Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500–1500 ed. by Jennifer Jahner, Emily Steiner, and Elizabeth M. Tyler

Abstract

Reviewed by: Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500–1500 ed. by Jennifer Jahner, Emily Steiner, and Elizabeth M. Tyler Helen Fulton Jennifer Jahner, Emily Steiner, and Elizabeth M. Tyler, eds. Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500–1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi, 581. $150.00. Correction (12.09.20): A corrections has been made to the online version of this review. On page 416, "Robert Rouse focuses on ideas of the nation..." was corrected to read "Andrew Galloway focuses on ideas of the nation..." In her magisterial two-volume Historical Writing in England (1974, 1982), Antonia Gransden chose an approach that was of its time, centered on authors and their texts with relatively little attention given to the meaning of "history". The editors of Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500–1500 acknowledge that Gransden's work is "unsurpassed" (6) and take an explicitly different approach that is also of its time, a moment when issues of politics, cultural identity, gender, language, and materialism are at the forefront of medieval studies. It is a tribute to the sure-footedness of the editors and the caliber of their contributors that this book succeeds so brilliantly in framing historia, in its many forms, as a crucial mediation of the medieval experience. Though the book starts with Gildas and ends with the Wars of the Roses, the editors have chosen not to follow a strictly chronological approach but have opted instead for four thematic groupings: time, place, practice, and genre. Each section spans almost the full range of the period from 500 to 1500, sometimes pausing on a specific writer or text (Gildas, Matthew Paris, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Brut) but more often pursuing an ideational line that connects several writers and texts or a whole genre or type into a single chapter. This is a risky strategy with consequences that may not please all readers. It may seem counterintuitive that there is no chapter on Geoffrey of Monmouth, Ranulph Higden, Thomas Walsingham, or Adam Usk, though these writers are all mentioned numerous times across the volume (and here the index is invaluable). The chapters on Wales, Scotland, and Ireland—a strict ration of one each—have a slightly dutiful air about them, and their authors have to spend a disproportionate amount of their word count explaining the particular histories of these nations to Anglocentric readers. Other consequences, however, are welcome and refreshing. The traditional disciplinary divide between history and literature is almost erased in the volume, creating a cross-disciplinary methodology that is much more in tune with modern approaches to the past. The editors have done an unusually thorough job of weaving the different chapters of the book together through unobtrusive cross-references that constantly remind us of similarities and parallels across time, space, [End Page 413] and language. There is a very pleasing balance, often within a single chapter, between the materialist approach, focusing on accounts of manuscripts and books, and a more analytical and interpretive pathway that leads us closer to the heart of how histories were made, used, and imagined. We are constantly reminded that, in any text, form and content are inseparable. The opening theme of "Time" encompasses medieval viewpoints on the nature of the past and how it can be made comprehensible. Thomas O'Donnell's chapter on "Monastic History and Memory" traces monastic texts from the personal to the regional to the world, showing how monastic writers were both keepers of archival memories and creators of philosophically and politically aware panoramas of the past. Richard K. Emmerson on "apocalypse" and Christine Chism on pagan histories and fictions give different accounts of the religious underpinnings of medieval history, while Marie Turner's chapter on "Genealogies" demonstrates their function as constructional frameworks for both history and romance. Cynthia Turner Camp writes illuminatingly about the pivotal moment of 1066 and what that meant for the Anglo-Saxons and their history. In an elegant sweep from Bede to John Bale, she illustrates the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons were imagined and how their past—and their passing—was mitigated and absorbed. As a companion piece, Jaclyn Rajsic...