HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

280 BERT ROESTMonastic chronicles also codified obtained privileges and landedpossessions; the economic life-blood of the traditional religious houses.This provided incentives for incorporating documents and charters,and for including detailed reports of duly witnessed donations bygenerous benefactors. Hence there exists considerable overlap betweenmonastic chronicles (or comparable forms of local institutional history)and document collections pertaining to particular institutions.Cases in point are the so-called monastic chartulary chronicles andthe later medieval urban town books. 7Traditional monastic houses and foundations of regular canons asa rule were established with aristocratic support and kept close relationswith noble benefactors. Many monastic chronicles thereforeincorporate a (partial) history of the founding aristocratic dynasty,making it hard to draw the line between monastic chronicles anddynastic history. 8 If dynasties gained a supra-regional or even pan-European importance, monastic chronicles incorporating their deedscould evolve into forms of territorial history and beyond.In the German lands, where several monasteries were imperialfoundations, monastic chronicles could include a partial history ofthe German Empire, providing the monastic house and its imperialbenefactors with a proper world-historical lineage. This was particularlyfashionable during the Ottonian and early Staufen period. 9 Inpost-conquest England and Normandy monastic historiography andAnglo-Norman dynastic historiography were also closely linked, witnessthe monastic chronicles of St. Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury. 10An almost automatic overflow from local monastic history and hagiographyto a Historia Anglorum and world-historical compilations, is alsovisible in the works of Matthew Paris (ca. 1200–59), a monk fromSt. Albans. In the Iberian Peninsula, we can signal several literaryendeavours under Alfonso X of Castile in the thirteenth century,and the fourteenth-century historiographical initiatives under PedroIV of Aragon. In both cases, the combination of strong monastic7Cf. Houts (1995), 16, 29 ff.; Genet (1977), 95–138; Patze (1977). Hofmann(1987), 427–28, mentions also the chartulary chronicle of John of Vincentio (1144),the so-called Chronicon S. Vincentii Vulturensis.8Cf. Patze (1964), 8–81, and (1965), 67–128; Patze (1987), 331–70; Houts (1995),3 ff., 32.9Schmale (1985), 96.10Emms (1995), 159–68.