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  • Chapter 7 - Pagan Histories/Pagan Fictions

  • from Part I - Time
  • Edited by Jennifer Jahner, California Institute of Technology, Emily Steiner, University of Pennsylvania, Elizabeth M. Tyler, University of York
  • Book:
    Medieval Historical Writing
    Published online:
    19 December 2019
    Print publication:
    28 November 2019, pp 117-136

  • Summary

    Because Christian history has distinct stages hinging on the Incarnation, the term “pagan” drafts non-Christians into particular temporal relationships with Christianity. This essay explores the ways that pagans are historically solicited for their virtue, beauty, rhetorical skill, knowledge, and capacity for engendering Christian self-reflection. It launches from the idea that pagan-ness in medieval writing performs a politics of historical othering, but it argues that many narratives that engage in such confessional border-keeping are tormented by contradictory responses of mourning and loss. As a result, in a variety of historical writings, pagans are overtly damned in order to be underhandedly “saved.”