, Brepols, 2021 Hardback, x + 377 pages, Size:156 x 234 mm, Illustrations:6 b/w, Language: English. ISBN 9782503586588.
Summary Historical writing has shaped identities in various ways and to different extents. This volume explores this multiplicity by looking at case studies from Europe, Byzantium, the Islamic World, and China around the turn of the first millennium. The chapters in this volume address official histories and polemical critique, traditional genres and experimental forms, ancient traditions and emerging territories, empires and barbarians. The authors do not take the identities highlighted in the texts for granted, but examine the complex strategies of identification that they employ. This volume thus explores how historiographical works in diverse contexts construct and shape identities, as well as legitimate political claims and communicate 'visions of community'. TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface Introduction: Historiography and Identity in a Comparative Perspective - WALTER POHL 'National History' in Post-Imperial East Asia and Europe - Q. EDWARD WANG The Wars of Procopius and the Jinshu of Fang Xuanling: Representations of Barbarian Political Figures in Classicizing Historiography - RANDOLPH B. FORD Mythology and Genealogy in the Canonical Sources of Japanese History - BERNHARD SCHEID Iran's Conversion to Islam and History Writing as an Art for Forgetting - SARAH BOWEN SAVANT Iran and Islam: Two Narratives - MICHAEL COOK The Formation of South Arabian Identity in al-Ikl?l of al-Hamd?n? - DANIEL MAHONEY Convergence and Multiplicity in Byzantine Historiography: Literary Trends in Syriac and Greek, Ninth to Twelfth Centuries - SCOTT FITZGERALD JOHNSON The Byzantine Past as Text: Historiography and Political Renewal c. 900 - EMMANUEL C. BOURBOUHAKIS Scriptores post Theophanem: Normative Aspects of Imperial Historiography in Tenth-Century Byzantium - YANNIS STOURAITIS Who were the Lotharingians? Defining Political Community after the End of the Carolingian Empire - SIMON MACLEAN Spaces of 'Convivencia' and Spaces of Polemics: Transcultural Historiography and Religious Identity in the Intellectual Landscape of the Iberian Peninsula, Ninth to Tenth Centuries - MATTHIAS M. TISCHLER Mapping Historiography: An Essay in Comparison - WALTER POHL Index