Could Isidore’s Chronicle Have Delighted Cicero? Using the Concept of Genre to Compare Ancient and Medieval Chronicles

Abstract

Richard W. Burgess and Michael Kulikowski’s A Historical Introduction to the Chronicle Genre from its Origins to the High Middle Ages (Volume I in the authors’ planned series Mosaics of Time: The Latin Chronicle Traditions from the First Century BC to the Sixth Century AD) posits that medieval studies has neglected to engage in a systematic, historically-informed reflection on the genre of chronicles. The present article asserts that this challenge to the field presents a unique opportunity for an interdisciplinary discussion of wide scope and lasting duration. I thus argue that Burgess and Kulikowski’s larger points may be reconciled with current scholarship on medieval chronicles by updating the theoretical premises that underlie our identification of historical genres. I aim to contribute to the discussion by turning to a consensus in current theoretical work, that genre is best discussed as a description of the way texts and their readers communicated. The article concludes by applying this hypothesis to an experiment in comparison: if it is not the differences but the similarities that stand out when Cicero and Isidore of Seville’s respective meditations upon chronicles are set side by side, then what are the implications for our methods of reconstructing the significance of chronicles in their own milieus?