HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

212 NORBERT KERSKENAt the turn of the fifteenth to the sixteenth century, national-historicalaccounts were prepared for the first time in a series of countries.Here, the relationship to new kinds of state-building processesand an intensification of national thought is not to be overlooked.In Sweden, where contemporary rhymed chronicles had dominatedup to this time, the crisis of the Nordic union and the tendenciestoward Swedish independence created the background against whichErik Olsson (Ericus Olai) (ca. 1425–86), canon in Uppsala, wrotethe Chronica regni Gothorum in the 1460s, 115 a depiction from the firstking, Erik, who ruled allegedly at the time of Christ’s birth, to theseventieth king, Christian I.In the Holy Roman Empire, in view of the Rome-centered orientationof the central political power, there were only beginningattempts at a German national historiography. 116 In the context ofthe reception of Tacitus since its first printing of 1470 and thedemand for humanistic historical interest in the court circle surroundingMaximilian I, literary formations of German national consciousnessappeared in the Alsatian humanist milieu, which found itseloquent historiographic expression in the Epitome rerum Germanicarumof Jakob Wimpfeling (1450–1528), begun by Sebastian Murrho (†1495).This text appeared in print in 1505 117 and was mainly motivated bypedagogical patriotic interests and uncovered a genuine Germanic,non-Roman early historical connection for German history.The internal consolidation of the confederate state system, its internationalimplementation, and the factual removal from the HolyRoman Empire found expression in the historiography through thefact that the particular historiographic reflection of the fourteenthand fifteenth centuries, since the beginning of the sixteenth century,was supplemented by a series of comprehensive accounts of Swisshistory. 118 The first texts of this kind appeared in the city republicsof Zurich and Lucerne. At the beginning of this historiographic115The work appeared first in Stockholm in 1615 and is now available as ChronicaErici Olai Decani Upsaliensis, in Scriptores rerum Svecicarum medii aevi, ed. E. G. Geijerand J. H. Schröder, vol. 2 (Uppsala, 1828), 1–166. See also Nygren (1953); Kumlien(1979), 126–29.116Thomas (1990) and (1991).117Epitoma Germanorum Iacobi Wympfelingii et suorum opera contextum (Argentoratae,1505). See also Muhlack (1991), 99–103, 162–63, 240–42, 255–56; Mertens (1993),42–43. For context and background, see Krapf (1979), esp. 102–11; Hammerstein(1989); Münkler, et al. (1998).118See Maissen (1994); Feller/Bonjour (1962).