The Oxford History of Historical Writing ─ 400-1400

How was history written in Europe and Asia between 400-1400? How was the past understood in religious, social and political terms? And in what ways does the diversity of historical writing in this period mask underlying commonalities in narrating the past? The volume, which assembles 28 contributions from leading historians, tackles these and other questions. Part I provides comprehensive overviews of the development of historical writing in societies that range from the Korean Peninsula to north-west Europe, which together highlight regional and cultural distinctiveness. Part II complements the first part by taking a thematic and comparative approach; it includes essays on genre, warfare, and religion (amongst others) which address common concerns of historians working in this liminal period before the globalizing forces of the early modern world.

Sarah Foot is the Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Christ Church, Oxford. She is the author of AEthelstan: the First English Monarch (2011); Monastic Life in Anglo-Saxon England, c. 600-900 (2006) and has written widely on perceptions and uses of the past in the early medieval West.


Chase F Robinson is Distinguished Professor and Provost of the Graduate Center, The City University of New York. A specialist in early Islamic history and historiography, he is the author or editor of several books, most recently The New Cambridge History of Islam, Volume 1: The Formation of the Islamic World, Sixth to Eleventh Centuries (2011, ed).