Authorising History: Gestures of Authorship in Fourteenth-Century English Historiography

This book discusses the strategies and rhetorical means by which four authors of Middle English verse historiography seek to authorise their works and themselves. Paying careful attention to the texts, it traces the ways in which authors inscribe their fictional selves and seek to give authority to their constructions of history. It further investigates how the authors position themselves in relation to their task of writing history, their sources and their audiences. This study provides new insights into the processes of the appropriation of history around 1300 by social groups whose lack of the relevant languages, before this ‘anglicising’ of the dominant Latin and French history constructions, prevented their access to the history of the British isles. -Wilhelm Busse University of Dusseldorf