Clement of Antioch is only attested in John Malalas. He wrote a chronicle that was based on Eusebius, but had a distinct focus on Syria. He positioned the start of the Christian era in AM 6000.

Itios is a corrupt name for an author in John Malalas. We consider the possibility that it is a garbled reference to the Hellenistic historian Berossus.

The fifth-century Latin author Gennadius of Marseille lists a chronicon among the works of Jacob of Nisibis. This is certainly a pseudepigraphic work, probably composed in Syriac. It had an anti-millennarianist intention.

This book shows that the development of Greek chronicle writing from the fourth to the seventh century was not linear. Whilst the impact of the chronicle of Eusebius of Caesarea was great, subsequent writers corrected his errors and incorporated the third-century chronographies by Hippolytus and Julius Africanus into the framework shaped by Eusebius. As a consequence, chronographies and not chronicles dominate in Greek literature. One innovation of the fourth century was to link computus (the calculation of the Easter date) and chronography, first visible in the work of Andreas, brother of Magnus (352), and later in that of Annianus (412). The direct impact of Annianus has been overestimated: unique in some of its core ideas, his work resurfaced only in the 560s, in the context of Justinian’s attempt to impose the Christmas date of 25 December on the church of Jerusalem. This controversy caused a flurry of works of chronography and computus to be written in the early seventh century. Besides this tradition, the book also uncovers a tradition of chronicles with a local focus, which shaped the chronicle of John Malalas. We argue that the source indications of Malalas deserve more credit than they are usually granted.

A tenth-century Christian Arabic history preserves a letter of John Chrysostom to Acacius of Melitene, offering a summary of Eusebius’ chronology. The text probably goes back to an original core and shows that in some circles the chronology of Eusebius still enjoyed authority at the end of the fourth century.

A substantial proportion of medieval texts consists of other texts. Form therefore needs to be understood on at least two levels, by distinguishing between what can be termed ‘composite’ forms and ‘constituent’ forms. Some composite forms are fairly fixed (the Bible is a composite form); others are quite fluid. Genre, in this textual dynamic, is an elusive and contested notion. As illustrative case studies, this chapter considers two types of narrative: chronicle and hagiography. Hagiography is defined by subject (writing about saints), not by form as such. But hagiographic narratives tend to be produced and reproduced in large-scale composite forms organised according to closed annual calendrical cycles, while chronicles are compilations (often compilations of compilations) organised according to open-ended annalistic sequence. Between them these large composite forms contain most of the individual narratives that tend to be extrapolated in modern editions and discussed in modern critical writings, as literary works.

Accounts of the battles of Bannockburn,by the anonymous writer of the Chronicle of Lanercost, of Henry V’s battles at Harfleur and Agincourt, by Thomas Elmham or Ps.-Elmham and by Titus Livius, and of Richard III’s death at the battle of Bosworth Field by Polydore Vergil are given here as examples of military historiography of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.A section of a metric poem on Henry V, in elegiac couplets, is also included. The reader must decide as to whether the writers on Henry V and Richard III can be regarded as writing ‘humanist’ Latin.

Henry Knighton (a canon of an abbey in Leicester) and Thomas Walsingham (a monk at St. Albans) were the leading historians of the period at the end of the fourteenth century. Here an intriguing account of a large group of women attending tournaments, colourfully dressed in men’s clothes, armed and on horseback, is included from Knighton’s Chronicle, along with excerpts about two of the revolutionary leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, Jack Straw and John Ball: both were captured and beheaded.

Æthelweard’s chronicle, in a rugged and distinctive Latin, covers history from Creation down to 975, just before he wrote the work. He bases it largely on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and parts of his chronicle provide valuableinformation about this Old English work, here in Æthelweard’s Latin translation or paraphrase. Æthelweard was a high-ranking lay leader. He addresses the work to his cousin, Matilda, abbess of Essen in Germany. Here the famous and dramatic story (which also exists in Old English) of prince Cyneheard and king Cynewulf is given, as well as sections on ninth and tenth century history.

The famous story of king Alfred burning the cakes in the humble kitchen of the country wife is first recorded in Latin in the first Life of St. Neot, written in the eleventh century, before the Norman Conquest. It is interesting in containing not only a Biblical reference, but also a reference to Juvenal’s seventh satire.Here the original version of this literary vignette is compared with a briefer post-Conquest version in the Annals of St. Neot’s and an expanded version from the thirteenth century, from the Chronicle of John of Wallingford, which preserves the reference to Juvenaland the Biblical reference used in the original but adds other references.

Alcuin’s letter no. 16 is addressed to Æthelred, king of Northumbria in 793, the year in which Lindisfarne was destroyed by the Vikings in their first attack on England. In the letter Alcuin blames the king and the people for their immoral lives, and like Gildas before him, sees the foreign invasion as God’s just punishment for such immorality. The excerpt from Symeon of DUrham’s twelfth-century history shows the portents seen shortly before the Viking attack.

This chapter considers John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, a poem in the mode of a universal chronicle that Lydgate composed for Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, during the 1430s. I suggest that, in Lydgate’s historical poetry, and particularly in the Fall, the poet fixates upon the “surplus” of literary matter that the forms of his poetry leave out or exclude. In its most immediate sense, this “surplus” consists of those aspects of the historical record that Lydgate cannot, or will not, repeat within his poetry. But in a broader way, it also figures Lydgate’s view of history itself, which he feels is too vast, and too self-conflicted, to represent in full. I begin by examining Lydgate’s debts to the artes poetriae manuals, the formes fixes tradition, and practices of monastic historiography, all of which lie behind his belief in the surplus and shape his use of the idea. I then consider how the surplus, both as a term and as a concept, motivates the poetics of the Fall, and in particular, the pointed but ambiguous way that it speaks to matters of contemporary political concern to Humphrey of Gloucester.

Throughout his work, Geoffrey Chaucer often returns to a well-known medieval commonplace: that “words” should be “cosyn” to the “deeds” they denote. After tracing the history of this commonplace and noting its prominence in fourteenth-century legal, philosophical, and literary discourse, this chapter turns to Chaucer’s use of the dictum in his Canterbury Tales. I argue that the Tales may be read as Chaucer’s free exploration of the different kinds of deeds, or matters, to which a poet’s words might be held “cosyn.” Different pilgrims take different positions on this question throughout the Tales, and this accounts, in part, for the variety of matter and styles employed in their narratives. This variety notwithstanding, I suggest the Tales ultimately posit that the proper “deed” of literature is historical in character. Chaucer comes to this insight over the course of Fragment Seven, and he makes his boldest claim for it in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, which suggests that poetry always retains the marks of the history that has produced its words and forms—no matter how autonomous or fictional that poetry may appear.

Eventful analysis employs the most unfrozen and hence the most exploratory strand of CHA. It employs historical comparisons and explores transformation patterns, that is, patterns of qualitative change. It uses two key tools: historical description and conceptualization. The aim of historical description is to figure out what is going on, to gain a basic understand of a phenomenon before proceeding to explain it. Often this involves de-redescribing a phenomena that has qualitatively changed over time. Historical description, in turn, involves six concrete steps: fact gathering, chronicling, concatenation, periodizing, looking for intercurrence patterns, and rethinking research questions. Conceptualization serves to make historical description more comparativist and to explore broader patterns. The chapter discusses how to replace proper names with broader concepts by defining both the positive and the negative pole of concepts. It lists criteria for assessing the content and temporcal validity of concepts.

The three subchapters illustrate, how the authors from the Medieval period down to the fifth century have heavily relied on Eusebius of Caesarea’s Church history to writing their own beginnings of Christianity. In addition, they drew heavily on pseudonymous material outside the New Testament canon which they largely ignored. Driven by the challenges of their own times and in answering questions of their own days they developed the beginnings of Christianity from Frankish and late Roman perspectives. In these, vernacular, Greek and Roman cultural elements were deeply inter-related and re-projected into earlier times, while Christianity became regarded as the filter through which to perceive and judge the past.

This chapter examines the complex itineraries of two influential Latin American queer writers – Mexican playwright and official chronicler of Mexico City Salvador Novo (1904–1974) and Chilean intellectual and diplomat Augusto D’Halmar (1882–1950) – to expose how their bodies undergo significant transformations in order to assert new sensibilities and relationships in the economy and productivity of travel. Novo and D’Halmar utilize their bodies to respond to the heteronormative pact between the state and the lettered city, and also to map a larger world based on unexpected connections, transformations, and new readings of the common archive. Through Eastern clothing and intense fevers, cosmetic prostheses and flamboyant behavior, these writers disorganize the hierarchies that dominate the hegemonic narratives of sex. In the process, they attempt to achieve a sort of material autonomy – the chance to regulate their own bodily matter – and thus forge new paths for Latin American writers.

Where some chapters in this volume find narrative in the phenomena addressed by scientists, or in their reporting and representational practices, or in their argumentation and reasoning, this chapter finds narrative at the level of field and subfield formation. It does so through the history of historiography and philosophy of history, particularly the work of scholars who have differentiated the many forms of historical knowledge. Focusing on just three – the chronicle, the genealogy and the narrative – the chapter explains how these means for making historical knowledge might be made to cover knowledge-making in the sciences. The first half of the chapter develops this analytical approach, while the second applies it to the case of synthetic biology. By taking narrative’s epistemic significances more seriously we arrive at a new way to explain scientific change over time.

Chapter 6 analyses and discusses the relation between the Verse chronicle, the novel Aristandros and Kallithea and the so-called Moral poem. These three works share not only a number of motifs and themes but also a fairly large number of verses. They contain motifs such as the instability of fortune and the dangers of envy, which appear also in other texts by Manasses. The investigation here aims at understanding the significance of authorial choices in the handling of slander and envy: the recycling of images and expressions that transgress genre boundaries and thus contribute to a characteristic authorial voice. The attribution of the Moral poem to Manasses has been questioned, but in view of its relevance for a better understanding of Manasses’ authorship and its reception, it is included in the analysis. Regardless of who composed the poem, it represents the Manassean voice and makes for a fruitful discussion of questions of authorship, attribution and tradition.