Cunningly Crafted Histories

Matthew Kempshall's book began life as a series of lectures for Oxford undergraduates. It was born out of anger and commitment: 'anger that there would still seem to be stubborn vestiges of the sort of functionalist secularism which used to be claimed as historiographical orthodoxy in Oxford in the mid-1980s by "Man and the Natural World"; commitment, in that it is intended to be useful to a different generation of students'. The birth was the outcome of the author's successful struggle to convince enough of his early-modern and modern colleagues that the history of European historiography began not in 1500, but in the classical world, and continued in Christian late antiquity and in the Middle Ages. As its title suggests, the author's point of departure is the rootedness of historical writing in rhetoric, that is, in classical literary and moral, judicial and political practice, and in biblical study.

The introductory chapter (pp. 1-33) is devoted to spelling out the definitions and commentaries of Cicero (first century BC) and Quintilian (first century AD). Rhetoric, 'the art or science of speaking well', aimed 'to teach, to move [through feeling to action], and to give pleasure'. It enabled men 'to speak well on civil questions'; it was the essence of communication between human beings. Historians, especially Sallust (first century BC) and Josephus (first century AD), and poets, especially Vergil (first century BC), and Lucan (first century BC), purveyed many examples of such communications. In late antiquity, Christian writers (such as Boethius, Cassiodorus, and Isidore of Seville), theologians (especially Augustine and Gregory the Great), and historians (Eusebius, Orosius), transmitted and commented on works of ancient rhetoric. All the above were written in Latin, or in Greek which was soon translated into Latin. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, more of Aristotle's works became available in Latin translations from the Greek, in some cases via Arabic. 'The traditional Roman contexts of speech-making, in law courts and political assemblies, were replaced by new arenas [details come later in the book] for delivering legal and political counsel' (p. 14). Kempshall keeps his word to the undergraduates, letting medieval authors speak for themselves, and quoting all texts in modern English translations, though often giving key phrases in Latin. These texts he summarizes as constituting 'the range of material which informed most, if not all, the writing of history in the Middle Ages', and providing 'categories of analysis' for modern students of historiography (p. 18). Some brief case-studies, chiefly from the twelfth century and from contexts in or near royal courts, illustrate connections between oral and written forms of commemorating the past, questions of audience, and the appearance of vernacular texts such as chansons de geste (poems on noble deeds). The chapter ends with three significant twentieth-century developments in historical method on which medieval historiography throws light: the linguistic turn, the structure of narratology, and the ways language was 'conditioned, even determined' by circumstances of use and by audience expectations. This is a live tradition, then: these works are no more dead than is, conventionally, the Latin they are written in.

The rest of the book is composed of five very substantial chapters. The first, 'History and Historiography' (pp. 34-120), provides a rich repertoire of items in the three main medieval historiographical traditions. In the first, the Classical, the focus is chiefly on Sallust and Josephus. War and politics, described through invented speeches, battle-scenes, geographical and ethnographic excursuses, gave these historians opportunities to express the moral judgements that were their primary concern. In the second tradition, the Christian, use was made from apostolic times onwards of the huge resources offered by the Bible - of the New Testament histories for instance by Eusebius in his ten-book Ecclesiastical History (early fourth century), and of Old Testament cycles of alternating good and evil regimes by Orosius in his Seven Books of History Against the Pagans (early fifth century). From the vantage point of what Orosius...