Making History with Manuscripts in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Introduction

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 shape historical narratives and define 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.