The Horse behind the Text: Animal Agency in Early Medieval Historiography

Early medieval authors frequently used horses as narrative devices. Therefore, when working with historiographical sources, one is confronted with a vital question: how can we reconstruct the horses’ agency without knowing whether their depiction is a mere narrative device? Combining praxeological approaches with the analysis of narrative structures, this paper offers a glance “beyond the text.” It shows how analysing the underlying knowledge of the medieval reader contributes to reconstructing a contemporary image of early medieval horses and their (perceived) agency in human society and thereby develops a new perspective for the future of historical human-animal studies.

Natural Disasters and Time: Non-eschatological Perceptions of Earthquakes in Late Antique and Medieval Historiography

This contribution analyzes the rhetoric surrounding natural disasters in historiographic sources, challenging our assumptions about the eschatological nature of late antique and medieval historical consciousness. Contrary to modern expectations, a large number of late antique and medieval sources indicate that earthquakes and other natural disasters were understood as signs from God, relating to theophanic encounters or divine wrath in the present time. Building on recent research on premodern concepts of time and historical consciousness, the article underscores the fact that eschatological models of time and history—that is, the relentless linear, teleological progression of time towards the End of Days—was not how premodern people perceived the relationship between past, present, and future. The textual evidence presented here is supported by a fragmented and little-known illuminated historiographic text, the Ravennater Annalen, housed today in the cathedral library in Merseburg. This copy of a sixth-century illustrated calendar from Ravenna contains unique depictions of earthquakes in the form of giants breathing fire. Like the textual sources, this visual document should not be read as a premonition of the End of Days, rather it visualizes the belief that divine agency and wrath caused natural disasters.

Between Archaeography and Historiography: Unsettling the Medieval?

Do archaeology and history refer to the same real past? Their relationship has been understood primarily as epistemic, as one of the distinct techniques for knowing different aspects or epochs of the past. When archaeologies of more familiar, historical, medieval pasts are conducted, why do these accounts enthusiastically find and lose, provoke and distress, their specialist kin; or why do historiography and archaeography relate uneasily? This article argues that it is useful to think of archaeography and historiography as two sensibilities, two activities, and following de Certeau, as two operations. Each operation is governed by distinct protocols of generalisation, different aspirations of synthesis, distinct poetics that govern their texts and the account they wish to give of their subjects. Appreciating these differences, this article focuses on the foreclosures shared by both operations with reference to the tangle of the medieval. It asks, what comes to count as evidence and how, which questions arise and why, and what aspects of pasts termed medieval appear familiar, alien, or interesting. From these questions it builds an account of what archaeology can disclose about shared modern historicist commitments to the medieval and those uneasily kept out of its scenes. This article grounds these questions through an engagement with South Asian medieval historiography on the theme of settlement. First, through a genealogy of settlement it examines the reasons for the concept’s centrality to accounts of medieval life, (modern) politics and the state. Through examples drawn from research in Mewat, it examines what these commitments to thinking about settlement disable and enable, the questions its assumptions exclude. It demonstrates how archaeologies of settlement bring into view questions of anteriority, and how attention to spatial relations of remove and accrual reverse figure and ground in accounts of dwelling. In light of these disjoinders, it asks, must we continue to close our operations, to write our medieval, in the manner we do?

Il «faticato peregrinaggio» di Isidoro Carini negli archivi e nelle biblioteche di Spagna (1881-1882)

The Relazione by Isidoro Carini about his research mission in Spain (1881-1882) and the events of its publication allow to reconstruct the beginnings of both the use of spanish sources for the Sicilian and Italian medieval history and of the context of the Sicilian medieval historiography at the end of the 19th Century.

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.