The historic imagination in fourteenth-century English vernacular chronicles
Abstract
Medieval chronicles, like all historiography, exhibit traits of an historic imagination. The use of imagination in the creation of historical texts is essentially similar to the use of a literary imagination in the creation of fiction. Thus, historiography can be examined as if it were a literary product. The vernacular historiography of fourteenth-century England corroborates this notion. In the Brut, the Polychronicon, the Bruce, the Orygynal Cronykil, the Chronicle by Thomas of Castleford, and the political poems by Laurence Minot, startling and unique differences exist in the presentation and content of historical events. The problem of this present research concerns both how and why this occurs. Michel Foucault was one of the first theorists to question the validity of history by questioning the validity of language itself. Drawing upon this notion, post-modernist historians, especially Hayden White, soon discovered that the fictive element in historiography actually may be more of a revelation than a hindrance to historical study since such an element provides a key into understanding the imaginative processes, the personal and societal conceptions, and the ideological biases of the historiographer and, by extension, his society. The fictive element in medieval chronicles reflects a writer's "historiographical style," which needs to be examined in order for a reader to understand the historiographical processes of medieval times. Despite the various and vastly opposed ideological differences that exist between the six historiographers, a single theme appears to dominate the whole of vernacular historical writing in the fourteenth century. That theme concerns the great lesson of faith, a lesson that is usually depicted in social terms as an individual's fidelity to his lord but which allegorically signifies the greater faith of all Christians to God.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Hughes, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Literature|Middle Ages|British and Irish literature|Middle Ages
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