Writing Across Time in the Twelfth Century: Historical Distance and Difference in the Kaiserchronik

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The 12th century saw an explosion of interest in the Roman past by authors all over Europe, who were looking for historical templates they could use to model the emerging political and cultural identities in their own texts. The Kaiserchronik, the first chronicle to be written in the Middle High German vernacular, is a prime example of this development as it connects the rulers of the medieval German empire to the Roman emperors of ancient Rome. This wide-ranging study of the chronicle’s historiography connects new and old points from scholarship with innovative perspectives on the text and shows how its episodic form and its idiosyncratic content work together to create a historical and political continuum, which connects the Roman past to the German present of the 12th century across time.

Christoph Pretzer is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland.