Workshop

International VISCOM Workshop, December 16-17 2013

Historiographies of Identity IV: 

History and Identity towards the End of the First Millennium

As the fourth in a series of workshops dealing with the social functions of historiography from classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages, this workshop will focus on the later ninth and tenth centuries CE. Starting from the transformation of the historiographical legacy of the Carolingian empire, it aims to contrast the development of historical writing in the Latin West, Byzantium and the Islamic world, exploring its social role for creating and communicating visions of community.  

The Western material shows historians around 900 reacting in different ways to the transformation of the Carolingian empire. Although they realise that the old imperial framework of Charlemagne's empire does not correspond with the actual political realities from the middle of the ninth century onward, they continue to use it as a common baseline from which to construct their own histories and resolve the tension resulting from this discrepancy in different ways. Some try to maintain this past as a vision for the future by keeping it together as a common Christian World. Others reconfigure the imperial past in order to fit it to smaller policies of the present such as the Western Frankish kingdom. Still others reinvent the framework of a Carolingian-Frankish past as a new one such as historians of the Saxon kingdom. Altogether what we observe is an experimental process, in which actual and imagined building blocks of Charlemagne's empire were constantly rearranged from different perspectives triggering reflections about their historical existence. The social function of history to formulate and legitimate such claims is something that everyone seems to take for granted in the Latin West (although this social function may appear differently after we have problematized its transformation from ancient history to the history of the Christian successor states in the post‑Roman West and the Carolingian empire in previous workshops).

From this theoretical perspective of the social function of historical writing to construct identities, communicate visions of community and legitimate political claims, we would like to compare this Western European context to that of the Byzantine and the Islamic world. While in the same period (9th to 11th centuries) the slow decline of the Abbasid Caliphate invites a comparison with the Islamic world, the intensification of reflections about the political, religious and cultural identity of Byzantium (which older historical research addressed as Macedonian Renaissance) invites a comparison with the Byzantine world too. How might this political fragmentation have been reflected (or not) in the writing of historiographical texts? What was the role of history in the social communication about identity and community in Byzantium and the Islamic world? What do these histories look like (as a genre or multiple genres) and how might they be based on models found in historiographical texts of earlier periods (i.e.7th and 8th centuries)? Ideally, in discussion we would like to evaluate how similar/different the forms of and the changes in historical writing were between the Latin West, the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world from the ninth to the eleventh centuries in order to compare their role for the creation of visions of communities.