The High Middle Ages: A Historiographical Framework

This study examines the transformation of historical writing in the Latin West between the fifth and eleventh centuries. Its object is not the events of the period, but the operations through which authors and communities selected, ordered, and explained the past. It argues that early medieval Christian historiography did not represent a degradation of classical models, but rather a reorganisation of historical writing: it retained techniques, authorities, and materials inherited from Antiquity and subordinated them to new conceptions of time, community, and legitimacy. The corpus is examined along five axes—conceptions of time, models of causality, selection of sources, narrative genre, and institutional function—applied to Eusebius of Caesarea, Augustine of Hippo, and Orosius as late antique antecedents; to the historians of the post-Roman kingdoms; to Bede; and to the annalistic, chronicle, and hagiographical production of monastic milieux. The Asturian chronicles and selected Andalusi testimonies make it possible to incorporate the specificity of the Iberian Peninsula without subordinating it to Latin periodisation. The study distinguishes three temporal levels and explicitly separates modern interpretive categories from the early medieval corpus.

KEYWORDS

Early medieval historiography; Latin West; providence; historical causality; historiographical genres; hagiography; monastic memory; post-Roman kingdoms; al-Andalus.

ABSTRACT

This study examines the transformation of historical writing in the Latin West between the fifth and eleventh centuries. Its object is not the events of the period, but the operations through which authors and communities selected, ordered, and explained the past. It argues that early medieval Christian historiography did not represent a degradation of classical models, but rather a reorganisation of historical writing: it retained techniques, authorities, and materials inherited from Antiquity and subordinated them to new conceptions of time, community, and legitimacy. The corpus is examined along five axes—conceptions of time, models of causality, selection of sources, narrative genre, and institutional function—applied to Eusebius of Caesarea, Augustine of Hippo, and Orosius as late antique antecedents; to the historians of the post-Roman kingdoms; to Bede; and to the annalistic, chronicle, and hagiographical production of monastic milieux. The Asturian chronicles and selected Andalusi testimonies make it possible to incorporate the specificity of the Iberian Peninsula without subordinating it to Latin periodisation. The study distinguishes three temporal levels and explicitly separates modern interpretive categories from the early medieval corpus.

KEYWORDS

Early medieval historiography; Latin West; providence; historical causality; historiographical genres; hagiography; monastic memory; post-Roman kingdoms; al-Andalus.