Readings the Skies in the Peterborough Chronicle

Abstract

This paper argues that natural phenomena in the twelfth-century Peterborough Chronicle are not only employed as topoi, with the purpose of maintaining narrative links with the earlier versions of the Chronicle, but are indicative of a renewed interest in computus and natural science in post-Benedictine Reform Anglo-Saxon England, in which winds, storms, earthquakes and other natural phenomena were given a framework of investigation that may have led to their increasing role in historiographical sources.