Inleiding. Karaktermoord is een tijdloos wapen

Introduction. Character assassination, a timeless weapon Character assassination is the deliberate destruction of an individual’s reputation or credibility. While the term itself is relatively new, the practices it describes can be found in virtually all cultures and historical epochs. Despite their great variety, character attacks share five common aspects or pillars: they involve an attacker, a target, a medium, an audience and they take place in a particular cultural, political and technological context. In recent times there has been a surge in scholarship on character assassination from a range of academic disciplines, including political science, rhetoric and communication studies. This thematic issue will explore the historical dimensions of character assassination and the challenges and opportunities that come with it. It will focus in particular on the role that various media – ranging from Roman histories and medieval chronicles to nineteenth-century cartoons – have played in shaping practices of character assassination throughout the ages.

An Annotated Edition of Chaucer Belonging to Stephan Batman

This article introduces a copy of The Woorkes of Geffrey Chaucer (1561) formerly belonging to the writer, cleric, limner, and book-collector Stephan Batman (c. 1542–1584). The volume is currently held at the Guildhall Library (SR 2.3.3), and contains Batman’s annotations and manicules throughout the text. It also features a 28-line poem in Batman’s hand, a short booklist of medieval chronicles, and five line drawings. The book thus offers a fresh insight into the reading practices of one of the most industrious English antiquaries of the sixteenth century, and sheds new light on Chaucer’s sixteenth-century reception.

Accentology of the Takht Eli: The Great Horde or the Greater Horde?

Research objectives: The author makes an attempt to determine the correctness of the emphasis in the Russian name of the Khanate Taht Eli – Bol’shaya (Great) or Bol’shaya (Greater) Horde; to check the connection of this name with the Mongolian and Turkic designations of the Mongol Empire, the Golden Horde, and the Crimean Khanate. Research materials: Russian, Lithuanian, and Crimean diplomatic correspondence from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries; Russian medieval chronicles and other works; works of European authors of the sixteenth century; Turkic, Mongolian, and Persian histo­rical works from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries; Golden Horde yarlyqs; monuments of Tatar and Kazakh folklore, historiography of the problem under study. Results and novelty of the research: The author concludes that the designation “Great Horde” (Bol’shaya) existed in Russian speech of the fifteenth century. This conclusion has to be justified, since, firstly, it seemed obvious and therefore had never been argued in historiography. Secondly, it must be discussed due to the recently proposed variant pronunciation ‘Bol’shaya’ (Greater Horde). The analyzed Russian name of Takht eli was a translation of one of the versions of the official name of the Jochi Ulus and at the same time, it repeated the distorted name of the Mongol Empire. The possible origins of the Russian name of the Jochi Ulus, the ‘Golden Horde’, are also to be found within the imperial history of the Mongols.

Metoda wydawnicza Brygidy Kürbis

Brygida Kürbis, a medievalist from Poznań, who died in 2001, thanks to her publications, contributed a lot to increasing the importance of both editing medieval chronicles and source studies, which are auxiliary sciences of history. The author deliberately modified the postulated rules and principles of publishing written sources in editorial practice, depending on the type of released texts and publishing capabilities, changing over time.

BIBLICKÁ BABYLONSKÁ VEŽA A ANTICKÍ ĽUDIA. HĽADANIE VLASTNÝCH PREDKOV V STREDOVEKU

The article is a presentation of ethnogenesis of Slavs in the view of medieval chronicles. Hungarian medieval historiography served as a starting point of the reflection. The author describes how national “Prehistory” was presented in Hungarian chronicles and compares them with the general tendencies in medieval historiography to show the way in which native origins were created. It was a search for a common ascendant of the European people based on the Bible figure of Japhet and the way in which this tradition is related to facts known from ancient history (like the Trojan War) as well as geographical description based on ancient erudition. It was the common explanation of native origins in the entire Western and Eastern Christianity.As a result, the culture of medieval and Pre-Modern Europe united despite the political divisions.

РАННИЕ СЛАВЯНЕ В ПОВЕСТИ ВРЕМЕННЫХ ЛЕТ МИФЫ ЛЕТОПИСЦЕВ И ИСТОРИОГРАФИИ

The author of the Primary Chronicle (PC) had a dual purpose of proving the legitimacy of the dynasty of Scandinavian origin and recording the traditions of the ethnic Scandinavian and Slavic populations. The author of this paper endeavours to analyse the authenticity of information provided in the PC concerning the origin of early Slavs. Before a critical method of studying medieval narrative texts was developed in the late 19th and the early 20th century, the authenticity of medieval chronicles had not been questioned. Therefore, the 19th century historiography treated all the information from medieval texts as authentic. In Russian historiography it was A.A. Shakhmatov who while dealing with the PC, laid down the foundations of the critical method in dealing with chronicles. He was the founder of the famous school of historical philology which has placed text analysis at its centre. Despite this approach, a “new hypothesis” appeared in the last decades of the 20th century (see the linguistic theory of O.N. Trubachev) gained wide publicity both in Russia and abroad. Trubachev’s theory did not take into conssideration the results of either text analysis or the findings of archaeology and was a return to the position from the 19th century. The author of the paper shows that this theory was a blind alley.

ETNOGENEZA SŁOWIAN W POLSKICH KRONIKA CH ŚREDNIOWIECZNYCH

Historiography including the story of native origins created ideological bonds in new states, created the state and afterwards national consciousness. The Latin cultural roots of Christianity and the awareness of the similarities of Slavic languages played a role in ethnographical stories told in Polish medieval chronicles. While keen on presenting Polish origins, the first Polish chronicles did not deal with ethnogenesis of Slavs. Only in the 14th century did the chroniclers adopt an ethnogenetical approach. Dzierzwa introduced the Biblical genealogy to Polish medieval historiography and derived the origins of the Poles from Japhet. The Slavic Interpolator of the Great-Polish Chronicle presented the Pannonian concept of the origin of Slavs which probably emerged in Great-Moravia and was preserved in Rus’ historical tradition. This story was used by John Dąbrówka in his commentaries to the Chronicle of Vincent Kadłubek and by John Długosz who created the erudite vision of Polish ethnogenesis, based on popular tables of nations.

Introduction

The Introduction summarises the origins of Scotland’s patriotic historiography, highlighting the importance of medieval chronicles and the Renaissance histories of Hector Boece and George Buchanan in laying the foundations of early modern Scottish national identity. In particular, it identifies the long-held belief that Scotland was one of the few places to have successfully resisted Roman conquest. As well as looking at the importance of classical literature and authors such as Cicero and Livy in the development of Scottish scholarship, it also outlines eighteenth-century Scottish attitudes towards ancient Rome, its culture and its imperial ambitions, and explores the importance of the Grand Tour in the formation of early modern interpretations of the classical past.

Waldef

This first English translation of Le Roman de Waldef makes a significant representative of the French literature of medieval England accessible for the first time. Its wide-ranging content provides an ideal introduction to a number of themes in medieval literature, making it suitable for a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses. The fast-moving romance plot of this early thirteenth-century tale recounts the ancestry and exploits of Waldef and his two sons, set against a history of pre-Conquest England. The narrative shares themes and incident types with other important insular romances, including the Lai of Haveloc, Boeve de Haumtone, and Gui de Warewic. Waldef’s scope, interest in battle, and political stratagems bear reading alongside medieval chronicles, while secret love affairs connect it with other romance literature of the period, and adventures across a wide area of the known world provide affinities with medieval travel narrative.

Contacts between the Mongols and the Latin West from the Point of View of the Italian Chronicles in the Second Half of the Thirteenth Century

When the news of the Mongol invasions in eastern Europe and western Asia reached the European courts in the first half of the thirteenth century, the papal court was the first to send embassies to the Mongols. The reports of missionaries and papal envoys, alongside the famous account of Marco Polo, provided Europeans with the first accounts on these terrible warriors. Italian chroniclers of the period included the information provided by these accounts in their works, including in their local chronicles the achievements and habits of these mysterious warriors from the east. Other chroniclers were eyewitnesses to the first diplomatic contacts between European and Mongolian sovereigns. Their testimonies offer interesting elements to observe the first rudimentary diplomatic approaches between two worlds so far apart. Comparing various medieval chronicles, this paper investigates a fundamental psychological difference in the way how Italian and Central European authors of the time perceived the Mongols. If on the one hand Central European sources describe the Mongol warriors with terror and fear, the Italian ones are more optimistic, as they consider them as a possible resource to definitively drive out the Muslim infidels from the Holy Land.