HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

INTRODUCTION 9In 1980, Bernard Guenée published Histoire et culture historique dansl’Occident médiévale. In 1985, Franz Josef Schmale published Funktionund Formen mittelalterlicher Geschichtsschreibung: eine Einfuhrung. The twobooks are quite similar in many ways. In each book, the author considersthe whole range of medieval historiography in chapters on theplace of history in medieval knowledge, the way the author learnedabout the past, the ways time was marked, the relationship to religiouswriting, and the nature of historical truth, function, and audience.By taking a topical approach to the historical texts, rather thanone based on genre or chronology, Guenée and Schmale are ableto examine much more clearly the place of history-writing in medievalintellectual life, and ways that medieval historians thought about theirsubject matter.Other than these comprehensive works, there have been numerousstudies on more focused groups of historical texts. Generallythese studies center on a particular geographic area in one particularperiod, or even on one text, and to look at the factors (political,personal, institutional, etc.) that went into the texts’ construction.National surveys have appeared for England, Italy, and Spain. 31 Fivevolumes devoted to individual genres of texts have appeared in theseries Typologie des Sources du Moyen Age occidental, on early medievalannals, universal chronicles, hagiographical manuscripts, gesta episcoporumet abbatum, and local and regional chronicles. 32 As noted above,all of these different types of categories are modern conceptions createdfor the purpose of studying a group of texts, rather than necessarilycorresponding to what medieval historians were doing. 33ConclusionsIt is much easier to write an analysis of an individual text than toattempt to survey medieval history-writing as a whole. As the ideathat medieval historians did not think in terms of genre has taken31England: Gransden (1974); Spain: Dübler (1943) and Linehan (1993); Italy:Zanella (1984).32McCormick (1975); Krueger (1976); Philippart (1977); Sot (1981); van Houts(1995).33Cf. Roest (1999), 48–49.