Writing circa 731 CE, Bede professes in the introduction to his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum that he will write his account of the past of the English following only vera lex historiae. Whether explicitly or (most often) implicitly, historians narrate the past according to a conception of what constitutes historical truth that emerges in the use of narrative strategies, of certain formulae or textual forms, in establishing one's own ideological authority or that of one's informants, in faithfulness to a cultural, narrative, or poetic tradition. If we extend the scope of what we understand by history (especially in a pre-modern setting) to include not just the writings of historians legitimated by their belonging to the Latinate matrix of christianized classical history writing, but also collective narratives, practices, rituals, oral poetry, liturgy, artistic representations, and acts of identity - all re-enacting the past as, or as representation of, the present, we find a plethora of modes of constructions of historical truth, narrative authority, and reliability. Vera Lex Historiae? will be constituted by contributions that reveal the variety of evental strategies by which historical truth was constructed in late antiquity and the earlier Middle Ages, and the range of procedures by which such narratives were established first as being historical and then as "true" histories. This is not only a matter of narrative strategies, but also habitus, ways of living and acting in the world that feed on and back into the commemoration and re-enactment of the past by communities and by individuals. In doing this, we hope to recover something of the plurality of modes of preserving and reenacting the past available in late antiquity and the earlier middle ages which we pass by because of preconceived notions of what constitutes history writing.

The refreshed insights into early-imperial Roman historiography this book offers are linked to a recent discovery. In the spring of 2014, the binders of the archive of Robert Marichal were dusted off by the ERC funded project PLATINUM (ERC-StG 2014 n°636983) in response to Tiziano Dorandi’s recollections of a series of unpublished notes on Latin texts on papyrus. Among these was an in-progress edition of the Latin rolls from Herculaneum, together with Marichal’s intuition that one of them had to be ascribed to a certain ‘Annaeus Seneca’. PLATINUM followed the unpublished intuition by Robert Marichal as one path of investigation in its own research and work. Working on the Latin P.Herc. 1067 led to confirm Marichal’s intuitions and to go beyond it: P.Herc. 1067 is the only extant direct witness to Seneca the Elder’s Historiae. Bringing a new and important chapter of Latin literature arise out of a charred papyrus is significant. The present volume is made up of two complementary sections, each of which contains seven contributions. They are in close dialogue with each other, as looking at the same literary matter from several points of view yields undeniable advantages and represents an innovative and fruitful step in Latin literary criticism. These two sections express the two different but interlinked axes along which the contributions were developed. On one side, the focus is on the starting point of the debate, namely the discovery of the papyrus roll transmitting the Historiae of Seneca the Elder and how such a discovery can be integrated with prior knowledge about this historiographical work. On the other side, there is a broader view on early-imperial Roman historiography, to which the new perspectives opened by the rediscovery of Seneca the Elder’s Historiae greatly contribute.

As periodical of the International Academy of the History of Medicine, this Clio Medica volume contains 15 papers.

Building upon, but also moving beyond, previous scholarship that has focused on Richer's political allegiances and his views of kingship, this study by Justin Lake provides the most comprehensive synthesis of the History, examining Richer's use and abuse of his sources, his relationship to Gerbert, and the motives that led him to write.