HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

ETHNIC AND NATIONAL HISTORY CA. 500‒1000 77to 1079; the Peterborough chronicle to 1154. The narrative style ofthese texts is anything but uniform, nor do they simply evolve, asmight be expected, from initial annalistic brevity to greater copiousnessand particularity. Over the centuries, the entries shift backand forth between laconic objectivity, usually paired with extremesyntactic simplicity, and an interpretive, moralizing attitude coupledwith rhetorical elaboration and a more ambitious vocabulary. 104 Moreimportantly, the focus of the narrative keeps changing, as does thegeneric profile of the text. If the protagonists of history are at firstthe early Christians, the Romans, and the Britons, in an outline thatowes much to universal chronicles, these are soon replaced by agreat number of royal and ecclesiastical lineages whose rise to powerand eventual decline become the annalists’ almost exclusive concern.Once the Scandinavian raids begin, strategy emerges as the dominantsubject and the comings and goings of the invading army arecovered in considerable detail. Occasionally, the concerns of the religioushouses and communities where the various chronicles werecompiled take center stage and receive as much attention as mattersof national importance. 105 This constant diversity of approach isprobably the main reason why the ASC, despite its use of the nationallanguage and its sustained interest in the Anglo-Saxon gentes, rarelyis discussed as a national history. It is a cumulative, heterogeneoustext with more seams than continuities and is therefore difficult toplace in a specific generic tradition.Widukind and the SaxonsWidukind, a monk at the Carolingian-founded monastery of Corveyon the Weser since 941/42, almost certainly was a member of theSaxon nobility and a descendant of the famous chieftain of the samename who in the late eighth century had led the Saxon resistanceagainst enforced conversion and incorporation into the Frankishempire. His death must be dated after 973. After composing a fewsaints’ lives that have not survived, Widukind took up a major work104Clark (1971).105Cf. Stenton (1971), 692–93: “. . . when compared with the great Frankishannals of the ninth century, which seem to descend from an official record, theChronicle has definitely the character of private work”.