Historiography Archive
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Striking a Match on Byzantium’s “Dark Age”
Posted on January 29, 2013 | No CommentsThe seventh and eighth centuries have been called the “Dark Age” of Byzantium because of the paucity of historical sources that illuminate them. This lack is commonly ascribed more to scant production than to failed transmission. -
Marriage between King Harald Fairhair and Snæfriðr, and their Offspring: Mythological Foundation of the Norwegian Medieval Dynasty?
Posted on January 27, 2013 | No CommentsHistorians in Nordic countries since the turn of the twentieth century have become increasingly aware of the problem using these primary sources from earlier times, especially the sagas from the late twelfth- and thirteenth centuries, about three hundred years after Harald assumedly lived. It was Halvdan Koht(1873-1965)who introduced this point of view into Norwegian historiography, although some researchers, including Yngvar Nielsen, had cast doubt on the accuracy of the account before him. -
The Eternity of the World and Renaissance Historical Thought
Posted on January 27, 2013 | No CommentsMedieval and Renaissance controversies over the Aristotelian doctrine of “the eternity of the world” have hitherto been treated as disputes restricted to natural philosophers and theologians. -
Procopius’ Portrayal of Theodora in the Secret History: ‘Her Charity was Universal’
Posted on January 27, 2013 | No CommentsLike most other writers of late antiquity, what little is known about Procopius comes from his works. Born at the turn of the sixth century in Caesarea, he had the chance to receive education in the traditional Greek fashion, i.e. through the use of classical authors, before Justinian banned pagan teaching in 529 -
Ordering the medieval past : England and the continent compared
Posted on January 23, 2013 | No CommentsThe English view of the Middle Ages is uncontroversial and untroubled. There is no doubt in the English mind that the thousand years between Rome and the Renaissance are an intrinsic part of our past and that we owe much to the Middle Ages for which we can still be thankful -
Genre Into Artifact: the Decline of the English Chronicle In the Sixteenth Century
Posted on January 20, 2013 | No CommentsMost modern scholars would agree with the thrust of these contemporary statements even while making the more subtle distinctions among different chroniclers that the perspective of four centuries provides. Few would now wish to argue that the chronicle, once the form of historical writing, had fallen into anything but a state of decay. -
Christine de Pizan in her study
Posted on January 20, 2013 | No CommentsBy the time Christine began the Cité des dames which she completed in 1405 she stated firmly that it had become the “habit of my life” to study literature (in which she included history) and as usual she was sitting in her cell. But how did this become such a habit? -
Mussolini Looks at Jan Hus and the Bohemian Reformation
Posted on January 20, 2013 | No CommentsWe can then define the book’s salient tenets as: nationalism; religion, understood generally as faith in an idea; the centrality of a leader incarnating and directing this idea, which then engulfed the masses; warning against the fission, which tended to weaken radical movements; and a strong social instinctive -
Blood-brothers: a ritual of friendship and the construction of the imagined barbarian in the middle ages
Posted on January 15, 2013 | No CommentsMy reflections are part of a broad stream of inquiries into the world of medieval rituals which has proved to be very fertile during the last two decades, but which also has its limits. For more than twenty years now, medievalists have discovered and analysed the importance of personal relationships for the organization of societies before the existence of states in a modern sense of the word. -
Is truth more interesting than fiction? The conflict between veracity and dramatic impact in historical fiction
Posted on January 15, 2013 | No CommentsI do not wish to enlist, on either side, in the battle between historians and novelists. What I would like is to suggest a foray which may at first glance seem a minor skirmish, but which may significantly affect the way in which a writer portrays people who once lived, particularly famous people. -
The Morosinis in Hungary under King Andrew III and the two versions of the death of the Queen of Hungary Tommasina
Posted on January 9, 2013 | No CommentsIn reality, Charles Robert’s predecessor, the last Arpád, Andrew III, called the Vene- tian, was already a foreigner on the throne of Hungary. -
Princess Salomea and Hungarian – Polish Relations in the Period 1214 – 1241
Posted on January 9, 2013 | No CommentsIt is necessary to say at the beginning that almost all works devoted to Salomea come from the pens of Polish historians. Slovak and Hungarian historiography has devoted little attention to her, in spite of the fact that she played a part in the history of the Kingdom of Hungary. -
Women, Gender and Guilds in Early Modern Europe
Posted on January 6, 2013 | No CommentsHistorians of women and gender, as we might expect, have had a different point of view. In her pioneering 1919 study of women’s working lives in seventeenth-century England, Alice Clark depicted a Golden Age in the medieval period, during which women enjoyed access to skilled and profitable work. -
The Historicity of the Early Irish Annals: Heritage and Content
Posted on January 2, 2013 | No CommentsTo anyone attempting to explore the alluring world of medieval Ireland, it would seem that there is a set of guidebooks that allow one to look up any given year in Irish history and know the important events that had occurred. -
Aspects of the English royal succession, 1066-1199: the death of the king
Posted on December 28, 2012 | No CommentsThe death of any ruler in the twelfth century, even if it were expected, caused a considerable amount of shock and disquiet amongst those who were left behind. -
Sir Thomas Gray’s Scalacronica: a medieval chronicle and its historical and literary context
Posted on December 20, 2012 | No CommentsSir Thomas Gray's Scalacronica is almost unique amongst medieval English chronicles in having been written by a knight, and it is therefore surprising that so little work has been done on it; this thesis attempts to remedy that omission. -
The Chronicle of Ulrich Richental as an Exceptional Source for the History of Slovakia
Posted on December 19, 2012 | No CommentsOne of the most interesting testimonies is the work of a burgher of Konstanz Ulrich Richental, who gave a straight forward account of everyday life in the city during the council, of things he saw, heard or learnt directly from participants in the council. -
Trickster, Convert, Martyr, Saint: Four Ways of Dying in Dudo of St. Quentin’s History of the Normans
Posted on December 16, 2012 | No CommentsI want to push this a bit further here and argue that Dudo was aiming to produce something that we might term sacramentary history, to show the three-fold interaction of the linear time experienced by fallen humanity, the cyclical time in which events are continually re-enacted and foreshadowed in the sacraments, and the unchanging eternity of time as experienced by God. -
Confronting the Caliph: ‘Uthmân b. ‘Affân in Three ‘Abbasid Chronicles
Posted on December 16, 2012 | No CommentsUntil relatively recently medieval Islamic chroniclers were viewed by modern historians in much the same way that Muslims view Muhammad – as transmitter rather than author. -
The Ideology of the Feminine in Byzantine historical narrative: The role of John Skylitzes’ Synopsis of Histories
Posted on December 15, 2012 | No Comments"Who once sliced men more sharoly than the sword Is victim of a woman...Epitaph for Emperor Nicephoros II Phocas. -
The Influence of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Masculinist Medievalism
Posted on December 14, 2012 | No CommentsTolkien, unlike other influential critics or popular fantasy writers, shapes perception of the Middle Ages from both the top down and the bottom up. -
The Invisible Wall of St John. On Mental Centrality in Early Medieval Italy
Posted on December 5, 2012 | No CommentsThe spatial categories of this society provided the basis for the view of certain places as being associated with a sacral materiality which is foreign to modern conceptualizations. It is the aim of this study to elucidate some of these early medieval notions of space. -
Hincmar of Reims on King-making: The Evidence of the Annals of St. Bertin, 861–882
Posted on December 5, 2012 | No CommentsThe Histories and Chronicles Hincmar had in mind were presumably Frankish ones; and Lothar II, succeeding his father, thus clearly came into this section of Hincmar's third category. But of the timing or form of Lothar's becoming king, Hincmar said not a word, preferring, instead, to spell out the Biblical lesson that a bad king (and he hastily disclaimed any allegation that Lothar's father had been a bad king) would see the succession depart from his line. -
The Emergence of the North
Posted on December 5, 2012 | No CommentsApart from this bipolar system that contrasted North and South, authors writing in the Old Norse-Icelandic language also appear to use the term Norðrlönd within a quadripolar system that held good beyond the immediate region: Norðrlönd, the Vestrlönd (the British Isles), Suðrríki (Germany, the Holy Roman Empire), and Austrríki or Austrvegr (Russia and other lands to the East). -
“So Stirring a Woman Was She”: A Closer Look at Early Modern Representations of Matilda, Lady of the English
Posted on December 4, 2012 | No CommentsI demonstrate what early modern subjects thought about their own queens by showing how authors and historians wrote about Matilda before, during, and after the reigns of Queens of Mary I and Elizabeth I
