Abstract
The familiarity attaching to the idiom ‘writing history’ obscures its paradox: the participle locates the ‘writing’ in the present, while the noun belongs to the past. ‘History’ is a shapeshifter, as its journey from estoire reveals: it connotes not ‘the past’, but the story of the past, ‘the narration, representation, or study of events’.1 There is, by definition, no history outside writing: what separates it from pre-history or archaeology is that it is written. But if there is no history outside writing, there is none inside it either: the written record remains a representation, the access it offers to the past an illusion.
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Notes
Samuel Daniel: A Defence of Ryme and Thomas Campion: Observations in the Art of English Poesie, ed. G. B. Harrison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), 24.
John Hardyng, The Chronicle of Iohn Hardyng, ed. Henry Ellis (London: Rivington, 1812), 7–8 (preface by Richard Grafton, 1543).
Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. and trans. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, repr. 2011), Book I, ch. xli, 67.
Jeanette M. A. Beer, Narrative Conventions of Truth in the Middle Ages (Geneva: Droz, 1981), 23, 10–11.
John Lydgate, The Troy Book: Selections, ed. Robert R. Edwards (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1998), Prologue, lines 298–315.
Donald R. Kelley, Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1998), 2–3.
Life of the Black Prince, ed. and trans. Mildred Katharine Pope and Eleanor Constance Lodge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1910), lines 4184–8 (pp. 130/170). References henceforth from this edition.
John O’Brien, ‘Fictions of the Eyewitness’, in Narrative Worlds: Essays on the Nouvelle in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century France, ed. Gary Ferguson and David LaGuardia, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 285 (Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University, 2005), 123–38, at 128 and 136–7.
Richard Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, repr. 2006), 145.
See Joanna Bellis, ‘“We wanted þe trewe copy þereof”: John Page’s The Siege of Rouen, text and transmission’, Medium Ævum, 83.2 (2014), 209–33; Joanna Bellis, ‘“The Reader myghte lamente”: The sieges of Calais (1346) and Rouen (1418) in chronicle, poem and play’, in War and Literature, ed. Laura Ashe and Ian Patterson (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2014), 84–106.
For authorship, see John Page, The Siege of Rouen, ed. Joanna Bellis, Middle English Texts 51 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2015), from which citations are given; and Joanna Bellis, ‘Page, John, (early 15th cent.), poet’, in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, stable URL: http://www.oxforddnb.com/ Accessed October 2013.
The Middle English Dictionary, stable URL: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/ Accessed October 2013. For discussion of the currency of proces in historical texts, see Raluca Radulescu, Romance and its Contexts in Fifteenth-Century England: Politics, Piety and Penitence (Cambridge: Brewer, 2013), 145.
Tamar S. Drukker, ‘An Eye-Witness Account or Literary Historicism? John Page’s Siege of Rouen’, Leeds Studies in English, ns 36 (2005), 251–73, at 255–7 and 267–8.
See Bartlett Jere Whiting and Helen Wescott Whiting, Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings Mainly Before 1500 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), H637, 300.
Richard Taverner, Prouerbes or adagies with newe addicions gathered out of the Chiliades of Erasmus (London: White Hart, 1539), sig.F.3v.
Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland, ed. Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 100–2.
Thomas Churchyard, A Generall Rehearsall of Warres, called Churchyardes choise (London: Edward White, 1579), sig.Air.
William E. Sheidley, ‘Violence and Style in George Gascoigne’s The Spoyle of Antwerpe (1576)’, in The Image of Violence in Literature, the Media and Society. ed. Will Wright and Steven Kaplan (Pueblo, CO: University of Southern Colorado, 1995), 468–72, at 468.
George Gascoigne, The Spoyle of Antwerpe (London: Richard Jones, 1576; facsimile by Da Capo Press/Theatrum Orbis Terrarum: Amsterdam/New York, 1969), frontispiece and sig.Cviiir.
Sheidley, ‘Violence and Style’, 468; see also Adam N. McKeown, English Mercuries: Soldier Poets in the Age of Shakespeare (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009), 89.
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Bellis, J. (2015). ‘I Was Enforced to Become an Eyed Witnes’: Documenting War in Medieval and Early Modern Literature. In: Downes, S., Lynch, A., O’Loughlin, K. (eds) Emotions and War. Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374073_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374073_8
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