As in many disciplines and occupations, historians have spent a good amount of ink writing about how and why they do what they do, both in the present and, appropriately for historians, in the past. Edited by Jennifer Jahner, Emily Steiner, and Elizabeth Tyler, Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500–1500 showcases the new approaches and frameworks now being applied to the study of medieval historical writing. It is a substantial expansion on the already robust body of historiographic studies with contributions by some of the leading scholars in their respective fields. The essays presented here are a useful introduction to medieval historical writing for any student, and they provide access points for a number of areas for further research.

The introduction outlines the historiographical hole that the collection intends to fill, namely the lack of a comprehensive update to Antonia Gransden's two-volume Historical Writing in England (1974–1982). Gransden tends to measure the works of medieval historians by the modern yardstick of “good” historical principles, of objectivity, accuracy, and utility as a written record. The essays here bring to the fore new questions and directions of research being asked of the same sources forty-plus years on, questions directly related to the volume's organizing themes of time, place, practice, and genre. The twenty-seven essays provide examples of how the writing of medieval history was “at the end of a chain of memory workers and witnesses” (302) and was required to be more than a mere benchmark for the accurate recording of events. The four themes—time, place, practice, and genre—under which the chapters are grouped position historical writing as a product of a collaborative historical culture that attempted to hold a delicate balance between the simultaneous functions of moral exemplar, entertainment, communal memory repository, and administrative archive as required by the immediate needs of an urban government, monastery, noble family, royal patron, or public audience. As Alfred Hiatt encourages readers to consider forgeries as one aspect of a spectrum of historical truthfulness, so the myriad frameworks through which these articles view medieval historical writing illuminate the spectrum, rather than the hard divisions, of written works with a historical focus.

The need to balance accuracy and truth with the various other functions of historical writing proves to be a recurrent theme throughout the essays, both as a preoccupation of historians in the Middle Ages themselves as well as in relation to how modern historians conceptualize medieval historical culture. For the essays under “Time,” the legendary histories of Gildas, Geoffrey of Monmouth, the Brut, and, for writers of the late Middle Ages, the Anglo-Saxon past offer a mirror of the desires of the writers’ present, something that may give us pause as to why legendary histories still today retain their appeal even when shown to be glaring departures from anything resembling reality. Rather than a lack of critical capacity, the usefulness of such legends to foster social cohesion or simply to entertain overrides their need for accuracy or adherence to any version of the truth.

While the expected divisions of genealogy, apocalyptic writing, urban histories, and romances appear, a number of the essays address categories less familiar, such as Christine Chism's examination of pagan histories, Tyler's essay on the European context of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and Thomas Prendergast's chapter on the relationship between historical writing and tragedy. Within “Place,” Charles F. Briggs's chapter on the historical culture of the universities and George Shuffelton's on London histories point to historical writing's being as closely linked to specific socioeconomic and intellectual environments as to any regional or institutional milieu. The inclusion of areas other than the England, in essays by Kate Ash-Irisarri, Owain Wyn Jones and Huw Pryce, Katharine Simms, and Tyler, recognizes the interconnections and shared influences of historical writing in the different areas of Britain while still acknowledging the variety of practices and concepts in these geographies. The expanded geographical coverage is a welcome broadening out from Gransden's solely English focus.

The essays under “Practice” and “Genre” engage most deeply with current questions of how the function, form, and style of nontraditional historiographical works are intertwined conceptually, and sometimes materially, with the more ubiquitous chronicle tradition. Hiatt's chapter on forgeries, Andrew Prescott's on archival records, Catherine Sanok's on hagiography, Thomas Prendergast's on tragedy, and to a lesser extent Richard Rouse's on romance illustrate how research into the historiographical practice of a time period reveals more than just what was happening but is rather a study of how written information, whether narrative or otherwise, reveals motivations and operations of medieval society. Hiatt and Prescott query how modern definitions of forgery and archive obfuscate the medieval understanding of the same concepts. Similarly, Sanok's hagiography chapter outlines the impossibility of separating saints’ lives from the textual culture in which they were composed and, perhaps more importantly, consumed.

A final element common to many of the essays is an acknowledgement of the changing conceptualization of historical writing over the duration of the medieval period. Simms, Björn Weiler, Matthew Fischer, Sanok, A. S. G. Edwards, and Sarah Peverley all outline the fluidity with which historical writing was adapted to the temporal and geographic focus, social function, intended audience, and material form necessary to meet the particular needs of the medieval present. This collection of essays illustrates how the questions being asked of medieval historical writing now can reveal new depths of sophistication and complexity in the concepts and practice of medieval historical writers then.