Abbatial Authority And The Writing Of History In The Middle Ages

ABBATIAL AUTHORITY AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY IN THE MIDDLE AGES.

Abbatial Authority and the Writing of History in the Middle Ages

This book argues that abbatial authority was fundamental to monastic historical writing in the period c.500-1500. Writing history was a collaborative enterprise integral to the life and identity of medieval monastic communities, but it was not an activity for which time and resources were set aside routinely. Each act of historiographical production constituted an extraordinary event, one for which singular provision had to be made, workers and materials assigned, time carved out from the monastic routine, and licence granted. This allocation of human and material resources was the responsibility and prerogative of the monastic superior. Drawing on a wide and diverse range of primary evidence gathered from across the medieval Latin West, this book is the first to investigate systematically how and why abbots and abbesses exercised their official authority and resources to lay the foundations on which their communities' historiographical traditions were built by themselves and others. It showcases them as prolific authors, patrons, commissioners, project managers, and facilitators of historical narratives who not only regularly put pen to parchment personally, but also, and perhaps more importantly, enabled others inside and outside their communities by granting them the resources and licence to write. Revealing the intrinsic relationship between abbatial authority and the writing of history in the Middle Ages with unprecedented clarity, Benjamin Pohl urges us to revisit and revise our understanding of monastic historiography, its processes, and its protagonists in ways that require some radical rethinking of the medieval historian's craft in communal and institutional contexts.

Making History with Manuscripts in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

This volume interrogates the role of the manuscript medium in conveying history to medieval and early modern readers. The contributors adopt a capacious understanding of "history" to explore history-writing in its materiality from a variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives. The core contentions of this book are that the material features of manuscripts helped shaping historical narratives and defining history conceptually, and that therefore, the makers of these manuscripts played an instrumental role in history-writing alongside authors. Ranging from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries and comprising materials from across Western Europe in Latin and the vernaculars, the ten chapters of this volume uncover stakes and strategies tied to highly specific contexts, such as late thirteenth-century Corbie or fifteenth-century Zurich, yet partaking in a shared practice of history-writing with manuscripts. Manuscript makers "made" history through layout, rewriting, illumination, compilation, choice of script, and annotation, and conferred history-writing its material dimension. This volume therefore situates the writing of history in its material dimension and invites us to consider medieval and early modern historiography in its medium.