John of Salisbury as historian

Abstract

Among the works of John of Salisbury the short, unfinished treatise that we call the Historia Pontificalis represents his only incursion into the writing of conventional history.’ Indeed even this, like the Metalogicon, Policraticus and Entheticus, bears the stamp of his unique individual approach to any branch of thought; and to call it conventional is little more than a polite bow of acknowledgement to the graceful preface in which he passes it off as merely another continuation of the world chronicle stretching from the Old Testament through Eusebius and Jerome to Sigebert of Gembloux and Hugh of Saint-Victor in his own age.