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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 25. No. 12. 1962

Problems of Medieval Historiography

Problems of Medieval Historiography

Speaking to the Historical Society on problems of medieval historiography Miss Margaret Avery refuted the allegation often made by modern historians that the work of the medievalist was much simplified by the paucity of evidence.

Modern history was so well documented that while any theory would have to be modified with the discovery of new data, at least the broad outlines could generally be maintained; whereas the medievalist, living to postulate a theory on the minimum reliable evidence, often found his whole structure imperilled by the weakness of Its foundations. Miss Avery referred to the recent discovery that Asher's Life of Alfred the Great, formerly supposed to have been written in the ninth century, was possibly written in the eleventh century, and therefore of much less value to the historian.

Among the problems described was the difficulty of deducing from the formal Latin of a legal document, just what the people were actually thinking in Anglo-Saxon. While admitting the value of the philologist in such cases, the speaker was wary of allowing the material of history to be evaluated by other disciplines, citing the example of the topographist who maintained that the accounts of battles contained in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle were entirely correct, because all the alleged battlegrounds were just the right sort of places to have battles.