Accounts of the battles of Bannockburn,by the anonymous writer of the Chronicle of Lanercost, of Henry V’s battles at Harfleur and Agincourt, by Thomas Elmham or Ps.-Elmham and by Titus Livius, and of Richard III’s death at the battle of Bosworth Field by Polydore Vergil are given here as examples of military historiography of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.A section of a metric poem on Henry V, in elegiac couplets, is also included. The reader must decide as to whether the writers on Henry V and Richard III can be regarded as writing ‘humanist’ Latin.

Henry Knighton (a canon of an abbey in Leicester) and Thomas Walsingham (a monk at St. Albans) were the leading historians of the period at the end of the fourteenth century. Here an intriguing account of a large group of women attending tournaments, colourfully dressed in men’s clothes, armed and on horseback, is included from Knighton’s Chronicle, along with excerpts about two of the revolutionary leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, Jack Straw and John Ball: both were captured and beheaded.

Æthelweard’s chronicle, in a rugged and distinctive Latin, covers history from Creation down to 975, just before he wrote the work. He bases it largely on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and parts of his chronicle provide valuableinformation about this Old English work, here in Æthelweard’s Latin translation or paraphrase. Æthelweard was a high-ranking lay leader. He addresses the work to his cousin, Matilda, abbess of Essen in Germany. Here the famous and dramatic story (which also exists in Old English) of prince Cyneheard and king Cynewulf is given, as well as sections on ninth and tenth century history.

The famous story of king Alfred burning the cakes in the humble kitchen of the country wife is first recorded in Latin in the first Life of St. Neot, written in the eleventh century, before the Norman Conquest. It is interesting in containing not only a Biblical reference, but also a reference to Juvenal’s seventh satire.Here the original version of this literary vignette is compared with a briefer post-Conquest version in the Annals of St. Neot’s and an expanded version from the thirteenth century, from the Chronicle of John of Wallingford, which preserves the reference to Juvenaland the Biblical reference used in the original but adds other references.

Alcuin’s letter no. 16 is addressed to Æthelred, king of Northumbria in 793, the year in which Lindisfarne was destroyed by the Vikings in their first attack on England. In the letter Alcuin blames the king and the people for their immoral lives, and like Gildas before him, sees the foreign invasion as God’s just punishment for such immorality. The excerpt from Symeon of DUrham’s twelfth-century history shows the portents seen shortly before the Viking attack.

This chapter considers John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, a poem in the mode of a universal chronicle that Lydgate composed for Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, during the 1430s. I suggest that, in Lydgate’s historical poetry, and particularly in the Fall, the poet fixates upon the “surplus” of literary matter that the forms of his poetry leave out or exclude. In its most immediate sense, this “surplus” consists of those aspects of the historical record that Lydgate cannot, or will not, repeat within his poetry. But in a broader way, it also figures Lydgate’s view of history itself, which he feels is too vast, and too self-conflicted, to represent in full. I begin by examining Lydgate’s debts to the artes poetriae manuals, the formes fixes tradition, and practices of monastic historiography, all of which lie behind his belief in the surplus and shape his use of the idea. I then consider how the surplus, both as a term and as a concept, motivates the poetics of the Fall, and in particular, the pointed but ambiguous way that it speaks to matters of contemporary political concern to Humphrey of Gloucester.

Throughout his work, Geoffrey Chaucer often returns to a well-known medieval commonplace: that “words” should be “cosyn” to the “deeds” they denote. After tracing the history of this commonplace and noting its prominence in fourteenth-century legal, philosophical, and literary discourse, this chapter turns to Chaucer’s use of the dictum in his Canterbury Tales. I argue that the Tales may be read as Chaucer’s free exploration of the different kinds of deeds, or matters, to which a poet’s words might be held “cosyn.” Different pilgrims take different positions on this question throughout the Tales, and this accounts, in part, for the variety of matter and styles employed in their narratives. This variety notwithstanding, I suggest the Tales ultimately posit that the proper “deed” of literature is historical in character. Chaucer comes to this insight over the course of Fragment Seven, and he makes his boldest claim for it in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, which suggests that poetry always retains the marks of the history that has produced its words and forms—no matter how autonomous or fictional that poetry may appear.

Eventful analysis employs the most unfrozen and hence the most exploratory strand of CHA. It employs historical comparisons and explores transformation patterns, that is, patterns of qualitative change. It uses two key tools: historical description and conceptualization. The aim of historical description is to figure out what is going on, to gain a basic understand of a phenomenon before proceeding to explain it. Often this involves de-redescribing a phenomena that has qualitatively changed over time. Historical description, in turn, involves six concrete steps: fact gathering, chronicling, concatenation, periodizing, looking for intercurrence patterns, and rethinking research questions. Conceptualization serves to make historical description more comparativist and to explore broader patterns. The chapter discusses how to replace proper names with broader concepts by defining both the positive and the negative pole of concepts. It lists criteria for assessing the content and temporcal validity of concepts.

The three subchapters illustrate, how the authors from the Medieval period down to the fifth century have heavily relied on Eusebius of Caesarea’s Church history to writing their own beginnings of Christianity. In addition, they drew heavily on pseudonymous material outside the New Testament canon which they largely ignored. Driven by the challenges of their own times and in answering questions of their own days they developed the beginnings of Christianity from Frankish and late Roman perspectives. In these, vernacular, Greek and Roman cultural elements were deeply inter-related and re-projected into earlier times, while Christianity became regarded as the filter through which to perceive and judge the past.

This chapter examines the complex itineraries of two influential Latin American queer writers – Mexican playwright and official chronicler of Mexico City Salvador Novo (1904–1974) and Chilean intellectual and diplomat Augusto D’Halmar (1882–1950) – to expose how their bodies undergo significant transformations in order to assert new sensibilities and relationships in the economy and productivity of travel. Novo and D’Halmar utilize their bodies to respond to the heteronormative pact between the state and the lettered city, and also to map a larger world based on unexpected connections, transformations, and new readings of the common archive. Through Eastern clothing and intense fevers, cosmetic prostheses and flamboyant behavior, these writers disorganize the hierarchies that dominate the hegemonic narratives of sex. In the process, they attempt to achieve a sort of material autonomy – the chance to regulate their own bodily matter – and thus forge new paths for Latin American writers.

Where some chapters in this volume find narrative in the phenomena addressed by scientists, or in their reporting and representational practices, or in their argumentation and reasoning, this chapter finds narrative at the level of field and subfield formation. It does so through the history of historiography and philosophy of history, particularly the work of scholars who have differentiated the many forms of historical knowledge. Focusing on just three – the chronicle, the genealogy and the narrative – the chapter explains how these means for making historical knowledge might be made to cover knowledge-making in the sciences. The first half of the chapter develops this analytical approach, while the second applies it to the case of synthetic biology. By taking narrative’s epistemic significances more seriously we arrive at a new way to explain scientific change over time.

Chapter 6 analyses and discusses the relation between the Verse chronicle, the novel Aristandros and Kallithea and the so-called Moral poem. These three works share not only a number of motifs and themes but also a fairly large number of verses. They contain motifs such as the instability of fortune and the dangers of envy, which appear also in other texts by Manasses. The investigation here aims at understanding the significance of authorial choices in the handling of slander and envy: the recycling of images and expressions that transgress genre boundaries and thus contribute to a characteristic authorial voice. The attribution of the Moral poem to Manasses has been questioned, but in view of its relevance for a better understanding of Manasses’ authorship and its reception, it is included in the analysis. Regardless of who composed the poem, it represents the Manassean voice and makes for a fruitful discussion of questions of authorship, attribution and tradition.

Magical realism, primitivism and ethnography are historically and theoretically interrelated discourses. Mavellous folk and fairy tales, legends and myths are remote origins that received renewed attention with the rise of the avant-grade and American archaeology in the early twentieth century. In the Hispanic tradition, antecedents date back to medieval lore, which inspired chivalric and pastoral romances as well as the picaresque novel, finding a seminal synthesis in Don Quixote. In the New World, the Chronicles of the Indies, with their outlandish tales of discovery, drew not only from medieval and early Renaissance worldviews, but also from marvellous sources as varied as John Mandeville, Marco Polo, Ptolemy, Pliny and the Bible. Latin American authors have consistently cited these sources of magical realism, yet they looked at them through the prism of the avant-garde. Alejo Carpentier conceived of his seminal concept of lo real maravilloso americano as an answer to the Surrealists’ artificial merveilleux. Carpentier and Miguel Ángel Asturias, with his Surrealist view of the ancient Maya, coincided in late 1920s Paris with avant-garde primitivism and another magic realist, Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri, a close associate of Massimo Bontempelli, whose version of magical realism became their true spark, whereas Franz Roh’s influence in Latin America was negligible. Later authors like Juan Rulfo and Gabriel García Márquez significantly developed magical realist narratology, consolidating the Latin American trend and making it indispensable for understanding its international expansion based on the allegorical reinterpretation, and subversion, of dominant history – a crucial postcolonial endeavour for cultures around the world.

This chapter explores how the conciliar and coercive discourses of Renaissance historiography and lyric poetry intersect in Shakespeare’s early history plays. It focuses on scenes of textual composition, and other engagements with the construction and interpretation of literary language, in plays including Edward III, Arden of Faversham, Richard III, The First Part of the Contention, and Titus Andronicus, to show how they illuminate the uneasy overlap between political advice and gendered, sexual coercion during Elizabeth I’s reign. The plays’ treatment of the coercive properties of poetry cast monarch and subject in fluid, shifting roles, and highlight the awkward ethical implications of mobile rhetorical authority, ultimately troubling the distinction between good and bad political advice. Moreover, the chapter considers the centrality of collaboration to the production of meaning, not just between actors, printers, and playwrights, but also of genres and discourses, within this intensely self-referential cluster of Shakespeare’s co-authored early works.

While the defence of princely legitimacy had to respond to certain legal and social standards, this technical reality did not act as a fixed template for its eventual performance. This chapter examines the practical and rhetorical aspects of three components of Jeanne’s legitimacy over the course of her whole career: her status as the rightful heiress of Brittany, her exercise of princely rights and responsibilities, and her responses to the disunity of the duchy. Although Jeanne’s claims were rooted in broadly accepted social expectations, not only could her assertions of legitimacy diverge from those of her husband and her predecessors, but she foregrounded different aspects of her status before different audiences; at the same time, other aspects of her official position remained constant even across the major shifts in her political circumstances. Recognizing princely legitimacy as a moving target expands our understanding of what constituted an effective response to a position of weakness, and tempers the ‘ideal’ prince of medieval (and modern) theory with constructions of power more adaptive to the concurrent pressures of princely relationships and authority.

In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, and in the civic chronicles of the fifteenth century, London serves a symbolic role as the site of consent between the rulers of England and their citizens. This meant that with each new set of rulers, the myth of London’s importance had to be recovered and reestablished. Thus works such as Wace’s Brut and the anonymous Middle English Saint Erkenwald suggest a dialectic between London’s discontinuous history and its continuous connection to the present. London’s symbolic role also meant that even local histories such as the Middle English civic chronicles often conceal the complexity of local politics in order to present a simpler national narrative.

What connections might be found between those who write history and the different kinds of histories they write? An emphasis on gender often focuses on the dynamics of women’s collaborative authorship, whether produced anonymously or in the form of patron and client relationships. But it also highlights the fact that sole authorship is often associated with male writers; with masculinity. Beginning with the Earliest Life of Gregory the Great, an anonymous Life that may have been composed by a woman, the chapter next addresses Æthelweard’s Latin Chronicle, written by a secular, elite male author for and in collaboration with a female patron and family relation, Abbess Matilda of Essen. It concludes with another kind of history, that of the anonymous Old English poem, Widsith, and the insight that the sheer variety of early medieval historiography is also suggestive of the different uses of gender by its authors.