History and the Written Word : Documents, Literacy, and Language in the Age of the Angevins / Henry Bainton.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bainton, Henry, Author.

Series:

Middle Ages series.

The Middle Ages Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English literature--Middle English, 1100-1500--History and criticism.

English literature.

Literacy--England--History.

Literacy.

Great Britain--History--Angevin period, 1154-1216--Historiography.

Great Britain.

Great Britain--History--Angevin period, 1154-1216--Sources.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (200 pages) : illustrations.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2019]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Coming upon the text of a document such as a charter or a letter inserted into the fabric of a medieval chronicle and "ed 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 increased use of documents by considering the growing bureaucratic state and an increasing historiographical concern for documentary evidence, Bainton seeks to resituate these histories, together with their authors and users, within literate but sub-state networks of political power. Proposing a new category he designates "literate lordship" to describe the form of power with which documentary history-writing was especially concerned, he shows how important the vernacular was in recording the social lives of these literate lords and how they found it a particularly appropriate medium through which to record their roles in history.Drawing on the perspectives of modern and medieval narratology, medieval multilingualism, and cultural memory, History and the Written Word argues that members of an administrative elite demonstrated their mastery of the rules of literate political behavior by producing and consuming history-writing and its documents.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Note on Orthography and Translations

Introduction

Chapter 1. Defining Documents

Chapter 2. Documentary Quotation

Chapter 3. Literate Sociability

Chapter 4. Literate Performances and Literate Government

Chapter 5. Literate Languages

Afterword

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 175-191) and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 06. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780812296761

0812296761

OCLC:

1143793406