Contemporary Chronicles of the Middle Ages - Sources of Twelfth Century History

Joseph Stephenson?s Contemporary Chronicles of the Middle Ages is a doorway into the twelfth century, that lively period when Europe was busy producing kings, saints, monks, crusaders, bishops, barons, miracles, quarrels, sieges, omens, bad weather and enough dynastic tension to keep several scriptoria in employment. The subtitle, Sources of Twelfth Century History , tells you exactly what is inside: not modern hindsight polished into a smooth narrative, but the voices and records closer to the actual noise. This is a book of medieval chronicles, which means history before it learned to pretend it was neutral. Chroniclers recorded battles, rulers, births, deaths, disasters, councils, visions, rebellions and divine displeasure with varying degrees of accuracy and great confidence in providence. If a comet appeared, it probably meant something. If a king behaved badly, the chronicler may have noticed. If a monastery was wronged, the moral universe was alerted immediately and in Latin. The pleasure of contemporary sources is that they give you the Middle Ages before the museum glass goes up. Here are the people of the time explaining their own world, with all its assumptions intact: faith, hierarchy, violence, law, land, loyalty, relics, rumours, oaths, marvels and political complaints dressed as moral observation. A modern historian may patiently separate cause, context and evidence. A medieval chronicler may instead report that God, a saint, a bad king and an eclipse were all involved, and somehow the result feels more honest about the emotional atmosphere. The twelfth century was hardly short of material. The Anarchy in England, the rise of Angevin power, crusading energy, church reform, monastic expansion, legal change, court politics and the general medieval habit of turning inheritance into warfare all belong to this world. Chronicles are where these things become immediate: not ?feudal instability? as a textbook phrase, but named men burning places, swearing things, betraying other things, founding abbeys, seeing signs, and dying inconveniently. There is a fine irony in calling these sources ?contemporary,? because they are now old enough to make almost everything else look recently assembled. Yet to their own age they were the news, the record, the warning, the explanation and sometimes the complaint department. They remind us that history was once written by people who did not know they were living in ?the Middle Ages.? They thought they were living in the present, which is usually how the trap works. For readers of medieval history, primary sources, chronicles, twelfth-century England and Europe, monastic writers, crusading history, and old accounts where politics and salvation keep sharing a desk, this is a useful and characterful volume. It is especially suited to anyone who prefers to meet the past in its own handwriting, before later historians have tidied its hair and corrected its table manners. Good copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. A solid Llanerch Enterprises volume, ready for the shelf where kings misbehave, monks take notes, comets look suspicious, and the twelfth century continues insisting that everything happened for a reason, preferably one recorded before supper. …