The Medieval Chronicle Society is an international and interdisciplinary organization founded to facilitate the work of scholars interested in medieval annals

Annals

Annals are a concise form of historical representation which record events chronologically, year by year. The Oxford English Dictionary defines annals as "a narrative of events written year by year"...

 and chronicle

Chronicle

Generally a chronicle is a historical account of facts and events ranged in chronological order, as in a time line. Typically, equal weight is given for historically important events and local events, the purpose being the recording of events that occurred, seen from the perspective of the...

s, or more generally medieval historiography

Historiography

Historiography refers either to the study of the history and methodology of history as a discipline, or to a body of historical work on a specialized topic...

. It was founded in 1999 and in February 2011 had 380 members.

Aims and history

Annals and chronicles were the main genres of historical writing in the Middle Ages

Middle Ages

The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...

. Consequently they have always been of great importance to historians. The extent to which they are also of interest to students of medieval literature

Medieval literature

Medieval literature is a broad subject, encompassing essentially all written works available in Europe and beyond during the Middle Ages . The literature of this time was composed of religious writings as well as secular works...

 or of historical linguistics

Historical linguistics

Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...

 was only fully realised in the latter part of the 20th century. Since many chronicles are illustrated, they are also a fruitful object of study for art historians

Art history

Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...

. It was the desire for a forum in which these disciplines could operate together that led to the foundation of the society.

The history of the society began with a series of triennial conferences initially in Utrecht

Utrecht (city)

Utrecht city and municipality is the capital and most populous city of the Dutch province of Utrecht. It is located in the eastern corner of the Randstad conurbation, and is the fourth largest city of the Netherlands with a population of 312,634 on 1 Jan 2011.Utrecht's ancient city centre features...

, but later moving from place to place. These early conferences were hosted by Erik Kooper (English studies, Utrecht). It was at the second of these conferences, in 1999, that the society was formally founded.

The society maintains a website financed by the University of Liverpool, and publishes a regular newsletter with information on recent publications in the chronicles field.

Journal The Medieval Chronicle

Volumes of proceedings of the first three conferences were published by Rodopi. When the society was founded, this triennial publication was transformed into a yearbook, now the peer-reviewed journal The Medieval Chronicle.

The journal is trilingual, with articles in English, French and German. As well as the proceedings of the society's conferences, and also of the Cambridge Chronicle Symposium, the journal includes research submitted independently of the conferences. A number of text editions of chronicles have also been published here.

Conferences

Conferences to date:

• 1996 Utrecht (Driebergen
  Driebergen-Rijsenburg
  Driebergen-Rijsenburg is a town in the municipality Utrechtse Heuvelrug in the central Netherlands, in the province of Utrecht.-External links:**...
  
  )
• 1999 Utrecht (Driebergen)
• 2002 Utrecht (Doorn
  Doorn
  Doorn is a town in the municipality of Utrechtse Heuvelrug in the central Netherlands, in the province of Utrecht. On 1 January 2008 the town had 10,052 inhabitants.-History:...
  
  )
• 2005 Reading
  Reading, Berkshire
  Reading is a large town and unitary authority area in England. It is located in the Thames Valley at the confluence of the River Thames and River Kennet, and on both the Great Western Main Line railway and the M4 motorway, some west of London....
  
  
• 2008 Belfast
  Belfast
  Belfast is the capital of and largest city in Northern Ireland. By population, it is the 14th biggest city in the United Kingdom and second biggest on the island of Ireland . It is the seat of the devolved government and legislative Northern Ireland Assembly...
  
  
• 2011 Pécs
  Pécs
  Pécs is the fifth largest city of Hungary, located on the slopes of the Mecsek mountains in the south-west of the country, close to its border with Croatia. It is the administrative and economical centre of Baranya county...
  
  
• 2014 (planned) Liverpool
  Liverpool
  Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...
  
  

Projects

A number of interdisciplinary projects have been inspired by the society, including Repertorium Chronicarum an on-line database of Latin chronicle manuscripts maintained by Dan Embree on the website of Mississippi State university.
A major project of the society was the Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle published in Leiden by Brill

Brill Publishers

Brill is an international academic publisher founded in 1683 in Leiden, the Netherlands. With offices in Leiden and Boston, Brill today publishes more than 134 journals and around 600 new books and reference works each year...

. The EMC contains around 2500 usually quite short articles on individual authors or on anonymous works. A majority of these are from Western Christendom, but there are also entries on Slavic, Byzantine, Syriac, Islamic and Jewish chronicles. These give information on the date, language, form and manuscript tradition, and discuss issues which have been highlighted in recent scholarship. There are also about 60 longer "thematic" articles on particular aspects of chronicles. The two-volume paper edition appeared in 2010 and runs to around 1830 pages, with about 60 black-and-white full-page illustrations. About 450 scholars collaborated in writing it. An electronic edition with additional articles is due to appear in 2012.

External links

• Website of the Medieval Chronicle Society
• Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle – catalogue entry at Brill Publishers.
• Sample EMC pages as PDF