 7pose active participation by the author, and to what extent is it acategory in which an author passively participates? Is it “a systemof rules for writing as well as for the evaluation of what is written”? 21Is it a literary format or style? Is it dependent upon subject matter?Is it dependent on the function of the text, or the author’s purposesfor writing it, or the way it was to be presented to its audience?Most historians, when they sat down to write, were doing so inresponse to another text or texts. In some cases these models areacknowledged, in some cases they are not, although we can oftenrecognize them, and we assume that contemporary readers wouldalso have caught the allusions. Whether they thought beyond thatto larger questions of genre may not be the point for their writing,but it is the point for our analysis of groups of similar texts. Whena certain number of texts are all based on one model, then modernscholars usually group them together as a genre. Certainly it is significantthat many authors wrote the same sort of text, whatever theymay have thought of the ‘rules’ of writing such a text. If authorsdid think that they were writing in a genre, the stylistic or methodologicalassumptions they used might have shaped their narratives.And, if we can make statements about certain features common tomembers of a genre, we can then use these assumptions to tell uswhat the history-writers meant.Modern Analysis of Medieval HistoriographyUntil the 1940s, relatively few scholars had seriously considered generalaspects of history-writing in the Middle Ages. 22 Those who hadwere usually concerned with one genre of historical writing, 23 onetext, 24 one period, 25 or one geographical area. 26 Many of the knownhistorical texts were published in series such as the Monumenta GermaniaeHistorica or the Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, with a certain amount of21Roest (1999), 48.22See Ray (1974) for a summary of research through 1974.23For example, Büdinger (1900), on universal history; Poole (1926), on chroniclesand annals; von Rad (1930), on chronicles.24Beumann (1950), on Widukind of Corvey.25Hoffmann (1958), on the Carolingians.26Balzani (1883–84), on Italy; Dübler (1943), on Spain; Jones (1947), on England.