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This volume of essays in honour of Dame Jinty Nelson celebrates the way in which Jinty has used her profound understanding of Frankish history as a frame for reflecting upon the nature of early medieval culture and society in general. It includes a tabula gratulatoria of those very many others who wish to express their appreciation of Jinty's work and their warm personal gratitude to her. She has remained at King's throughout her entire career. Her early career was combined with young motherhood, a tough experience that has made her strongly supportive of colleagues trying to balance work and family. Although she continued to write about early medieval inauguration rituals, a new departure came with the 1977 paper 'On the limits of the Carolingian Renaissance'. The book discusses what factors determined and informed their particular take on the Frankish world, and how this compares to law-codes and charters. It considers the possibility that land was sometimes taken in early medieval Europe, whether by kings or local lords, for what they claimed was the common good. Whenever only meagre information was available, it was impossible to make sense of the past, that is, to take a prosaic approach to a sense of oblivion. The book explores both the roots of the historical interpretation and the stimuli for change, by considering the long historiographical tradition, attitudes to textual sources, and the changing political environment. The subjects of queens and queenship have figured prominently among Nelson's publications.
Middle Ages progress. This reality informs a rich historiographical tradition somewhat at odds with earlier medieval evidence, leaving the false impression that the practice of monastic exemption began in the High Middle Ages. This skewed historical perception is understandable but not entirely justified. Under the auspices of church reformers, an unprecedented number of religious houses and churches were granted papal privileges and exemptions in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It is yet to be determined how these proprietary conditions led to the creation of a
for change, by considering the long historiographical tradition, attitudes to textual sources, and the changing political environment. The historiographical tradition Let me begin with the historiographical tradition. La Borderie was not the first to utter the nationalist sentiments of the late nineteenth century, for he wrote within an already existing interpretative framework
on their own.57 Even with such a wide brief, there remain some areas of rhetoric which, inevitably, this study is, from the outset, deliber ately not intended to cover. Chapter 1 is designed to locate the writing of history in the Middle Ages at the confluence of three major historiographical traditions – the classical, the biblical 57 To that end, an attempt has been made throughout to confine references to works of history which are readily available in English translation; citations (emended where necessary) will likewise be made, wherever possible, from
book where he proposed an extensive reconstruction of the feats of Norman warriors from Normandy to southern Italy. 49 To sum up, we have seen that the concept of ‘empire’, even though a well-established historiographical tradition, does not find adequate support in the sources for the Normans in Italy. When this concept was employed as an analytical tool to make sense of the quick success of the Norman expansionism, it was too broad and imprecise to be applied without qualification in every land affected by the Norman diaspora. Despite the concept’s limitations
This book provides an analytical overview of the vast range of historiography which was produced in western Europe over a thousand-year period between c.400 and c.1500. It focuses on the centrality of certain basic principles of rhetoric to the writing of history, and the relationship between the methodology of non-Christian and Christian historiography. The book first locates the writing of history in the Middle Ages at the confluence of three major historiographical traditions such as the classical, the biblical and the chronographic. Then, it introduces a fourth - rhetoric - and its contents are accordingly determined by the traditional division of rhetoric into its three fundamental categories: demonstrative or epideictic rhetoric; judicial or forensic rhetoric; and deliberative rhetoric. There is variation between each of these categories in terms of both approach and emphasis but all three of these forms of rhetoric still have fundamental elements in common. In particular, all three categories divide the subject-matter of a speech or text into five constituent elements: invention or inventio; arrangement or dispositio; style or elocutio; memory or memoria; and delivery or pronuntiatio. It is the first three of these five elements (inventio, dispositio and elocutio) which form the basis for defining the methodology of medieval historiography as a relationship between verisimilitude and truth. The book is intended to serve as a practical guide to some of the more important methodological principles which informed medieval historiography. It also provides a (necessarily) selective index to some of the more specialised modern commentary and scholarship.
This chapter examines how the First World War transformed the leadership of the IPP. John Redmond’s unilateral declarations regarding the Irish Volunteer force – a nationalist alternative to the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force – caused tensions, specifically with John Dillon. Redmond’s pledge of the force to Home Defence and subsequently to full participation in the war effort signalled a radical realignment of policy. It builds upon a historiographical tradition that sees the First World War as the defining moment in modern Irish history. It examines the ways in which the Irish party were called upon to assist in wartime recruitment and how the war began a stagnation of the Home Rule movement which had appeared to achieve its goals in September of 1914 with the signing of the Home Rule Bill into law. By mid-1915, correspondence shows that Redmond and Dillon had patched up their differences, at least to the extent that they could find a modus vivendi.
This introduction discusses the main varieties of modern South African historiography – that is, the trends that have shaped the field over the last five decades or so. It discusses the major schools, which are Afrikaans neo-Marxist, revisionist and postmodern historiography. The sections will discuss the major individual contributors to each of these schools, and the controversies that have embroiled each of the interpretations. The chapter will also provide a sense of the unresolved problems within the field. This discussion will serve as a basis for the final section of the chapter, which will introduce the respective contributions to History beyond apartheid, and explain how they build on the legacy of the various strands of the South African historiographical tradition.
This chapter sets out to challenge current interpretations of Carolingian culture, and especially its perceived correctio (correction), reform or renaissance. It maintains that in the past, too much emphasis has been placed on the central agency of kings and their direct entourages, although a much wider group of (mostly anonymous) people was actively involved in the moral improvement of society. Secondly, the idea that the creation of uniformity was one intended outcome needs re-assessment. Instead of reading variety as 'failed uniformisation', it should instead be considered as cultural wealth and pluriformity. In early medieval eyes, in other words, 'correct' practices could take many different shapes and forms. Thirdly, the terms generally used to discuss Carolingian culture (reform, correctio, renaissance) are the inheritance of a long historiographical tradition. As a result of nineteenth and early twentieth century convictions, such terms come with a set of connotations which distort the primary sources of the period itself.
Historians have frequently noted the twin propensities of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century evangelicals for writing hagiographical and historical narratives. This chapter argues that the interaction of these traditions led to the emergence of a new, distinctively evangelical form of hagiography: that of the ‘practical’ or ‘useful’ saint. This chapter moves beyond the well-worn territory of filial piety to consider how the Clapham ‘saints’ came to be regarded as such. Exploring parallel shifts in the evangelical historiographical tradition and in published funeral sermons, it outlines a set of changing ideals, from the ‘pious philanthropy’ of the 1780s through the middle ground of ‘moral celebrity’ to posthumous ‘practical sainthood’ by the 1830s and 40s. New definitions of sanctity gave rise to new narratives of mediation. The ‘practical saint’ represented the Gospel’s immanent improving power as an historical force, differentiated from the eighteenth-century emphasis on unchanging doctrine. He or she mediated between Providence and the nation, between the domestic and the global, and between industrialising mass society and the individual worker in piety. As Sir James Stephen wrote, concluding his ‘ecclesiastical biography’ of William Wilberforce, recording such a life was an exercise in ‘mémoires pour servir, in the composition of an historical picture’ – an intertwining of hagiography and historiography.