Old Tales for a New Gens. Alberic of Trois-Fontaines’ Grafting of History

Throughout the Middle Ages, waves of people came to the lands once been a part of the Roman Empire. At the same time, lands yet unknown encountered the successors of the Empire. These gentes sometimes preserved a long history of their paths to their new homelands. The Longobards, the Saxons, and many others had an origo gentis, where gods played an important role. These narrations were incorporated into a historiography that was almost entirely Christian. This article is concerned with the methods used to find harmony between the past and present by Alberic of Trois-Fontaines when writing about the Semigallians. The narrative of their origins used established motifs and themes that made it possible to include the invented history of the gens into the then-established universal history. This was done through the etymology of names or the erudite use of the writings of other authors. These new gentes were grafted onto the trees of old tales.

Left Ruins in Ethiopia: Imagining Otherwise Amid Necroepistemic Historiography

This essay uses the notion of necroepistemology to expose the killing of the other as executed by the neoliberal historiography in Ethiopia. Utilizing Fanonian negative dialectics, it critiques the ahistorical, immaterial, and reified object, as well as universal history, promoted by the official Ethiopian historiography’s absolute time, space, and matter. It does so to reveal the ways in which the enduring social questions and new imaginations are dismissed by this historiography as the work of the global-local left. To counterbalance this practice, I return to the 1974 Ethiopian socialist revolution and to the staging of Ethiopian socialism as a critical transnational rethinking of the human in the country. At the same time, attending to the everyday struggle of women performers in both the imperial and revolutionary spaces, the essay reminds us how the revolutionary practice, which had envisioned a new social human, ended up marking female performers’ bodies as dangerous for the socialist movement. Revealing the ways in which women performers collaborated with and fought against a male revolutionary figure, this essay ends with a call to respond to the current necroepistemic moment to draw attention to the historically vulnerable people who are dying in Ethiopia in the here and now.

The Illustration of Mīrkhwānd's Rauḍat al-ṣafā, RAS Ms. P. 38

Among the precious manuscripts belonging to the Royal Asiatic Society is a copy of volume four of the Tārīkh-i Rauḍat al-ṣafā (History of the Garden of Purity), a work of ‘universal history’ in six volumes, compiled by Muḥammad b. Khwāndshāh b. Maḥmūd (d. 903/1498), generally known as Mīrkhwānd. He composed his chronicle in Herat under the patronage of ‘Alī Shīr Navā’ī (d. 906/1501), the Naqshbandi Sufi, Chaghatay poet and statesman at the court of the last Timurid ruler, Sulṭān-Ḥusain-i Bāyqarā (r. 875-912/1469-1506), see Fig. 1.

Herod on the Rise

This chapter covers Herod’s rise to kingship. It seeks to embed the ‘rising star narrative’ that we find in BJ 1 and AJ 14 into Nicolaus’ historical framework as far as it can be reconstructed from the fragments. This leads to a new hypothesis on the role of Herod’s Idumean origins in Nicolaus’ narrative. The chapter ultimately shows how Nicolaus’ portrait of the young Herod connected timeless patterns of universal history with the specific conditions created by Rome’s rise to universal power, and thus had a special appeal to an Augustan readership.

Herod in History

Most of our information about Herod the Great derives from the accounts found in Josephus’ Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities. Together they constitute quite a unique resource on one of the most famous personalities of ancient history. But whence did Josephus get his information? It is commonly agreed that his primary source was Nicolaus of Damascus, Herod’s court historian, though the extent to which Josephus adapted his material remains disputed. This book takes a modern source-critical approach to Josephus’ extensive account of Herod’s reign to suggest that Josephus did indeed rely heavily on Nicolaus’s work, but that previous scholarship was mistaken in seeing Nicolaus as a mere propagandist. Nicolaus may have begun his Universal History while Herod was alive, but he finished it after his death. He thus had no reason to write propaganda. This makes his work all the more interesting, for what we have instead is something rather different: a Syrian intellectual claiming a place in Augustan Rome, by telling a story about what the Augustan World looks like on the Eastern periphery. We delineate Nicolaus’ approach to various critical topics in Herod’s reign in order to reveal the Damascene’s perception of client kingship, the impact of empire, and the difficulties involved in ruling Judaea. Most significantly of all, we uncover an Eastern intellectual’s view on how to succeed and how to fail in the new Augustan world order.

Radical Historiography

This chapter argues that the currency of Higden’s Polychronicon in later medieval England attests to the profound historiographical investments of a spectrum of polemicists, preachers, translators, and poets. English writers discovered in the Polychronicon a master genre for broad and diverse political engagement and an innovative form with which to theorize a range of issues, especially those pertaining to the institutional Church. The hot topics that modern scholars tend to associate with Wycliffism were given a discursive heft and complexity through the literary appropriation of Higden’s universal history, as we see in Trevisa’s commentary on the Polychronicon, as well as in Langland’s Piers Plowman. In this view, radical historiography leads to radical ecclesiology when compendious genres become loci for the political imaginary.

The City of Ihrit’ in Asoghik’s Universal History and the Origin of the Sacred Aureola Around Medieval Ohrid

Stepanos Taronetsi (Steven of Taron), better known as Asoghik, completed his Universal History in 1004. This work made him the most prominent Armenian historian of the 11th century. It is known in Bulgaria because of Asoghik’s information about the Armenian origin of the Bulgarian Tsar Samuel. However, the following passage, related to Bulgarian history, has gone unnoticed by scholars: “Justianos, 37 years... He was overthrown by his army for insignificant reasons and fled to Khakan, the king of the Khazars, married his daughter and took the city of Ihrit as an inheritance, and with the help of the Khazar troops returned to reign in Constantinople and established himself on the throne of his kingdom. Then he built the great and famous Hagia Sophia Church.” Ihrit is the city of Ohrid in the present-day Republic of North Macedonia. A careful analysis of the passage shows that the episode of Justinian II’s reascension (685–695; 705–711) to the Byzantine throne with the help of the Bulgarians (the Khazars at Asoghik) was automatically attached to the reign of Justinian I (527–565) by the Armenian historian. Or rather, this insertion was already made in the earlier source used by Asoghik. The fact that Asoghik mentions Ohrid during the reign of Justinian I falls within the context of the propaganda efforts of the Ohrid Archbishopric (Archbishopric of Bulgaria) to derive its origins directly from the famous Archbishopric of Justiniana Prima, founded in 535 by Emperor Justinian I. The aim was to create a sacred aureola around the Ohrid Archbishopric and subsequently to neutralize the Constantinople Patriarchate’s attempts to subdue it and even to put an end to its existence. However, Asoghik’s account preceded the Ohrid Archbishopric’s efforts by a century. Nevertheless, the mention of Ohrid in Asoghik’s work is not a late interpolation of a scribe, but it fits perfectly into a statement of the Byzantine historian Nicephorus Gregoras, suggesting that the first steps in presenting Ohrid as an ancient ecclesiastical center, identical to Justiniana Prima, were made around 972, shortly after the seat of the Bulgarian Patriarchate had been transferred from Moesia to Macedonia.

Otto Dov Kulka, German Jews in the Era of the “Final Solution”: Essays on Jewish and Universal History. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter; Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2020. xv + 341 pp.

This chapter evaluates Otto Dov Kulka's German Jews in the Era of the “Final Solution”: Essays on Jewish and Universal History (2020). Readers interested in the significance of antisemitism in modern European history, the centrality of antisemitism in Nazi ideology, the reaction of German Jews to Nazi persecution, and the influence of the German public's attitudes toward Jews on Nazi policies will find this collection a rich source of information. Kulka shows that key organizations of German Jewry such as the Reichsvertretung and its successor, the Reichsvereinigung, managed to preserve their essential functions under the Nazis; they did not become tools of the regime. In general, German Jews were able to resist the process known as coordination (Gleichschaltung). If anything, they became more dedicated to their own organizations and more democratic as persecution increased. The collection also includes Kulka's own experience of miraculous survival in the family camp at Auschwitz and his return visit to Auschwitz in 1978.