IMC 2019: Sessions
Session 709: National Identity and Medieval History Writing, III: Past and Present Histories
Tuesday 2 July 2019, 14.15-15.45
Organisers: | Henry Marsh, Department of History, University of Exeter Trevor Russell Smith, Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds |
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Moderator/Chair: | Tom Chadwick, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Exeter |
Paper 709-a | Whose National History?: Foreign and Native Sources in the Arthurian Defences of Elis Gruffydd, John Leland, and John Prise (Language: English) Index terms: Historiography - Medieval, Political Thought |
Paper 709-b | Geoffrey of Monmouth and Universal History (Language: English) Index terms: Genealogy and Prosopography, Historiography - Medieval, Language and Literature - Latin, Political Thought |
Paper 709-c | National Identity in John Strecche's Chronicle (Language: English) Index terms: Historiography - Medieval, Language and Literature - Latin, Mentalities, Political Thought |
Abstract | This series of four sessions examines the relationship between concepts of ethnic and national identity in the historical literature of the Middle Ages. Papers in this session consider how historical writers engaged with and imagined national identity through histories of contemporary events as well as accounts of the past. The first paper explores how three writers, who identify variously as English, Welsh, and British, defended the Arthurian mythos against criticism. The paper questions how ideas of 'foreign' and 'native' sources were treated by authors, and in particular Welsh writers. The second paper examines how 13th-century universal chroniclers incorporated the events of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae into an international framework. The paper analyses the parallels between British and Old Testament history in the Westminster continuation of the Flores historiarum. The third paper considers how the Kenilworth canon John Strecche constructed a peculiar national narrative through the comparison of ancient and contemporary history in his early 15th-century chronicle. |