This volume interrogates the role of the manuscript medium in conveying history to medieval and early modern readers. The contributors adopt a capacious understanding of « history » to explore history-writing in its materiality from a variety of methodological and disciplinary perspectives. The core contentions of this book are that the material features of manuscripts helped shaping historical narratives and defining history conceptually, and that therefore, the makers of these manuscripts played an instrumental role in history-writing alongside authors. Ranging from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries and comprising materials from across Western Europe in Latin and the vernaculars, the ten chapters of this volume uncover stakes and strategies tied to highly specific contexts, such as late thirteenth-century Corbie or fifteenth-century Zurich, yet partaking in a shared practice of history-writing with manuscripts. Manuscript makers « made » history through layout, rewriting, illumination, compilation, choice of script, and annotation, and conferred history-writing its material dimension. This volume therefore situates the writing of history in its material dimension and invites us to consider medieval and early modern historiography in its medium.

Sommaire

Introduction: History, Manuscripts, Making
Johannes Junge Ruhland

I STRATEGIES OF PRODUCTION
Assemblages and History in a Medieval French Manuscript from Corbie, ca. 1295: Copenhagen, Kongelige Biblioteket, GKS 487 f°
Henry Ravenhall

Writing with the Book: History through the Codex and the Materiality of Autography
Rachel Wilson

Miscellanies of Histories: Perception of the Past and Historiographical Agency of Late Medieval Compilers
René Hernández

II THE STAKES OF ADAPTATION
Writing History with Bede’s Martyrology, 800–1200
Kate Falardeau

Adaptation and Affect in Orderic Vitalis’s Historia ecclesiastica
Carolyn Cargile

From Little Egypt to Zurich: Chronicling Romani Immigrants with Late Medieval Manuscripts
Lane B. Baker

Making History in the Renaissance with Medieval Manuscripts: Jean Le Féron and the Grandes chroniques de France
Antoine Brix

III CONFIGURING HISTORY
Medieval Monastic Manuscripts after the Middle Ages: The Case of St. Nikolaus in undis at Strasbourg
Björn Klaus Buschbeck

History Branches Out: Narrative and Chronology in Cologny, Fondation Martin Bodmer, Cod. Bodmer 147
Giulia Boitani

Fabulous History: Painting History in Paris, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 5069
Christopher T. Richards

IV RESPONSE
Making History with Manuscripts: Response
Jane Gilbert

General Index

Requires Authentication 303
Manuscripts Cited

Requires Authentication 315