Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500–1500. Edited by Jennifer Jahner, Emily Steiner, and Elizabeth M. Tyler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+581.

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewMedieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500–1500. Edited by Jennifer Jahner, Emily Steiner, and Elizabeth M. Tyler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+581.Michael CalabreseMichael CalabreseCalifornia State University at Los Angeles Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe expert editors of this rich, cohesive collection have worked hard to organize the twenty-seven essays gathered here so that each chapter contributes to an ongoing discussion and to the larger whole. When scholars work separately, unaware of each other, it leads to isolated, undynamic offerings and a baggy collection. But here, by contrast, we see cross-references and explicitly stated assertions of what “this chapter” is designed to accomplish. But just as well, readers interested in particular authors/texts can profitably read chapters in isolation, depending on what one is preparing for class or researching. Modern anthologies—and medieval pedagogy—have long broken down generic barriers between literature and history. Gildas is day one of my medieval survey, Geoffrey a bit later, chronicles contemporary to Piers Plowman follow later, and so on, and teachers in literature and history departments will find an abundance of information, provocative analysis, historical contextualization, and new theoretical insights about a plethora of medieval historical writings. Perhaps readers will be encouraged to include more historical writing in their classes.The “disciplinary fluidity” (6) of medieval historical writing compels a critically nimble and interrelated set of approaches, so the twenty-seven essays here compiled “address the historiography of medieval Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including political and legal history, literary history, art history, religious studies, codicology, the history of emotions, gender studies, and critical race theory” (1). The book is intentionally not chronological (though it consciously begins with Gildas and ends one thousand years later in the sixteenth century), while some authors and texts reappear in various chapters. Looming behind many historical writings is Orosius’s Seven Books of History against the Pagans, a text that invites insular writers to contextualize the local into a larger, global historical awareness, an awareness that “history was neither universal or local…. [but] always both” (5).Instead of using a linear chronology, the book is divided conceptually: Time, Place, Practice, and Genre. All engage with the “restless inventiveness” of medieval historical writing and display an agile creativity and a longing to shed “new light on familiar subjects” (15). Medieval historical writing is a fluid, inherently mixed genre, engaging classical and biblical narrative and immediate local histories, while also being “bound inextricably with the larger patterning of the divine plan and the larger cultural networks that crisscrossed Latin Europe and beyond” (5). The editors hope that these essays on familiar and unfamiliar texts will “provoke more scholarship” in emergent fields, “such as gender and sexuality, global studies, critical race studies, ethnic and indigenous studies, environmental history, and the history of material texts” (15).Time: Magali Coumert starts the volume with a clear, informative essay on a foundational text, exploring Gildas’s Ruin of Britain as “a moral sermon that illustrates the necessity of conversion” (19), providing a pattern of biblical contextualization that deeply informs other later historians, despite the “hazy chronology” that informs Gildas’s work (23). Thomas O’Donnell confronts some of the myths and clichés about monastic historians in favor of studying “a wide range of writing about the past by nuns and monks” (often informed by acts of memory); instead of attempting to “define ‘monastic history’ with a rigour that the concept cannot sustain” (36), O’Donnell offers an expansive sense of genre practiced by monastic writers. Richard K. Emerson responds to the critical neglect of apocalyptic narratives by medieval historians who have been strangely dismissive of prophetic history, hoping to bring those narratives more distinctly into the critical spotlight. Jaclyn Rajsic moves on to adaptations of the wildly popular Historia of Geoffrey. These adapters (including the prose Brut) struggle to reconcile the “periodization” disjunctions between Geoffrey’s and Bede’s histories in relation to the respective rule of the Britons and the Anglo-Saxons. Marie Turner turns to genealogies, whose influence informs “annals and chronicles, … family narratives, romances, and other historical fictions” (84), revealing the anxious, traumatic interplay of family histories with the larger national narratives they aspire to be part of, at times asserting continuity against conquest and political upheaval. Cynthia Turner Camp then discusses the manipulative power of periodization in medieval historical writing, exploring how late medieval writers saw “pre-Conquest England [as] both a coherent historical period, as a paradigm of England’s political and religious potential,” and as a “perfected age from which the present was separated by time and by debased morals” (101), while the “desire to justify moral and political decisions through a selectively remembered Anglo-Saxon past has persisted into the present day” (115). Christine Chism adds a lucid, informative, and compelling account of pagans and non-Christians in the medieval historical imagination, exploring the various urges to love, save, admire, and learn from those depicted either as “revered authorities or perfidious adversaries” (119). The “ethical, aesthetic, and epistemological pagan variety” in these engagements, says Chism, presages “more dialogic histories of encounter and transculturation” (133) and the eventual decentering of Latin Christendom, citing the important work of Shirin Khanmohamadi.Place: Sarah Foot, elegantly applying Michel de Certeau, explores how “a pervasive sense of liminality … affected the ways in which historians writing in Britain before the mid-twelfth century conceived and represented space in their writing about the past” (140). These “mental maps” engage with migration, conquest, and cultural change. Paul Gazzoli confronts the complexities of who and what a “Viking” was, as well as where they were from, in order to better understand the complexities of cultural spaces they inhabited in migration and invasion, with historians first reacting to a threat but then later “assimilating Scandinavian cultural contributions which eventually surfaced in English literary culture,” allowing Cnut, for example, to “identify himself with English history” (171). Elizabeth M. Tyler (one of the volume’s editors) examines the paradox of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which, though written in the vernacular, is nonetheless “enmeshed in the multilingual fabric of Europe … [and] was alert to the linguistic politics of history writing across Latin Europe” (172); this reveals a chronicle not solely concerned with Englishness but “strikingly international in its writing of history,” seen within a “wider European space, with deliberately undefined boundaries, in northwest Eurasia” (173).Kathryn A. Lowe offers a case study of “how the Benedictine monastery of Bury St Edmunds created and curated its pre-Conquest archive in response to challenges to its power from rival institutions, the Crown, and rioting citizens” (192), with the history of the creation and transmission of the archive (an exciting tale itself) asserting the monastery’s “ancient liberty and freedom” (207). Owain Wyn Jones and Huw Pryce turn to medieval Wales and explore its historical narratives, which attempt a “conceptualization of Welsh history as a continuation of British history,” with origins in “classical antiquity,” yet always informed with “a profound sense of loss” shaped by the “experience of conquest from the late eleventh century onwards” (208). Kate Ash-Irisarri turns to Scottish history, examining its national self-consciousness in its choice of source materials with a focus on lineage, identity, and origins, “deliberately reshaped” to foster a “rhetoric of commonality cultivated by both chroniclers and poets” (225). For those who know little about Welsh and Scottish works, this sequence of chapters is wonderfully accessible and informative.George Shuffleton turns to London itself, a city and a concept central to battles for control both real and imagined. In a series of invasions, “London was repeatedly cut off from its past”; nonetheless, “there remained a strong sense that the city has been continuously occupied, and that if history could not connect the past to the present, myth and miracle could” (247), with the “city’s historians” establishing “a sense of continuity that would never be fully lost again” (257). Charles F. Briggs then looks at how history per se was studied at Oxford and Cambridge, where “many alumni of England’s universities wrote, purchased, and read historical works,” using these texts for, among other academic purposes, “the writing of sermons” and “the study of grammar and rhetoric, moral philosophy, and pastoral theology” (274).Practice: “Practice” involves, say the editors, “the challenge that modern scholars have in untangling the medieval writing of history from the medieval experience of history” (11). Katharine Simms explores the work of the Irish senchaide, “paid professional historians,” who were “graduates of specialist schools where the curriculum combined chronological studies and ecclesiastical history … with the mythical and genealogical lore of the bardic poets” (279) and who functioned variously as entertainers, propagandists, and even legal expert witnesses. Claire A. Lees studies how “gender and historiography are intertwined in the early Middle Ages,” a period that may lack the noted women authors that mark later periods but which nonetheless reveals the “dynamics of women’s collaborative authorship, whether produced anonymously or in the form of patron and client relationships” (300). The fascinating discussion includes the possible collaborative monastic composition of the Earliest Life of Gregory the Great and how the Old English poem Widsith displays the patronage of a royal woman Ealhhild.Björn Weiler offers a case study of the writings of the prolific English Benedictine monk Matthew Paris, whose histories serve as forms of moral instruction, hermeneutics, devotion, and lay instruction, and whose efforts “encompass most aspects of medieval historical culture: universal, national, and communal,” with “horizons of reporting extending from Norway to Morocco, from Ireland to Armenia” (319). Matthew Fisher offers a vibrant study of vernacularity, since “the many languages of Britain were central to the fundamental subjects of English history writing: debates over ethnic and national identity, invasion and independence, regnal legitimacy, and Christian faith” (339). Fisher insightfully connects the composition of history to the advent of yearly confession and “how individuals were expected to render experience as narrative” (344). Andrew Prescott engages with medieval archives, zones of “paradox and conflict … full of the marginalized, excluded, and forgotten” (369), containing “ a vast repository of historical narratives which … provide vivid insights into everyday life” (356); texts like the London Letter Books provoke our attention as historical sources but also as documents worthy of the “same close reading as canonical literature” (359), pointing to a fruitful corpus of previously neglected cultural texts. A. S. G. Edwards looks at Caxton’s marketing strategies surrounding the publication of Morte d’Arthur, stirring up interest in his romance publications by making the “the term ‘history’ as capacious as possible in the [related] works he published” (371). Edwards explores some “new” histories in London printing up to 1543, with writers celebrating the present after the break with Rome and ultimately, after 1548, asserting a “politicized, ameliorative agenda,” tracing how “things are getting better all the time” (385).Genre: In a contemplative and charming essay Robert Rouse explores the fluid boundaries between chronicle and romance, the latter a genre sometimes dismissed “as merely entertaining tales of knights and giants,” but which actually “constituted an important genre within the range of medieval modes of written history” (389). Rouse’s notion of “textual ecosystems” (where romances reside in manuscripts) is compelling (397). Alfred Hiatt, in the spirit of an exciting detective story, calls for greater attention to forgeries (in chronicles, charters, hagiography) as historical sources; such texts, taken as true or not, attempted to “intervene in the historical record: to write or rewrite history” (404). A charter allegedly by Edward in 964 to the abbey of St Mary at Worcester—a mid-twelfth-century forgery—is one case in point. Catherine Sanok looks at hagiography, yet another genre that post-Enlightenment moderns might mistakenly relegate to the realm of the purely fictive—a critical judgment that minimizes the “dynamic” relationship it forges “between the past and the present” (435). Sanok argues convincingly that hagiography, as a force of historiography, engages with urgent and ever-relevant questions in polity, human agency, and religious/secular history.Thomas A. Prendergast, in a penetrating essay on a subtle topic, “grapples” with the problem of how historians struggled to “narrate tragic history without transforming it into fictional history”(437), thus continuing the volume’s focus on how our division of the true and false does not reflect the practice of medieval historical writing. Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale, and the writings of William of Malmesbury and Walsingham, reveal how authors struggled to find stable historical meaning and real remedy for endless calamities. Andrew Galloway then explores how fourteenth-century chronicles deal with the idea of the English nation, evidenced in texts composed outside of the traditional monastic setting in “new venues for national history developed from intersections and even literary collaborations between gentry or higher nobility and clerics outside the monastic world” (450), while “by century’s end, history writing served more openly as an argument for partisan rights and particular identities” than before (465). Examining some lesser-known writers such as John of Rous and John Hardyng and studying genealogical rolls, Sarah L. Peverley closes the collection with a look at the turbulent period designated the War of the Roses, known for “aristocratic factionalism, slanderous rumour, bloody civil battles, deposition, regicide, economic collapse, and beleaguered foreign affairs,” which all influenced “the production and dissemination” of the historical writings in the period (467). She provides some well-crafted words of wisdom in ending the volume, as she contemplates the flexibility, uncertainty, and contradiction” that marks these Wars’ histories, speaking to the “unknowability of the times, the lacunae that troubled those attempting to make sense of events, and the lack of stability that permeated everything from the monarchy to the authors themselves” (482).A list of manuscripts, an enormous list of sources (over eighty pages, divided into primary and secondary), and a finely detailed index (critically important to a dynamically structured collection like this) round out this serious, keenly engineered, and informative model of research and humanist scholarship. It is accessible, clearly purposed, and trenchantly researched. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 118, Number 3February 2021 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/711628 Views: 248 HistoryPublished online September 30, 2020 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.