HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

282 BERT ROESTwider salvation-historical perspective. Thus forms of order historywith hagiographic overtones appeared, 14 as well as forms of ecclesiasticalhistory in which the history of the monastery or the orderwas carefully embedded in the history of the Church (as happenedin the Historia Ecclesiastica of Hugh of Fleury). 15 In the late MiddleAges, comparable perspectives were developed by mendicant chroniclers,who had reasons of their own to link the emergence and thesignificance of their religious orders to a (hierocratic) history of theChurch at large. To this kind of mendicant historiography, whichitself was inspired by the longstanding Liber pontificalis tradition, I willreturn later on. 16In the period after ca. 1200, monastic historiography did not subside,even when it lost some of its prominence to the mendicantsand various non-religious protagonists. In fact, the late Middle Agesabound in monastic chronicles of every kind: short annals limited toone particular foundation (from the high Middle Ages onwards, annalscontinued to be a ‘basic vehicle’ for local institutional history), fullyfledgedmonastic chronicles with overtones of dynastic history, aswell as specimens of monastic reform historiography, in which theperspective could be much broader than the community for whichthe chronicle was intended.No use then, to lament the decline of monastic historiographyduring the late medieval period. There certainly was a breach: thePlague epidemics of 1347/9 caused the abrupt termination of manylocal monastic and non-monastic historiographical traditions. Thelater fourteenth century was, in a sense, a time without history. 17This should not be interpreted as a full decline of monastic historicalwriting, as has been done in the past. Monastic historical writingwas taken up again in the course of the fifteenth century, frequentlyin connection with observant reforms.The early observants, whether monks or friars, almost everywhereturned their back on ‘superfluous’ learning, towards a ‘more pure’religious life. They were more concerned with the production of14Such as the Exordium magnum Cisterciense sive narratio de initio Cisterciensis ordinis,ed. Br. Griesser (Rome, 1961), by Conrad of Eberbach (fl. ca. 1200).15Cf. Hofmann (1987), 413 ff.16Zimmerman (1960); Hofmann (1987), 413.17Sprandel (1987), passim.