HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

UNIVERSAL HISTORY 300‒1000 35favoured his tandem but separable universal framework, which foldedtogether cosmic time based on Hebrew Truth, the paradigm of theAges, and wide-ranging yet concise historical annotations. 59 Bedebulks large today for his pioneering but spare use of A.D. and B.C.dating in his Church History of the English People. 60 His importance foruniversal historical idiom was different. Along with Isidore, Bedepreached the cadence of the world’s ages according to Augustine’smodel and concerns, and Bede’s adjusted chronology helped to setthose concerns at least partly to rest. 61Models for Subsequent HistoriographersSince Clement of Alexandria, the idiom of universal history had providedChristian thinkers with a highly adaptable means for knowingand stabilizing their place and even their moral duties in the continuumof time. Jerome’s Chronicle set the background and the termsfor virtually all subsequent Latin engagements with historical peoplesand events from Abraham and, by implicit embrace, from Creation.Even where Bede revised datings according to “Hebrew Truth” (itselfknown from Jerome’s Vulgate), the sweep of his early historical noticesfollowed the contours and cues of Jerome’s chronistic model. In theinterval between Jerome and Bede we see, in effect, the emergenceof a grammar of universal historical expression rooted in early needs,learned achievement, and innovation. Other authors promptly builton the primary foundation of sacred and secular fact laid by Eusebius-Jerome, Orosius, Isidore, and Bede, in order to situate new elaborationsof regional or communal history in their wider Christian andcosmic perspective. In addition to content, these continuators andcreators of history emulated the rhetorical examples and devices oftheir predecessors. These ranged from the succinctly commentated,columnar chronistic form, with or without multiple threads to begin,to the narrative mode of Augustine or Orosius, or even the Latinversions of Greek church histories devoted to Christian times. Structure,59Cf. Borst (1998), 511, 754.60Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum I.2, and V.24. Cf. Jones (1943), 120–22.61Cf. Haeusler (1980), 24–32; Schmidt (1956), 293–94.