This thesis undertakes a close study of a single manuscript of the early 1320s, written at the priory of Fineshade, Northamptonshire. The manuscript contains a short chronicle and several documents related to the failed baronial rebellion of 1321-22. I argue that, in collaboration with the priory’s patrons, the Engayne family, the chronicler responds to the current situation with an attempt to create meaning from a time of crisis. In the process, he attempts to shape his material through patterns of style and thought inherited from both chronicle and hagiographical traditions, to make the present conform to the known and understood shape of the past. His success is limited by his inability to establish sufficient distance from traumatic events, a difficulty that many chroniclers seemed to encounter when they attempted to turn current events into meaningful historical narrative.

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This thesis undertakes a close study of a single manuscript of the early 1320s, written at the priory of Fineshade, Northamptonshire. The manuscript contains a short chronicle and several documents related to the failed baronial rebellion of 1321-22. I argue that, in collaboration with the priory’s patrons, the Engayne family, the chronicler responds to the current situation with an attempt to create meaning from a time of crisis. In the process, he attempts to shape his material through patterns of style and thought inherited from both chronicle and hagiographical traditions, to make the present conform to the known and understood shape of the past. His success is limited by his inability to establish sufficient distance from traumatic events, a difficulty that many chroniclers seemed to encounter when they attempted to turn current events into meaningful historical narrative.

This dissertation is a study of the Futūḥ Miṣr (Conquest of Egypt) of Ibn 'Abd al-Ḥakam (d. 257/871), the earliest extant Arabic history of Egypt. Its primary aim is not to assess whether its information is 'authentic' - i.e. corresponding to an objective historical reality - though my findings are of relevance for those engaged in debates over authenticity. My goal instead is to explore the ideas about the past which are conveyed by this particular conglomeration of historical information and to propose methods through which we can expose and analyse different layers and types of authorial activity within a multi-vocal text like Futūḥ Miṣr. Ultimately, I use this analysis as the basis of a case study suggesting how we might more effectively historicise the generation and transmission of historical ideas in the early Islamic period. Part I of the thesis consists of three chapters which explore Futūḥ Miṣr as a whole, literary text which can be understood as an instantiation of the historical worldview of its composer. Part II of the thesis contains three chapters which each illuminate features of Ibn 'Abd al-Ḥakam's historical practice which are important prerequisites for the stratigraphic reading of Futūḥ Miṣr performed in Part III. Part III of the thesis uses the understanding of Ibn 'Abd al-Ḥakam's authorial techniques developed in Part II to expose the earlier packages of historical information which underpin Futūḥ Miṣr. These final three chapters demonstrate how Ibn 'Abd al-Ḥakam reinvested these pre-existing narratives with meaning at a micro-level - by interjecting commentary and accounts from other sources - and at a macro-level - by integrating them into the larger narrative structure of Futūḥ Miṣr. In sum, this thesis is the first systematic study of the sources, structure, and authorship of an early Arabic history, which both tests and expands our current understanding of the dynamics of early Islamic historical writing, and sheds light on numerous aspects of the changing uses of the past among the Muslim scholars of Umayyad and 'Abbāsid Egypt.

This thesis undertakes a close study of a single manuscript of the early 1320s, written at the priory of Fineshade, Northamptonshire. The manuscript contains a short chronicle and several documents related to the failed baronial rebellion of 1321-22. I argue that, in collaboration with the priory’s patrons, the Engayne family, the chronicler responds to the current situation with an attempt to create meaning from a time of crisis. In the process, he attempts to shape his material through patterns of style and thought inherited from both chronicle and hagiographical traditions, to make the present conform to the known and understood shape of the past. His success is limited by his inability to establish sufficient distance from traumatic events, a difficulty that many chroniclers seemed to encounter when they attempted to turn current events into meaningful historical narrative.

This thesis explores the geographic complexity of English identity in the High Middle Ages by examining texts that reflect moments and spaces of cultural contact. While interaction with a cultural Other is often thought to reinforce national identity, I challenge this notion, positing instead that, in the texts analysed here, cultural meetings prompt the formation or consolidation of regional identities. These identities are often simultaneously local and cross-cultural, inclusive but based in community ties and a shared sense of place. Each of the four chapters examines a different kind of regional identity and its relation to Englishness through romances and historiographical texts in Anglo-Latin, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English. Discussion primarily focuses on the Gesta Herwardi, Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis, Fouke le Fitz Waryn, Gui de Warewic, Boeve de Haumtone, Le roman de toute chevalerie, and Richard Coer de Lyon. Each of these texts negotiates English identity in relation to a cultural Other, and balances various aspects of cultural identity and scales of geographic affiliation. While some focus exclusively on a particular locality, others create inclusive regional identities, draw together the foreign and the familiar, or depict England as a region on the edge of an interconnected world. These texts show that Englishness can carry different meanings, nuances, and identitary strategies that depend on context, location, or ideology. Together, they forge an image of England that is diverse and multinucleated. Its borders become spaces of meeting, connection, and cultural overlap, as well as division. These works establish a strong English identity while articulating England's necessary relationship with other places, spaces, and peoples, challenging not the borders of England, but the borders of Englishness.

The world of Cosmas. The image of political nation in the oldest Czech chronicle This work focuses on the image of the political nation in the oldest Czech chronicle - Chronica Boemorum (The Chronicle of Czechs) by Cosmas, "the first Czech historian" [Robert Bartlett, University of St Andrews: "Bohemia made a spectacular debut in this respect with Cosmas of Prague, whose vivid prose style, gifts of powerful characterization and ability to convey action, and the occasional personal touches he allows (such as the yearning picture of his long-gone student days) make him not only a vital historical source for the Premyslid lands but also one of the great writers of the Middle Ages. He initiated a tradition which continued, with peaks and plateaux, throughout the Premyslid period, and this was important, for a native historical tradition was one of the marks of a Latin Christian society."] Cosmas' Chronicle (The Chronicle of Czechs) is part of the context of "national history". Cosmas wrote a scholarly, entertaining, but also politically committed work, presenting a "national program" of sorts. This was no Czech specialty - when we think of Europe in the 11th and 12th century, we see a garden of sprouting new nations, the medieval "spring of nations". The first national states, with clear territorial...

Vojtěch Bažant, The notions about the origins of nations in 14th and 15th century historical culture, Ph.D. thesis, Institute of Czech History, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague 2020 The thesis offers an analysis of narrative structures in medieval historiography about Czech and Hungarian history, more specifically in historiography either created or read and rewritten in the 14th and the 15th century. The research is focused on a variety of narratives of the origins of nations, i.e. on stories retelling the Confusion of Tongues, the search for land and the building of a homeland, the establishment of a new society and, finally, the Christianisation of the tribe or people. Individual medieval historical works are treated as literary narratives, not as sources to be exploited for a reconstruction of historical events or of the context in which the chronicles in question were created. In this scope, the thesis examines individual narrative motifs as well as the entirety of the narrative; motifs are interpreted in their relation to the whole narrative while the chronicles and histories are approached as both meaningful stories and stylized narrations of these. The discourses on Czech and Hungarian histories are not construed in developmental terms; individual historical texts are rather...

This study explores Layamon's engenderment of cultural unification for the explicit purposes of an Anglo-Welsh cultural resistance to the Norman overlords in the March of Wales. In essence, I examine some of the most important cultural signifiers in medieval English and Welsh culture and the methods by which the poet adapts and grafts them together to form a culturally amalgamated text—neither explicitly English nor Welsh but yet simultaneously both - and the political implications of this amalgamation. Though Laymon's methodology emanates from multiple aspects of the text, I have concentrated here on what I feel are the most explicit manifestations of this theme: Merlin, his prophecies, and the Law of the March. / Master of Arts

This thesis is an examination of English evocations of translatio studii et imperii during the Hundred Years War. According to the myth of translatio, intellectual and martial superiority were entwined and together moving ever-westwards, from Athens, to Rome, to Paris, and thence - the English claimed - to England. This study contributes to an understanding of how late-fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English aristocrats and clerics understood and legitimized their cultural struggle with France not only as a martial battle but also as an intellectual competition. It also explores how this struggle contributed to the cultural authority of libraries and book collections. The first chapter of this thesis traces the development of the translatio studii et imperii tradition from its ancient origins to its zenith in the reign King Charles V "the Wise" of France. This chapter serves to establish the historiographical implications of the translatio myth as well as the French translatio tradition to which the English responded. The second chapter of this study is devoted to a literary analysis of texts which explicitly evoke the translatio topos and which were composed or copied in England during the Hundred Years War, such as Bishop Richard de Bury's Philobiblon and Ranulf Higden's Polychronicon, as well as Oxford and Cambridge university foundation myths. The third chapter explores the extent to which late-medieval England's book culture resonated with English evocations of translatio. Central to this exploration is the underhanded acquisition of Charles V's monumental French royal library by the English regent of France, John, Duke of Bedford. As is attested in the writings of French court scholars, the monumental French royal library was held to symbolise France's cultural superiority over England during the Hundred Years War. Bedford's manoeuvre can be seen as a bid to transfer Europe's seat of learning, and by extant of power, to England. This thesis concludes with a consideration of the translatio myth's ambivalent implications for contentious master narratives such as the rise of nationalism and of the English language in late-medieval England.