Rewriting Roman History in the Middle Ages: The ‘Historia Romana’ and the Manuscript Bamberg, Hist. 3

The Historia Romana was the most popular work on Roman history in the Middle Ages. A highly interesting aspect of its transmission and reception are its many redactions which bear witness to the continuous development of the text in line with changing historical contexts. This study presents the very first classification of such rewritings, and produces new insights into historiographical discourse in the Middle Ages. Drawing on an analysis of the paraphrase contained in the manuscript Bamberg Hist. 3, which is edited here for the first time, the author offers numerous examples of textual transformations of language, style and ideology, all of which give us a clearer picture of textual fluidity in medieval historiography.