This chapter offers a survey of the principal Merovingian narrative sources. It covers the key chronicles: Gregory, the Chronicles of Fredegar, and the Liber historiae Francorum, plus their relatives. It also offers a guide to the production of hagiography in the period. Throughout the emphasis is on how we might read the stories in these sources, drawing on the competing arguments that have been put forward by scholars about the nature of the texts. Only by understanding some of the strengths and weaknesses of the common approaches to the narrative sources can readers be armed to approach the complexities of Merovingian history.

Even though the theme of return migration is specific to Ezra–Nehemiah, the concept of social displacement appears throughout the Old Testament from the banishment from Eden, through ancestral journeys and multiple exiles from Samaria and Judah. Thus, the multivalent theology of Ezra–Nehemiah engenders a broader dialogue with the rest of the Old Testament.

The opening chapter presents an overview of some of the historical-critical issues that shape a theological reading of the text. A better understanding of literary, historical, and social issues provides an interpretive control for theological articulation.

This chapter explores intellectual responses to disasters and the creation and use of the disaster-divine wrath discourse as it spread from homilies to histories over time. It argues for centering human responses to disaster as the way forward using critical disaster theory.

Chapter 8 looks at Samuel in the theological context of the rest of the Scriptures: the Former Prophets or Deuteronomistic History, Chronicles, Psalms, Proverbs, Qohelet, and the New Testament.

This chapter is an overview of the extant Middle Mongolian historical sources of the Mongol Empire, its documents arranged here according to their places of origin, the writing systems used, and their content and genres. They are described and evaluated in the following sections: extant and lost chronicles, Uighur script epigraphic monuments (edicts, epitaphs and other memorial inscriptions, graffiti, seal and coin inscriptions), Uighur script letters of Mongol rulers to foreigners, monuments from Qara-Qoto, Uighur script documents from the lands of the Ilkhans and their vassals and from the Turfan area and the Dunhuang Mogao caves, square-script monuments, and badges and xylograph fragments in square script or in Uighur letters. The notes also offer new interpretations of some passages of the monuments discussed.

Sources that contain testimonies regarding the part of the Mongol Empire known to the Rus′ can be divided into three broad genre categories: chronicles, tales and saints’ lives, and documents. Rus′ sources from the first encounter of the Rus′ with the Mongols in 1223 through the seventeenth century concerning the Ulus of Jochi and its successor khanates can be divided into three chronological phases: 1223−1252, 1252−1448, and post-1448. Those written during the first phase, 1223−1252, initially express bewilderment about who the Mongols are and simply explain their presence as God’s punishment for the sins of the Rus′. Soon, however, they begin to disparage the Mongols and their Tatar subjects. Between 1252 and 1448, the Tatars are presented in neutral (non-disparaging) terms. After 1448, church writings revert to the pre-1252 pejorative terminology about the Mongol–Tatars and expand on the slurs and denigrations. State documents, in contrast, maintain neutral verbiage.

The twelfth–thirteenth centuries formed one of the richest periods in Armenian historiography. Armenian sources of that period can be classified as general histories, chronicles, hagiographic sources, colophons, epigraphic sources or inscriptions, and poetry. They are essential for understanding the patterns of thought of medieval Armenians as well as of the Mongols. The Armenian sources differ in their attitudes toward the Mongols, expressing both neutral and personal views, and depending on where they were written, in Greater Armenia or in Cilician Armenia. The information of these historians varies according to their views of certain historical events, which are based on their culture, locality, and time and style of writing, as well as the character of the sources, whether chronicles or historical compilations.

The three subchapters demonstrate the early attempts at Christianizing historiography. The start of history is made by the historically perceived Resurrection of Christ, as outlined by Iulius Africanus. Christians are not simply part of a long history of human development, but they mark a new beginning of human history. What existed before, Paganism and Judaism, were only ephemeral preparations for Christianity. Like Eusebius later, he draws on pseudonymous writings, particularly documents that he refers back to the archive of Edessa. Origen, before him, had already approached history from a spiritual angle, largely disregarding the historical and chronological side of it, and making use of the canonical writings of the New Testament in an allegorical way by which he dissociates Christian history from that of Jews and Pagans, and sees it guided and foreseen by God. Very similar to Origen, Tertullian in the Latin speaking world portraits Christians in fighting of Pagans and Jews, but also deviant Christians, heretics and less commited brothers and sisters which he contrasts with those prophetic Christians who are fully engaged, are prepared for asceticism, rejection of pagan pasts and are willing martyrs. Instead of canonical scriptures it is the prophetic reading of the church traditions that inform about the origins of Christianity.

From the Iberian colonization on, the American Indians were understood based on their skin color and the place where they were living. They were imputed a corporal condition and/or a complexio linked to the preponderance of the melancholic and phlegmatic ‘humor’ which expressed a kind of specific morality and behavior according to medical discourse of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. This chapter analyzes how these medical assessments were transferred to the American Indians with a high degree of generalizing essentialism in order to naturalize a condition of permanent servitude. This knowledge transfer used to describe them, implied a series of strategic analogies and correspondences among the generalized significations and representations of complex melancholy on the individuals in the Old World and the observed practices and behaviors of the Natives of the New World.

Early Rus written culture, and eventually literature, developed following the spread of Christianity, which was adopted as the official religion at the end of the tenth century. Christian writings reached Rus in Church Slavonic translation, mainly from Greek originals. Church Slavonic was close enough to local East Slavonic to be treated as the learned register rather than a different language. This learned register was not a closed system. Much Rus writing sticks closely to imported Church Slavonic linguistic and stylistic models, notably in homiletics and in some kinds of hagiography. However, where there is significant local content (in chronicles, for example), there is also more linguistic flexibility across registers. Surviving local compositions are not common. They cannot provide hard evidence of an established culture of literariness. However, they are sufficient to suggest patterns of production in two areas. Prominent among the earliest works are the ‘foundational’ texts whose principal theme is the origins and dignity of Rus itself and of its Christian institutions. Second, a small number of texts hint at a culture of verbal display beyond the devotional, perhaps at court.

Medieval societies did not exclusively and inflexibly conceive kingship as the remit of a mature man, even if adult male rulers were more typical. This introduction shows the urgency and timeliness of looking beyond the ‘unspoken hegemony’ of adulthood to understand the intersections between childhood and kingship. Focusing first on the interconnectedness of representation and reality, the chapter highlights the necessity of uniting an emphasis on children’s lived experiences as political actors with an examination of cultural representations of ideas about childhood and rulership. The introduction then turns to consider three essential components which shape this study’s methodology: a comparative approach, a diachronic analysis and a holistic approach to the sources. This section argues for the importance of contextualising child kingship within a wider comparative framework which accounts for political, social, cultural and legal change. It also sketches the benefits of adopting a broad approach to the source material which incorporates chronicle, documentary, didactic, epistolary, legal and literary sources.

With his ‘Solomonic Connection’, David Firth observes the man Solomon as he appears in Kings and Chronicles. Solomon is ‘paradigmatic’ for understanding wisdom in both of these books and yet he is not treated identically therein. Kings and Chronicles offer different portraits of the exceedingly wise king, whether that be his foundational role for wisdom or his problematic relationship with it. Matters of the temple, Solomon’s behaviour, torah, and the very conception of wisdom itself all have a place in biblical presentations of Solomon. Firth looks closely at 1 Kings 1–11 and 2 Chronicles 1–9 with a literary and theological reading that does not let one account determine the other or allow the Solomonic portraits in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes to have all of the attention.

Chapter 2 probes the temporal dimensions of the memory of the dissolution, which it traces across the period c. 1540–c. 1640 and in the context of the transition from personal to inherited memory. It explores the place of the suppression in both Protestant and Catholic historiography, and its role in what recent scholarship has identified as the reformation of English history. It uses evidence gleaned principally from chronologically organised sources such as histories and chronicles, including those by John Foxe, John Stow, Peter Heylyn, Nicholas Sander, and Gilbert Burnet, as well as lesser known authors. It examines how – far from the insignificant episode described in many modern studies – the dissolution was seen by many commentators as a critical, if not the critical, episode in the Protestant Reformation. It also interrogates the emerging tendency exhibited by Catholic and Protestant authors alike to judge Henry VIII’s reputation by the dissolution. In the context of English Protestantism, it is particularly striking that this tendency developed as perspectives on Henry’s reign became increasingly anxious and critical. At the heart of this chapter are questions of how and when the suppression came to be considered a rupture with the medieval past and a critical Reformation event.

Shakespeare’s plays suggest not so much a preoccupation with war as his recognition of its inescapability. He seems never to have experienced warfare firsthand, but no doubt had spoken to people who had. But most of what Shakespeare knew came from books. Chief among these were the chronicles he depended upon for his histories, primarily the group project we refer to as “Holinshed.” What he found was that warfare is more or less indistinguishable over time, a fact revealed in the tedious repetition of battle accounts, further blurred by the echoing of aristocratic family names over generations – and, in the often-overlooked source of the 1577 Holinshed, in which the recycling of a limited number of woodcuts to illustrate events separated by hundreds of years reveals the dispiriting reality. Ironically, it is in Henry V, Shakespeare’s seemingly most triumphal presentation of English military heroism, in which “the question of these wars” finds an answer.

This chapter assesses the significance of a variety of genres of written and material sources for an understanding of political culture in Byzantium, including narratives and chronicles, encomia, orations, ceremonial handbooks and lists, monuments, silks, coins, archival documents, lead seals and letters. It distinguishes between narratives produced at the centre of Byzantine political life and those produced by outsiders: the former not simply windows into Byzantine political culture but integral elements of that culture, projecting the norms and expectations of the governing elite; the latter offering alternative perspectives, valuable for plugging chronological gaps but also as correctives to the propaganda that characterises so much Byzantine historiography. Few administrative records survive from Byzantium, especially compared to the Latin west, although legions of lead seals point to archives once far richer. Our surviving sources, particularly speeches, suggest that only in the later period were alternatives to the prevailing political order countenanced, and even then, despite a loss in territorial reach, the emperor’s court still formed the focal point of political life.

Too little scholarly attention has been paid to the paradox that those from the southern kingdom of Judah wrote, collected, and edited a foundational narrative not of Judah but of Israel, the ethnonym more closely associated with the northern kingdom even within the biblical narratives. This chapter argues that, rather than staking their claim to be the sole heirs to the heritage of the covenant with YHWH, the Judahite biblical editors constructed a biblical narrative that emphasizes that Judah is only one portion of a larger Israel that is presently—from the perspective of the editors and their implied audience—incomplete and awaiting reunion and restoration. By constructing an Israel of the past and rhetorically situating the reader in exile, the editors of the Primary History (Genesis–2 Kings) and 1–2 Chronicles establish a perspective of restoration eschatology in which an idealized biblical Israel (of course under the leadership of Judah) does not presently exist, having lost its status due to covenantal disobedience and disunity, but remains a social and theological aspiration.

How the long-standing genre of historical manuscripts show how writers worked with a broad and important sense of their place within a tradition.