It has long been established that the crisis of 1066 generated a florescence of historical writing in the first half of the 12th century. Emily A. Winkler presents a new perspective on previously unqueried matters, investigating how historians' individual motivations and assumptions produced changes in the kind of history written across the Conquest. She argues that responses to the Danish Conquest of 1016 and the Norman Conquest of 1066 changed dramatically within two generations of the latter conquest. Repeated conquest could signal repeated failures and sin across the orders of society, yet early 12th-century historians in England not only extract English kings and people from a history of failure, but also establish English kingship as a worthy office on a European scale

It has long been established that the crisis of 1066 generated a florescence of historical writing in the first half of the twelfth century. Emily A. Winkler presents a new perspective on previously unqueried matters, investigating how historians' individual motivations and assumptions produced changes in the kind of history written across the Conquest. She argues that responses to the Danish Conquest of 1016 and the Norman Conquest of 1066 changed dramatically within two generations of the latter conquest. Repeated conquest could signal repeated failures and sin across the orders of society, yet early twelfth-century historians in England not only extract English kings and people from a history of failure, but also establish English kingship as a worthy office on a European scale. Royal Responsibility in Anglo-Norman Historical Writing illuminates the consistent historical agendas of four historians: William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, John of Worcester, and Geffrei Gaimar. In their narratives of England's eleventh-century history, these twelfth-century historians expanded their approach to historical explanation to include individual responsibility and accountability within a framework of providential history. In this regard, they made substantial departures from their sources. These historians share a view of royal responsibility independent both of their sources (primarily the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) and of any political agenda that placed English and Norman allegiances in opposition. Although the accounts diverge widely in the interpretation of character, all four are concerned more with the effectiveness of England's kings than with the legitimacy of their origins. Their new, shared view of royal responsibility represents a distinct phenomenon in England's twelfth-century historiography.

It has long been established that the crisis of 1066 generated a florescence of historical writing in the first half of the twelfth century. Emily A. Winkler presents a new perspective on previously unqueried matters, investigating how historians' individual motivations and assumptions produced changes in the kind of history written across the Conquest. She argues that responses to the Danish Conquest of 1016 and the Norman Conquest of 1066 changed dramatically within two generations of the latter conquest. Repeated conquest could signal repeated failures and sin across the orders of society, yet early twelfth-century historians in England not only extract English kings and people from a history of failure, but also establish English kingship as a worthy office on a European scale. Royal Responsibility in Anglo-Norman Historical Writing illuminates the consistent historical agendas of four historians: William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, John of Worcester, and Geffrei Gaimar. In their narratives of England's eleventh-century history, these twelfth-century historians expanded their approach to historical explanation to include individual responsibility and accountability within a framework of providential history. In this regard, they made substantial departures from their sources. These historians share a view of royal responsibility independent both of their sources (primarily the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) and of any political agenda that placed English and Norman allegiances in opposition. Although the accounts diverge widely in the interpretation of character, all four are concerned more with the effectiveness of England's kings than with the legitimacy of their origins. Their new, shared view of royal responsibility represents a distinct phenomenon in England's twelfth-century historiography.

Norman historians have never been systematically studied, but the tradition of historical writing they created offers valuable insight into the nature of Latin historical writing in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This book, the first to treat the Norman tradition as a whole, considers not only what the Normans wrote and what methods and models they used, but also how history was used in Normandy and who read it. Historical writing is one of the ways in which communities create themselves or imagine themselves into being. In the eleventh century, Norman historians wrote Normandy's history as a comedic adventure, in which Normans triumphed at home and abroad. In the twelfth century, their histories took a more pessimistic tone, depicting Norman glory as threatened or eclipsed. Such histories told the Normans who they were or might be by telling them who they had been. The need for cultural reenforcement was strongest just after periods of social disruption--when dukes claimed new powers or the elite attempted to assert their independence of ducal authority or monasteries attempted to preserve their religious autonomy. Consequently, histories were the product of power relations, and were produced where power was at stake. The histories sponsored by Norman dukes circulated widely, while other histories were locally read or languished without readers. There was, as yet, no spontaneous audience for history, just as there were no agreed-upon conventions or methodologies for its composition. The potential audience, however, grew in the later Middle Ages as great princes and individuals alike found ways to use history, which in turn led to its wider dissemination and to increased methodological development. Leah Shopkow presents an insightful study of the functions and meanings of history. She makes clear that historical writing is neither simply a source for data on times past nor a form of disinterested literary expression. Medieval histories were complex cultural phenomena. Her study will be of great interest to historiographers and will become a standard work for Normanists and Anglo-Normanists. Leah Shopkow is associate professor of history at Indiana University. ""By focusing on Latin historical writing in the duchy of Normandy during the apogee of its power in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Shopkow has managed to span part of the gap between the many broad theoretical treatments of medieval historiography and the narrow examinations of single authors or works.""--Choice ""Necessary reading for anyone working with the historians whom it analyzes and deserves a place on the shelf of recent, exciting dissections of the corpus of medieval works of history.""--Albion ""This impressive work casts fresh light on a topic of the first importance: the contemporary historians of medieval Normandy. Shopkow's scholarship stands out for its interdisciplinary grasp of both historical and literary materials and for its sensitivity to new methodological techniques.""--C. Warren Hollister, University of California, Santa Barbara Table of Contents Introduction: Historical Writing and the Norman Community 1. History in the County of Normandy 2. The Norman Comedy 3. The Glorious Norman Past 4. Truth 5. Methods, Models, and Sources 6. The Purpose of History 7. Patrons and Other Readers: The Reception of Norman Histories Conclusion: The Propagation of Historical Writing in Medieval Europe

By tapping into the vast reservoir of undertreated early English documents and texts, the collected studies explore how individuals living in the late tenth through fifteenth centuries engaged with the authorizing culture of the Anglo-Saxons.

This book throws light on the relevance and role played by translations and translators at times of serious discontinuity throughout history. Topics explored by scholars from different continents and disciplines include war, the disintegration of transnational polities, health disasters and revolutions - be they political, social, cultural and/or technological. Surprisingly little is known, for example, about the role that translated constitutions had in instigating and in shaping political crises at both a local and global level, and how these events had an effect on translations themselves. Similarly, the role that translations played as instruments for either building or undermining empires, and the extent to which interpreters could ease or hamper negotiations and foster new national identities has not been adequately acknowledged. This book addresses all these issues, among others, through twelve studies focused not just on texts but also on instances of verbal and non-verbal communications in a range of languages from around the world. This interdisciplinary work will engage scholars working in fields such as Translation Studies, History, Modern Languages, English, Law, Politics and Social Studies.

This book explores how eleventh- and twelfth-century Anglo-Norman ecclesiastical authors attributed anger to kings in the exercise of their duties, and how such attributions related to larger expansions of royal authority. It argues that ecclesiastical writers used their works to legitimize certain displays of royal anger, often resulting in violence, while at the same time deploying a shared emotional language that also allowed them to condemn other types of displays. These texts are particularly concerned about displays of anger in regard to suppressing revolt, ensuring justice, protecting honor, and respecting the status of kingship. In all of these areas, the role of ecclesiastical and lay counsel forms an important limit on the growth and expansion of royal prerogatives.

The Norman conquerors of Anglo-Saxon England have traditionally been seen both as rapacious colonizers and as the harbingers of a more civilized culture, replacing a tribal Germanic society and its customs with more refined Continental practices. Many of the scholarly arguments about the Normans and their influence overlook the impact of the past on the Normans themselves. The Continuity of the Conquest corrects these oversights. Wendy Marie Hoofnagle explores the Carolingian aspects of Norman influence in England after the Norman Conquest, arguing that the Normans’ literature of kingship envisioned government as a form of imperial rule modeled in many ways on the glories of Charlemagne and his reign. She argues that the aggregate of historical and literary ideals that developed about Charlemagne after his death influenced certain aspects of the Normans’ approach to ruling, including a program of conversion through “allurement,” political domination through symbolic architecture and propaganda, and the creation of a sense of the royal forest as an extension of the royal court. An engaging new approach to understanding the nature of Norman identity and the culture of writing and problems of succession in Anglo-Norman England, this volume will enlighten and enrich scholarship on medieval, early modern, and English history.

William of Poitiers served William the Conqueror for many years as one of his chaplains. His Gesta Guillelmi is a first-hand account of the momentous events of William's reign, and one of the most important sources for the history of the period. This new edition, with facing-page English translation of the Latin text, provides the first complete English translation, as well as a full historical introduction and detailed notes.

In the Middle Ages writers were still deeply involved in the legal and linguistic consequences of the Norman victory. Later, the issues became directly relevant to debates about constitutional rights; the theory of a "Norman yoke" provided first a call for revolution and, by the nineteenth century, a romantic vision of a lost Saxon paradise. When history became a subject for academic study, controversies still raged around such subjects as Saxon versus Norman institutions. The debates are still going on. Interest has now moved to such subjects as peoples and races, frontier societies, women's studies and colonialism.