Historiography and identity III: Carolingian approaches

Historiography and identity III: Carolingian Approaches is the third volume of a series of six, which aims to study the relationship between the writing of history and the construction of identity from antiquity to the Middle Ages. Taken together, these volumes hope to recover the potential that historiography developed to articulate and shape strategies of identification in the ancient, late ancient, and medieval worlds. The third volume explores this history in Carolingian Europe from the 8th to the 10th century, a crucial period for the cultural history of Europe. With the renovation of the Western Roman empire under Charlemagne in 800 CE we observe an intensified exploration of the Roman and classical past. In this process Carolingian scribes and scholars preserved much of what has come down to us from the rich body of ancient knowledge, texts and models of the classical Latin past. The intensified study of these cultural resources also inspired a learning process during which not only old resources were preserved, but new cultural foundations were created as well. This volume explores this learning process in regard to the study of the past. The various essays collected here aim to move beyond a relatively narrow approach to Carolingian historiography, which has tended to privilege narratives written by Carolingian contemporaries. Instead, this volume explores various approaches to the past as reflected in the rich and varied manuscript transmission of the period; it focuses on the study of late ancient chronicles and histories, on their rewriting and continuation, on different ideas about the meaning of history, its diverse perspectives and genres, and not least on reflections about its connection to a providential future. In so doing Carolingian scribes and scholars defined and redefined the meaning of history. What they passed on to successive generations, however, was less a stable canon of history, but rather an intensified use of the writing of history for social, religious and political legitimation. In this process we also see models for the historical construction of identities sliding more firmly into place - models that would shape the writing and study of history in Europe for many centuries to come.