HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

10 DEBORAH MAUSKOPF DELIYANNIShold, scholars have shied away from writing surveys of medieval historiography,instead focusing on more theoretical aspects of historywriting. The purpose of the present volume is to attempt to fill thatvoid, by introducing the whole variety of medieval historical texts,as well as the ways that modern scholars have approached them.Since genres, either medieval or modern, are now held in suchdisrepute, this book takes as an organizational framework the subjectmatter of the texts: whose pasts were being written down in theMiddle Ages. In some cases, the texts discussed in a chapter willrepresent only one or two of the traditional historiographical genres,but in other cases many different sorts of texts might be considered,for example in the chapter by Joaquin Pizarro. By considering thetexts in this way, we can do two things at once. First, we can seewhich entities were considered worthy of having their history writtendown (and, by extension, which were not) at various periods. Second,we can examine how the histories of these entities were written,which conventions and genres were considered suitable for them,and thus ultimately understand something about historical genres aswell. At certain points we can see that a genre has developed, withassumptions and rules, and based on a recognized model. 34Rather than simply understanding the place of history in medievalintellectual culture, by looking at the different types of subject mattermemorialized in these texts, we reach a broader understandingof what mattered at different times and in different contexts, of whatsorts of individuals, groups, and sets of events were considered worthyof having their history recorded. The book is divided into twoparts, early and later Middle Ages. For the early period, there arefour chapters, whereas for the later period there are seven. This ispartly because many more texts survive from the later period, andin order to give greater coverage to them, more chapters were deemednecessary. But a look at the chapter titles also indicates the widerarray of subject matter that was covered by history in the laterperiod.For the early Middle Ages, historiographical texts can be dividedinto four main subject areas. Universal history was very popular since34Allen (in this volume) notes this for universal history; Pizarro (in this volume)for the origo gentis, which, however, only exists as a conscious genre after the tenthcentury.