The Oxford History of Historical Writing - Volume 2: 400–1400

THE OX FOR D HISTORY OF

HISTOR IC A L W R ITING

THE OXFORD HISTORY OF HISTORICAL WRITING

The Oxford History of Historical Writing is a fi ve-volume, multi-authored schol￾arly survey of the history of historical writing across the globe. It is a chronologi￾cal history of humanity’s attempts to conserve, recover, and narrate its past with

considerable attention paid to different global traditions and their points of

comparison with Western historiography. Each volume covers a particular

period, with care taken to avoid unduly privileging Western notions of periodi￾zation, and the volumes cover progressively shorter chronological spans, refl ect￾ing both the greater geographical range of later volumes and the steep increase in

historical activity around the world since the nineteenth century. The Oxford

History of Historical Writing is the fi rst collective scholarly survey of the history of

historical writing to cover the globe across such a substantial breadth of time.

Volume 1: Beginnings to ad 600

Volume 2: 400–1400

Volume 3: 1400–1800

Volume 4: 1800–1945

Volume 5: Historical Writing since 1945

THE OXFORD HISTORY OF HISTORICAL WRITING

Daniel Woolf

general editor

The Oxford History of

Historical Writing

volume 2: 400–1400

Sarah Foot and Chase F. Robinson

volume editors

Ian Hesketh

assistant editor

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1

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,

United Kingdom

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,

and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of

Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

© Oxford University Press 2012

Editorial matter © Sarah Foot and Chase F. Robinson 2012

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

First published 2012

Impression: 1

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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the

address above

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and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

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ISBN 978–0–19–923642–8

Printed in Great Britain by

MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn

The Oxford History of Historical Writing was made possible by the

generous fi nancial support provided by the Offi ces of the Vice-President

(Research) and the Provost and Vice-President (Academic) at the

University of Alberta from 2005 to 2009 and subsequently by Queen’s

University, Kingston, Ontario.

General Editor’s Acknowledgements

The Oxford History of Historical Writing has itself been the product of several

years of work and many hands and voices. As general editor, it is my pleasure to

acknowledge a number of these here. First and foremost, to the volume editors,

without whom there would have been no series. I am very grateful for their

willingness to sign on, and for their fl exibility in pursuing their own vision for

their piece of the story while acknowledging the need for some common goals

and unity of editorial practices. The Advisory Board, many of whose members

were subsequently roped into either editorship or authorship, have given freely

of their time and wisdom. At Oxford University Press, former commissioning

editor Ruth Parr encouraged the series proposal and marshalled it through

the readership and approvals process. After her departure, my colleagues and

I enjoyed able help and support from Christopher Wheeler at the managerial

level and, editorially, from Rupert Cousens, Seth Cayley, Matthew Cotton, and

Stephanie Ireland. I must also thank the OUP production team and Carol

Carnegie in particular.

The series would not have been possible without the considerable fi nancial

support from the two institutions I worked at over the project’s lifespan. At the

University of Alberta, where I worked from 2002 to mid-2009, the project was

generously funded by the Offi ces of the Vice-President (Research) and the Provost

and Vice-President (Academic). I am especially grateful to Gary Kachanoski and

Carl Amrhein, the incumbents in those offi ces, who saw the project’s potential.

The funding they provided enabled me to hire a series of project assistants, to

involve graduate students in the work, and to defray some of the costs of publica￾tion such as images and maps. It permitted the acquisition of computer equip￾ment and also of a signifi cant number of books to supplement the fi ne library

resources at Alberta. Perhaps most importantly, it also made the crucial Edmonton

conference happen. At Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, where I moved

into a senior leadership role in 2009, funding was provided to push the project

over the ‘fi nish-line’, to transfer the research library, and in particular to retain

the services of an outstanding research associate, Assistant Editor Dr Ian Hesketh.

I am profoundly grateful for Ian’s meticulous attention to detail, and his ability

ruthlessly to cut through excess prose (including on occasion my own) in order

to ensure that volumes maintained editorial uniformity internally and together

with other volumes, not least because the volumes are not all being published at

once. A series of able graduate students have served as project assistants, includ￾ing especially Tanya Henderson, Matthew Neufeld, Carolyn Salomons, Tereasa

Maillie, and Sarah Waurechen, the last of whom almost single-handedly organ￾ized the complex logistics of the Edmonton conference. Among the others on

General Editor’s Acknowledgements vii

whom the project has depended I have to thank the Offi ce of the Dean of Arts

and Science for providing project space at Queen’s University, and the Department

of History and Classics at Alberta. Melanie Marvin at Alberta and Christine

Berga at Queen’s have assisted in the management of the research accounts, as has

Julie Gordon-Woolf, my spouse (and herself a former research administrator),

whose advice on this front is only a small part of the support she has provided.

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Foreword

Daniel Woolf , General Editor

Half a century ago, Oxford University Press published a series of volumes entitled

Historical Writing on the Peoples of Asia . Consisting of four volumes devoted to

East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and South Asia, and based on confer￾ences held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

in the late 1950s, that series has aged surprisingly well; many of the individual

essays are still being cited in our own day. The books were also remarkably ahead

of their time since the history of historical writing was at that time fi rmly under￾stood as being the history of a European genre. Indeed, the subject of the history

of history was itself barely a subject—typical surveys of the early to mid-twenti￾eth century by the likes of James Westfall Thompson and Harry Elmer Barnes,

following Eduard Fueter’s paradigmatic 1911 Geschichte der Neueren Historiographie

[History of Modern Historiography], were written by master historians survey￾ing their discipline and its origins. The Oxford series provided some much needed

perspective, though it was not followed up for many years, and more recent sur￾veys in the last two or three decades of the twentieth century have continued to

speak of historiography as if it were an entirely Western invention or practice.

Since the late 1990s a number of works have been published that challenge the

Eurocentrism of the history of history, as well as its inherent teleology. We can

now view the European historiographic venture against the larger canvas of many

parallel and—a fact often overlooked—interconnected traditions of writing or

speaking about the past from Asia, the Americas, and Africa.

The Oxford History of Historical Writing is conceived in this spirit. It seeks to

provide the fi rst collective scholarly history of historical writing to span the globe.

It salutes its great predecessor of half a century ago, but very deliberately seeks

neither to imitate nor to replace it. For one thing, the fi ve volumes collectively

include Europe, the Americas, and Africa, together with Asia; for another, the

division among these volumes is chronological, rather than by region. We decided

on the former because the history of non-European historical writing should, no

more than that of its European counterpart, be viewed in isolation. We chose the

latter in order to provide what amounts to a cumulative narrative (albeit with

well over a hundred different voices), and in order to facilitate comparison and

contrast between regions within a broad time period.

A few caveats that apply to the entire series are in order. First, while the series

as a whole will describe historical writing from earliest times to the present, each

individual volume is also intended to stand on its own as a study of a particular

period in the history of historical writing. These periods shrink in duration as

they approach the present, both because of the obvious increase in extant materi￾als and known authors, but also because of the expansion of subject matter to a

fully global reach (the Americas, for instance, do not feature at all in volume 1;

non-Muslim Africa appears in neither volume 1 nor volume 2). Second, while the

volumes share a common goal and are the product of several years of dialogue

both within and between its fi ve editorial teams and the general editor, there has

been no attempt to impose a common organizational structure on each volume.

In fact, quite the opposite course has been pursued: individual editorial teams

have been selected because of complementary expertise, and encouraged to ‘go

their own way’ in selecting topics and envisioning the shapes of their volumes—

with the sole overriding provision that each volume had to be global in ambition.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, this series is emphatically neither an ency￾clopedia nor a dictionary. A multi-volume work that attempted to deal with every

national tradition (much less mention every historian) would easily spread from

fi ve to fi fty volumes, and in fact not accomplish the ends that the editors seek. We

have had to be selective, not comprehensive, and while every effort has been

made to balance coverage and provide representation from all regions of the

world, there are undeniable gaps. The reader who wishes to fi nd out something

about a particular country or topic not included in the OHHW ’s more than 150

chapters can search elsewhere, in particular in a number of reference books which

have appeared in the past fi fteen or so years, some of which have global range.

Our volumes are of course indexed, but we have deemed a cumulative index an

ineffi cient and redundant use of space. Similarly, each individual essay offers a

highly selective bibliography, intended to point the way to further reading (and

where appropriate listing key sources from the period or topic under discussion

in that chapter). In order to assist readers with limited knowledge of particular

regions’ or nations’ political and social contexts, certain chapters have included a

timeline of major events, though this has not been deemed necessary in every

case. While there are (with one or two exceptions) no essays devoted to a single

‘great historian’, many historians from Sima Qian and Herodotus to the present

are mentioned; rather than eat up space in essays with dates of birth and death,

these have been consolidated in each volume’s index.

Despite the independence of each team, some common standards are neces￾sary in any series that aims for coherence, if not uniformity. Towards that end, a

number of steps were built into the process of producing this series from the very

beginning. Maximum advantage was taken of the Internet: not only were schol￾ars encouraged to communicate with one another within and across volumes, but

draft essays were posted on the project’s website for commentary and review by

other authors. A climactic conference, convened at the University of Alberta in

Edmonton, Canada in September 2008, brought most of the editors and just

over half the authors together, physically, for an energizing and exciting two days

during which matters of editorial detail and also content and substance were

Foreword x

xi Foreword

discussed. A major ‘value-added’, we think, of both conference and series, is that

it has introduced to one another scholars who normally work in separate national

and chronological fi elds, in order to pursue a common interest in the history of

historical writing in unique and unprecedented ways. As the series’ general editor,

it is my hope that these connections will survive the end of the project and pro￾duce further collaborative work in the future.

Several key decisions came out of the Edmonton conference, among the most

important of which was to permit chronological overlap, while avoiding unnecessary

repetition of topics. The chronological divisions of the volumes—with calendri￾cal years used instead of typical Western periods like ‘Middle Ages’ and

‘Renaissance’—remain somewhat arbitrary. Thus volume 1, on antiquity, ends

about ad 600 prior to the advent of Islam, but overlaps with its successor, vol￾ume 2, on what in the West were the late antique and medieval centuries, and in

China (the other major tradition of historical writing that features in every vol￾ume), the period from the Tang through the early Ming dynasties. Volumes 4

and 5 have a similar overlap in the years around the Second World War. While

1945 is a sensible boundary for some subjects, it is much less useful for others—in

China, again, 1949 is the major watershed. Certain topics, such as the Annales

School, are not usefully split at 1945. A further change pertained to the denota￾tion of years bc and ad ; here, we reversed an early decision to use bce and ce , on

the grounds that both are equally Eurocentric forms; bc / ad have at least been

adopted by international practice, notwithstanding their Christian European

origins.

It became rather apparent in Edmonton that we were in fact dealing with two

sets of two volumes each (vols. 1/2 and 4/5), with volume 3 serving in some ways

as a bridge between them, straddling the centuries from about 1400 to about

1800—what in the West is usually considered the ‘early modern’ era. A further

decision, in order to keep the volumes reasonably affordable, was to use illustra￾tions very selectively, and only where a substantive reason for their inclusion

could be advanced, for instance in dealing with Latin American pictographic

forms of commemorating the past. There are no decorative portraits of famous

historians, and that too is appropriate in a project that eschews the history of

historiography conceived of as a parade of stars—whether Western or Eastern,

Northern or Southern—from Thucydides to Toynbee.

The present volume, though chronologically the second of fi ve in the series, is

last to be published. The editors, Professors Sarah Foot and Chase Robinson,

respectively scholars of early medieval Europe and the Islamic Middle East, have

assembled contributions from specialists in a number of regions of the world

spanning the millennium from 400 to 1400. As they note in their introduction,

periodization (always a challenge in projects of global scope) is especially compli￾cated during this very long era (which is one reason why this volume overlaps in

its early centuries with ground covered by volume 1 and, in some chapters,

stretches at the other end into the time scale of volume 3). The centuries covered

here witnessed the bureaucratization of an already old Chinese tradition of

historical writing under the Tang dynasty, and further signifi cant innovation

under the Song and Yuan near the end of the period; it also saw the adaptation of

Chinese historiography by nearby East and Southeast Asian countries, in particu￾lar Japan, Korea, and Vietnam; an additional infl uence throughout the region

was Buddhism, imported from India and Sri Lanka. Elsewhere, the seventh and

eighth centuries saw the emergence and rapid expansion of Islam, and with it an

especially vigorous tradition of historical writing in Arabic, Persian, and other

languages. In Europe, with Christendom divided between Greek East and Latin

West, late antiquity gave rise to a host of new genres, beginning with the works

of the great ‘barbarian’ historians of the sixth to eighth centuries, new universal

and church histories, continuing with the ‘gesta’ or deeds of kings, emperors, and

powerful ecclesiastical fi gures, and ending with the urban chronicles that start to

appear, along with the towns whose social and economic life they refl ect, in the

thirteenth century. Throughout the millennium migration, war, and trade con￾tributed to the spread, limited though it may have been, of one culture’s historical

forms elsewhere. This happened, for instance, in the adaptation of Chinese his￾torical forms, rooted in Confucianism, elsewhere in East Asia, and in the dissemi￾nation of Islamic historical writing outside its Middle Eastern birthplace,

eventually reaching as far afi eld as Southeast Asia. The number of languages used

in extant historical writing remained quite limited in much of the world, though

the use of vernacular tongues, once quite sporadic, increased in the last quarter

of the millennium. In rare cases, the conqueror would adopt both the language

and the historiography of the vanquished, as happened during the short-lived

tenure of the Mongol Yuan dynasty over China.

Professors Foot and Robinson note that this is a millennium through most of

which ‘peoples’ rather than ‘nations’ are (along with religions and royal, imperial

or aristocratic dynasties) the more meaningful unit around which historians

organized their writings. With a geographic range as broad as that in volume 1,

the chapters begin in the Far East with China, Korea, Southeast Asia, and Japan

and thence travel westward, embracing India, Islam, and Byzantium, ending in

Western Europe thereby (as is the case in volume 3) explicitly de-centreing the

privileged European historiographical achievement. The later chapters of the

book adopt either a topical or a genre-based approach, exploring forms of histori￾cal writing from the local to the universal, from the court-centred to the religious;

in some cases they offer explicit comparisons among historiographical traditions

often studied separately, for instance those of Western or Eastern Christendom

and Islam (where contacts were more regular than, say, between Europe and East

Asia). Collectively, the authors of this book have illuminated both the familiar

and the more obscure corners of the historiographical corpus bequeathed to us by

an age which we in the modern West have by long tradition called ‘medieval’—

this in itself being a term that has limited application once one leaves the confi nes

of Christian Europe for the east.

Foreword xii

NOTE ON TRANSLATION AND TRANSLITERATION

Non-Roman alphabets and writing systems have been routinely transliterated

using the standard systems for each language (for instance, Chinese using the

Pinyin system). For the transliteration of Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Syriac we

have followed the rules set out by the International Journal of Middle Eastern

Studies . Non-English book titles are normally followed (except where meaning is

obvious) by a translated title, within square brackets, and in roman rather than

italic face, unless a specifi c, published English translation is listed, in which case

the bracketed title will also be in italics.

xiii Foreword

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