Medieval Annals

The terms "annals," "chronicle" and "history" are to a certain extent interchangeable, as Tacitus demonstrated around the beginning of the 2nd century AD, by calling one of his major historical works the Historia, and the other one the Annales -- or perhaps it was someone else who gave the titles to Tacitus' works, I don't actually know for sure. 

While conceding, therefore, that all three terms have been applied to any and all types of historical writing, for the purpose of this blog post, I am using the term "annal" to refer only to that form of Medieval historical writing, within the Catholic/Latin sphere, in which the entries are all labelled by year, in which a typical year's entry might contain as little as a sentence or two -- a king or prince is born or dies, or the Emperor rides to Constance to celebrate Christmas, a comet is seen, famine and/or drought is suffered locally -- or a year might not be entered at all, and in which the entry for a year rarely exceed a page in a modern octavio edition. There is typically not more than one entry per year, but it is clear that sometimes the entry for a past year has later been revised or added to. The language is usually Latin. In the 12th century, French and Italian began to appear in some annals. The only early non-Latin annal of which I am aware is the famous Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which began in the 9th century. But it should be kept in mind that this was just one annal among many Latin annals made in England. Medieval writing in Catholic lands was, overwhelmingly, Latin writing. 

 

If some reader happens to know the precise boundaries between annals, chronicles and histories, and wishes to assist my readers and damn my astounding ignorance upon this point, I, of course, would be delighted.

While ancient Latin and Greek histories had each been the work of one author, who signed his work, an annal could have many different contributors. Some Medieval authors wrote histories in the style of ancient authors. These were usually members of the clergy, but their works were treated differently than the annals of the monasteries. Whether they were humble monks or Popes, whether they stayed in one abbey or traveled widely, their names, in most of the cases I know, were never hidden from us: Gregory of Tours, the venerable Bede, William of Malmesbury, Otto of Freising, William of Tyre, Matthew Paris and so forth.

Sometimes the authors of some parts of the annals are known to modern scholars, sometimes they have conjectures as to authorship, and often the authors are unknown. The style of the Latin prose could be quite good, and helpful in identifying its author, or it could be quite ordinary. The annal as a whole was thought of as the product of a monastery or cathedral, in England, France, or Germany, while in Italy some cities also maintained their own annals. An annal may represent as much as several centuries' worth of history recorded on behalf of a particular religious institution or city, and, unsurprisingly, events of local significance are given greater weight than they might be in histories which strive for universal relevance. On the one hand, this may seems to lend to annals a more trivial nature compared to histories. However, the modern historian, while recognizing in the famous Medieval historians forerunners in his own genre, may often make much more day-to-day use of the anonymous annalist, precisely because of the abundance of detailed local information.

Many of the Medieval annals, along with chronicles, histories, letters, decrees, laws, etc, etc, of Medieval Germany and surrounding countries, are collected in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH); Italian annals are among the works collected in the Rerum Italicorum Scriptorum; and British annals are among the Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland During the Middle Ages (Rolls Series). And there are many more Medieval Latin annals, from Iberia, from Scandinavia, from the Catholic Slavic lands, in other collections. Still more annals from all across Latin Medieval Europe can be found in scholarly journals. And some are still only in manuscripts, still await edition and publication.