Rewriting Roman History In The Middle Ages

The Bamberg version of the "Historia Romana" represents a fascinating witness to the transition from Latin to vernacular literature, which the author relates to the intellectual and ideological milieu of the Ottonians. This book presents the first edition of the paraphrase contained in the manuscript Bamberg, Hist. 3.

The Bamberg version of the Historia Romana represents a fascinating witness to the transition from Latin to vernacular literature, which the author relates to the intellectual and ideological milieu of the Ottonians. This book presents the first edition of the paraphrase contained in the manuscript Bamberg, Hist. 3.

The idea that with the decline of the Roman Empire Europe entered into some immense ‘dark age’ has long been viewed as inadequate by many historians. How could a world still so profoundly shaped by Rome and which encompassed such remarkable societies as the Byzantine, Carolingian and Ottonian empires, be anything other than central to the development of European history? How could a world of so many peoples, whether expanding, moving or stable, of Goths, Franks, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, whose genetic and linguistic inheritors we all are, not lie at the heart of how we understand ourselves? The Inheritance of Rome is a work of remarkable scope and ambition. Drawing on a wealth of new material, it is a book which will transform its many readers’ ideas about the crucible in which Europe would in the end be created. From the collapse of the Roman imperial system to the establishment of the new European dynastic states, perhaps this book’s most striking achievement is to make sense of an immensely long period of time, experienced by many generations of Europeans, and which, while it certainly included catastrophic invasions and turbulence, also contained long periods of continuity and achievement. From Ireland to Constantinople, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, this is a genuinely Europe-wide history of a new kind, with something surprising or arresting on every page.

How, when and why did the Middle Ages begin? This reader gathers together a prestigious collection of revisionist thinking on questions of key research in medieval studies.

A thought-provoking look at the Angevin aristocracy's literary practices and historical record Coming upon the text of a document such as a charter or a letter inserted into the fabric of a medieval chronicle and quoted in full or at length, modern readers might well assume that the chronicler is simply doing what good historians have always done—that is, citing his source as evidence. Such documentary insertions are not ubiquitous in medieval historiography, however, and are in fact particularly characteristic of the history-writing produced by the Angevins in England and Northern France in the later twelfth century. In History and the Written Word, Henry Bainton puts these documentary gestures center stage in an attempt to understand what the chroniclers were doing historiographically, socially, and culturally when they transcribed a document into a work of history. Where earlier scholars who have looked at the phenomenon have explained this increased use of documents by considering the growing bureaucratic state and an increasing historiographical concern for documentary evidence, Bainton seeks to resituate these histories, together with their authors and users, within literate but sub-state networks of political power. Proposing a new category he designates "literate lordship" to describe the form of power with which documentary history-writing was especially concerned, he shows how important the vernacular was in recording the social lives of these literate lords and how they found it a particularly appropriate medium through which to record their roles in history. Drawing on the perspectives of modern and medieval narratology, medieval multilingualism, and cultural memory, History and the Written Word argues that members of an administrative elite demonstrated their mastery of the rules of literate political behavior by producing and consuming history-writing and its documents.

The period of time of which this book treats is that lying between the greatest splendor of the Roman Empire and the beginning of what may properly be called the Middle Ages. What had before seemed blind forces of destruction became agents working together in the making of a new and fairer civilization. It is the purpose of this book to dwell upon these elements of construction, to show how they originated, and how they were tending to produce the life of the great period which was to follow. These forces were chiefly three: first, the organized Christian Church; second, the Germanic races; third, the domination of the Frankish race over all the other Germanic nations of the continent. The history of these three lines of development finds its natural culmination in the union of the Frankish kingdom with the Roman papacy under the form of the Holy Roman Empire. - Preface.

All over Europe and in the Arabic world, and throughout the Middle Ages chronicles were written. These chronicles raise such questions as by whom, for whom, or for what purpose were they written, how do they reconstruct the past, what determined the choice of verse or prose, or what kind of literary influences are discernable in them.