Clio's Workshop. Narrativity and Structures of Narrative Sources Using the Example of Narratives of Power Transitions from the 11th to the 13th Century

Habilitation project by Kilian Baur

Historians have often been harsh on medieval chroniclers when their findings do not match the accounts in chronicles and annals.

It is quickly assumed that the writer was poorly informed or deliberately distorted the facts. Meanwhile, the view has prevailed that the aim of historians was not to provide reports that were as realistic as possible. They created elaborate narratives that conveyed certain images of the past or their present and had to meet certain literary standards. Research has so far focused primarily on the first aspect, while the second has been treated as secondary in the context of the investigation of individual motifs or the imitation of texts. The effects of the literary character on the structure of historiographical representations, on the other hand, have hardly received any attention in medieval historical studies.

The “Klio's Workshop” project aims to close this gap. Using the example of high medieval narratives about changes of power, it analyzes the content and narrative structures of historiographical texts. The investigation is guided by the basic idea that medieval historians, like authors of fictional literature, often had similar frames of reference when constructing their texts. The project derives these frameworks by comparing sources with the aim of presenting them as schemata. Schemata may often have found their way into historiography through the imitation of biblical, religious, or folk narratives or representations of classical literature. The study is therefore also interested in the origin and dissemination of the schemata and their motivational structure. The aim is to create a typology of narratives of change of rule that can be used as a source-based tool for the critical classification of historiographical narratives of change of rule.