Building on their training and contacts, Iberian men of letters such as Nogueira widened their intellectual horizons. Amid a period of relative peace known as the Pax Hispánica (1601–1621), the expertise of such figures in historical writing was solicited by members of the Republic of Letters interested in Iberian matters. Such intellectual correspondences gave way to debates on politics of conversion and tolerance and the relationship between royal and ecclesiastical power. In the meantime, someone like Nogueira specialized in historical matters and became a source of information for foreign intellectuals who worked on behalf of French, Italian, English, and other powers. This process of specialization fueled the critical political sense of Nogueira while bringing him increasing attention from admirers and critics. At the core of his self-fashioning strategy, Nogueira’s library became a proxy by which he and his critics came to define his status as a mercenary of knowledge. As this status started to become more evident, so too did a strengthening sense of belonging to a mercenary republic.

Continuing the volume’s fourth thematic strand (Cultural Perspectives), this chapter studies the writing of history and memory in the age of William the Conqueror. After a discussion of Normandy’s first dynastic chronicle composed by Dudo of Saint-Quentin, it directs its focus onto monastic historical narratives produced in Normandy, England, and their neighbouring territories, before turning to a range of contemporary secular narratives. The chapter is rounded off with considerations of Anglo-Norman historical writing in the broader context of north-western Europe and its transmission in manuscripts.

This chapter considers the relationship between change and continuity in the English Reformations through a close study of historical writing. It situates Protestant historical writing during the Tudor Reformations in its polemical context: the need to defend Protestantism from charges of novelty and heresy, and explain away the apparent glory of the Catholic Church over the previous 1,500 years, which were captured in the phrase, ‘Where was your Church before Luther?’ It shows that in answering that question, Protestant writers used traditional practices and modes of historical writing – apocalypticism, providence and prophesy – and employed traditional media (ballads and prophetic images) alongside the new technology of print. It argues that this apparent continuity with the medieval past was vital to Protestant experience and expression of the Reformations as a jolt to historical consciousness. Because they were teleological, these types of historical writing defined the Reformation as a seismic and defining change in history: the last days which would see the culmination of human history and the purification of the Church. Articulating the importance of the presence necessitated the past being remembered and redefined. In this way, memory was crucial to the process of Reformation.

This chapter explores how classical ideas of the gift were utilised by medieval writers. The chapter focuses on three particularly influential writers from medieval England active across a range of genres: John of Salisbury, William of Malmesbury and Matthew Paris. The chapter shows that these writers were highly familiar with classical ideas of the gift and drew extensively upon them in shaping their own writings.