Description
Book SynopsisA 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 increase
Trade Review
"Henry Bainton’s volume offers an original and innovative approach to a corpus of historiographical texts that have attracted the interest of many scholars of English history, as well as historians of historiography...[A]n an inspiring read, which can contribute to an interdisciplinary conversation between historians, paleographers, and codicologists, as well as literary scholars." * Speculum *
"Offering fresh insights and deftly incorporating a wide selection of apt modern scholarship and theory, History and the Written Word leads us to talk about the deep issues of collective identity and state formation." * Nancy Partner, McGill University *
