IMC 2017: Sessions

Session 1638: Shaping the Past, the Present, and the Future: Early Medieval Latin and Greek Chronicles and Their Histories

Organiser:	Jesse W. Torgerson, College of Letters, Wesleyan University, Connecticut
Moderator/Chair:	Stephan Köhler, Historisches Institut, Universität Mannheim
Paper 1638-a	Writing History and Christianizing Time: Bede's De Ratione Temporum and the Historia ecclesiastica (Language: English) Silke Schwandt, Fakultät für Geschichtswissenschaft, Philosophie und Theologie, Universität Bielefeld Index terms: Anthropology, Historiography - Medieval, Social History
Paper 1638-b	Your Emperor, the Antichrist: How the Chronography of Synkellos and Theophanes Reimagined the Present by Re-Calibrating Time (Language: English) Jesse W. Torgerson, College of Letters, Wesleyan University, Connecticut Index terms: Byzantine Studies, Historiography - Medieval
Abstract	One idea with a long pedigree in medieval studies holds that, for medieval people, the past always held sway over the present, and so too over the future. This panel will re-examine this important idea by reconsidering the temporal framework behind three important and influential chronological-historical projects from the Early Medieval period. Our readings suggest that investigating the temporal matrices lying behind medieval chronicles allows us to study these texts as evidence of social actions of greater complexity and variety than has been acknowledged.