The very personal history of Nithard: family and honour in the Carolingian world

Nithard's Histories of the civil wars fought between Louis the Pious's sons reveal much about mid‐ninth‐century nobility, political values, and the author's changing social position. This article considers how Nithard's immediate familial history affected the text's composition. We argue that his incorporation of authorial voice and detail, crafting of the royal lineage, and emphasis on fraternitas suggest that Nithard employed the text to fight for legitimacy and honour, both familial and individual. We propose that the Histories should be read as a social commemoration of Nithard's familial memories, thus complicating the assumption that family histories were the purview of women.     

Canon law and the practice of penance: Burchard of Worms's penitential

This article investigates the characteristics and function of Book 19 of Burchard's Decretum. It demonstrates how the penitential questionnaire, usually considered the most original part of this text, was the result of Burchard's systematic expansion upon his main source, Regino of Prüm. It argues that Book 19 was not a conventional penitential, to be used to support the administration of penance by priests, but rather that it was meant to be both an exemplary penitential and a summary of the preceding eighteen books. Burchard thus sought to ensure there was no contradiction between his collection of canon law and his penitential.     

Origin Narratives and the Making of Dynastic History in al‐Dīnawarī's Akhbār

This article takes the reader on a journey into the historical writing of the ninth century Muslim historian al‐Dīnawarī (d. 895) and examines the motives behind composing his al‐Akhbār al‐?iwāl. The themes and narrative arrangements of this work give insight into al‐Dīnawarī's historical agenda that demonstrates his interest in royal histories that exemplify the rise and fall of nations, dynasties, and powerful rulers. Al‐Dīnawarī's emphasis on specific episodes and events demonstrates that only certain ethnic groups whose political legitimacy derives from a respectable and prominent origin can bring about political and social stability. By dealing with these sociopolitical concerns, this article also sheds new light on the intellectual discourses and political crises that dominated Islamic society during the eighth and ninth centuries and the way al‐Dīnawarī reacted to these challenges.     

The ‘Life of Muhammad’ in Eulogius of Córdoba: some evidence for the transmission of Greek polemic to the Latin west

Eulogius of Córdoba, the principal recorder of the ninth‐century Córdoban martyrs’ movement, copied for posterity a polemic biography of the Prophet Muhammad. The lost original is the earliest such text known in Latin, despite the longstanding tradition of anti‐Islamic polemic in the Greek east. However, textual analysis indicates that Eulogius revised the original biography, and that his revisions were influenced by the polemic of John of Damascus. Eulogius's exposure to John's writings probably came through personal contact with a monk from the monastery of Mar Saba, contact which offers rare evidence of a non‐textual transmission of ideas.     

Flothilde's visions and Flodoard's histories: a tenth‐century mutation?

Although Flodoard of Reims is best known for his comprehensive historical writings, he also recorded separately the visions of a young girl named Flothilde. Re‐examining Flodoard's varied historical works in light of these visions reveals that he was unusually interested in visions generally, and particularly those of women. The question is why. In proposing answers, it will be suggested that both Flodoard's histories and Flothilde's visions represent a crucial moment in the transformation of ninth‐century Carolingian understandings of history, visions, and reform into the quite different patterns of the early eleventh century.     

The Poeta Saxo at Paderborn: episcopal authority and Carolingian rule in late ninth‐century Saxony

This paper argues that the Poeta Saxo's epic poem about Charlemagne was composed at the bishopric of Paderborn as part of a wider literary programme that included both the Translatio sancti Liborii and the Vita sancti Liborii. Near the close of the ninth century, when Paderborn's renown and resources were at their lowest ebb, these three works articulated an image of episcopal authority, touted the pre‐eminence of Paderborn, and made a bid for royal patronage.     

Flodoard,the will of St Remigius and the see of Reims in the tenth century

The ‘longer’ will of St Remigius of Reims, as preserved in the mid‐tenth‐century Historia Remensis ecclesiae of Flodoard of Reims, is widely agreed to be a forgery. But despite the fact that it is known almost exclusively from Flodoard's work, historians have never suggested that this document was produced in his day. This article contends that the longer will was indeed an original component of the Historia. Read in this context, the will can throw new light on the Historia itself, the career of Flodoard and the tumultuous history of the church of Reims in the first half of the tenth century.     

Several Thoughts on Newell's Tyrants

This critical review of Newell's Tyrants consists of two parts. The first one departs from questions Jan Pato?ka, the most important Czech philosopher of the 20^th century, raised in the 1970s in the context of his critical reading of a book by Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History. Pato?ka's criticism of Barraclough, suggested here as a starting point for a dialogue with Newell, departed from Husserl's Crisis of European Sciences and his own interpretation of the current phase of history of mankind as the end of Europe and the arrival of a post-European age. The second part confronts Newell's treatments of tyrants usurping power throughout the human history and his efforts to offer a “homeopathic cure for the tyrannical temptations” that we might see emerging in the future with the concept of totalitarianism elaborated in the political thought of Hannah Arendt.     

The Life of Constantine,the Life of Methodius and the history of the Slavs in the ninth century: a reassessment

The Slavonic Lives of Constantine/Cyril (d. 869) and Methodius (d. 885) are generally considered to have been written shortly after the death of these two saints, and in any case in the ninth century. However, the present article tries to show that this contention is not conclusive. Instead, it argues for a later writing, in the course of the tenth or eleventh centuries, taking into account in particular the authors' use of older Latin sources on the same theme. As a result, the specific information from these two Lives is subject to caution, which has important consequences for the biography of Constantine/Cyril, for the modalities of the papal mission to Moravia, and more generally for the history of the Slavic countries in the ninth century.     

St Columba and the convention at Druimm Cete: peace and politics at seventh‐century Iona

Attendance at the ‘convention of kings’ at Druimm Cete in north‐east Ireland is one of the most famous episodes in the career of St Columba or Colum Cille, who died in 597. Discussion of the significance of this shadowy summit, largely informed by unreliable late evidence, has hitherto focused upon what (may have) transpired there between kings based in Ireland and Scotland. The result has been the neglect of the hagiographical dimension of the presentation of Druimm Cete in our principal source, Adomnán's Vita Sancti Columbae, composed c.700. Analysis of this material shows that Adomnán's information about the convention came from his principal source, composed some sixty years earlier. It reveals moreover that Druimm Cete assumed prominence within the Columban dossier in the 640s for what it represented, rather than because of what actually happened there. Once the hagiographical agenda of Vita Sancti Columbae and its principal source is restored to its rightful place in evaluating the text, it emerges that several of its best‐known stories – including the story of Columba's ordination of a Scottish king – are much more problematic as witnesses to sixth‐century history than is conventionally supposed. As scholars begin to lose their grip upon the historical Columba, however, they grow better able to grasp seventh‐century political history in north‐east Ireland and Gaelic Scotland.     

Machiavelli's scientific method: a common understanding of his novelty in the sixteenth century

This paper argues that Machiavelli's method, his inductive and comparative use of history and experience for political analysis, and his fashioning of historical-political analysis as ‘science’, played an important and still unrecognised role in his reception in the sixteenth century. It makes the case that Machiavelli's inductive reasoning and stress on historia and experientia offered a model for scientific method that open-minded sixteenth-century scholars, eager to understand, organise and augment human knowledge (scientia), could fit to their own epistemology. By focusing on the question of method—a crucial issue for sixteenth-century contemporaries—the paper offers more than a key to the understanding of Machiavelli's positive reception. It also helps in apprehending the crucial importance of Lucretius to Machiavelli's scholarship; the role of the late Renaissance fascination with historia in his reception; and the breadth of appropriation of his method exactly in the decades when anti-Machiavellianism became official politics all over Europe. These claims are sustained through the cases of Machiavelli's early translators and promulgators; the French legal humanists and historiographers; the Swiss, Italian and French scholars engaging with medicine, Paracelsism and astronomy; the authors of political maxims from all over Europe; and finally Francis Bacon.     

Countering the hegemony of the Irish national canon: the modernist rhetoric of Seán O'Faoláin (1938–50)1

ABSTRACT. The telling and re‐telling of national history has long been recognised in studies of nationalism as one of its key legitimising and mobilising strategies. In this article I illustrate how a rhetorical approach can effectively explore this dynamic and emotive dimension of nationalist ideology by examining the rhetorical strategies in the Irish liberal intellectual, Seán O'Faoláin's, attempts to reconstitute the popular canon of Irish history in the 1930s and 1940s. More specifically, I show that contrary to depictions of O'Faoláin as a European liberal who employed rational argument to undermine and encourage the rejection of Irish nationalism and its emphasis on rhetorical narratives of the past, O'Faoláin's challenge to the Irish national canon reveals that he himself mobilised historical narrative to promote his own modernist version of Irish liberal nationalism and demonstrated in the process that he was one of the most skilful rhetors of his day.     

TRAUMA DELEGITIMIZED: KARL LÖWITH AND THE COSMIC VIEW OF HISTORY

This article uncovers the work of trauma in Karl Löwith's historical thought. Although best known for his critique of the philosophy of history and for the conception of secularization in his 1949 book, Meaning in History, Löwith deepened his positive historical vision in several essays that he wrote in the 1950s and 1960s. From these texts emerges a unique historical orientation, which I call the “cosmic view of history.” This perspective was at once a critique of modern historical consciousness and an embodied corrective to that consciousness, one in which the catastrophes of the twentieth century were relativized and made endurable. In both the origin and structure of this historical orientation and in its textual expression in Löwith's work, trauma is a residual force that links Löwith's language, his experiences, and the postwar context. The role of trauma in Löwith's thought further reveals a process of delegitimization in which historical consciousness and historical events lose their power to determine historical meaning, thus enabling a response to and an escape from catastrophe. This article also explores the significance of this cosmic view of history for contemporary theoretical concerns related to the Anthropocene and its consequences for historical theory.     

Cultural contacts and ethnic origins in Viking Age Wales and northern Britain: the case of Albanus,Britain's first inhabitant and Scottish ancestor

Albanus, an eponymous ancestor for the kingdom of Alba, provides an example of the extent to which the creation of an ethnic identity was accompanied by new ideas about origins, which replaced previous accounts. Through an analysis of the Historia Brittonum’s textual tradition and Welsh knowledge of early Roman history and medieval ethnic groups, this article establishes that Albanus was added to the Historia Brittonum in the late ninth or early tenth century as an ancestral figure for the new kingdom of Alba in northern Britain. This was potentially a result of shared political situations in Gwynedd, Alba (formerly Pictland) and Strathclyde in relation to Scandinavian power at this time, which encouraged contacts and the spread of Alba-based ideology to Gwynedd. The later development of this idea and its significance in Alba itself, Geoffrey of Monmouth's account and English claims to supremacy over Scotland are also traced.     

HISTORY AND THE MANIFEST IMAGE: HAYDEN WHITE AS A PHILOSOPHER OF HISTORY1

To claim that Hayden White has yet to be read seriously as a philosopher of history might seem false on the face of it. But do tropes and the rest provide any epistemic rationale for differing representations of historical events found in histories? As an explanation of White's influence on philosophy of history, such a proffered emphasis only generates a puzzle with regard to taking White seriously, and not an answer to the question of why his efforts should be worthy of any philosophical attention at all. For what makes his emphasis on narrative structure and its associated tropes of philosophical relevance? What, it may well be asked, did (or could) any theory that draws its categories from a stock provided by literary criticism contribute to explicating problems with regard to the warranting of claims about knowledge, explanation, or causation that represent those concerns that philosophy typically brings to this field? Robert Doran's anthologizing of previously uncollected pieces, ranging as they do over a literal half‐century of White's published work, offers an opportunity to identify explicitly those philosophical themes and arguments that regularly and prominently feature there. Moreover, White's essays in this volume demonstrate a credible knowledge of and interest in mainstream analytic philosophers of his era and also reveal White as deeply influenced by or well acquainted with other important philosophers of history. White thus invites a reading of his work as philosophy, and this volume presents the opportunity for accepting it as such.     

HERBERT BUTTERFIELD AND THE ETHICS OF HISTORIOGRAPHY

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SCHOPENHAUER'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Contained mostly within one brief chapter of his The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer's philosophy of history has long been considered either hostile or irrelevant to nineteenth‐century philosophy of history. This article argues that, on the contrary, Schopenhauer maintained what would become a widely accepted criticism of the methodological identity of historiography and the natural sciences. His criticism of Hegel's teleological historiography was more philosophically rigorous than is commonly acknowledged. And his proposal of a “genuine” historiography along the model of art became a major influence on the historiography of Burckhardt, Emerson, and Nietzsche. This article accordingly aims to restore Schopenhauer to the conversation of nineteenth‐century philosophy of history.     

The rise of the new model army

In this paper the contribution of Robert R. Palmer to the now booming Atlantic history is put into perspective. It describes the main features of the political and historiographical context that inspired the writing of his book, The Age of the Democratic Revolution in the early 1950s (first volume published in 1959, second volume in 1964). It also argues that the war experience Palmer had in the historical section of the Army Ground Forces has been important in reviving the interest for the transatlantic dimension in modern history that was central in his PhD dissertation. This paper shows how the liberal-tocquevillian approach that Palmer adopted to explain the multiple revolutions that shook North America and Europe in the last quarter of the 18th century earned him the attacks of the Marxist historians. In its last part this paper makes use of private letters to claim that in the 1970s and 1980s the Italian historian Franco Venturi revived the scholarly interest in Palmer's perspective despite methodological differences between his Settecento riformatore and Palmer's analysis. Settecento riformatore and The Age of the Democratic Revolution have contributed to the interest in a transatlantic approach to 18th-century history that is now pursued under the heading of “entangled histories”.