Imagining History in Medieval Britain

by Kelly, Stephen

• ISBN13: 9781441154484
• ISBN10: 1441154485
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2017-03-09
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Exploring the historical imagination through medieval and early modern writers and texts, from Christian historians such as Bede to secular chronicles, Geoffrey of Monmouth to Chaucer and Malory, Imagining History in Medieval Britain moves away from a chronological approach to assess the writing of history thematically. Chapters are designed to be comprehensive in mapping the major texts of medieval historical writing but are also intended to challenge current understandings by juxtaposing texts with themes which are informed by the postmodern sense of crisis in historical representation. The book frames its exploration of medieval history writing with reference to key thinkers of contemporary historiographical theory including Foucault, de Certeau, Collingwood and Hayden White.

While introducing students to the main currents of medieval history writing, this book also challenges the strictures imposed by the discipline of history as it has emerged since the 18th century. Sidebars pose additional methodological and theoretical questions and each chapter contains suggestions for further reading.

Author Biography

Stephen Kelly is Lecturer in the School of English at Queen's University Belfast, UK. He is co-editor of Betwixt and Between: Place and Cultural Translation (2007) and co-editor of Imagining the Book (2005). He is currently writing Tears and Saints: Sanctity and the Politics of Enthusiasm.

Table of Contents

1. Imagined Communitie: Inventing the Nation from Bede to the Tudors
2. Eternal Return: The Bible and Historical Imagination
3. Mythistories
4. Among ruins
5. Histories of interregnum? The Historian as Apologist
6. The Presence of the Dead
7. Prophetic History
8. 'Morbid symptoms': The Politics of Periodisation
9. The Historiography of Nature
10. The Tragedy of Historical Experience
11. Memory, History, Forgetting, or the Reformation of History
Bibliography
Index