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Abstract
Living beings can only observe the past by reading traces. Historiographical texts belong to the group of such traces. We can read them in various ways: for example as a historical analysis or as a rhetorical analysis. In the case of rhetorical analysis, chronicles are read as purposeful, strategical communicative acts. The rhetorical perspective of analysis is thus the perspective of the texts in function. The question rhetoric poses is not: What historiographical has statements Otto von Freising made in his medieval times at the moment t2 about the classical Roman event x (i.e. in 1143 in his Chronica about the assassination of Julius Caesar). The question rhetoric poses is: What strategical-communicative action does Otto von Freising perform with his historiographical statements about the event x at the time t1. Factual proposition and strategy of text are thereby combined to form a message, the isolation of which is concentrated on by the rhetorical-analytical interest. The examples of Otto’s von Freising Latin chronicle and the German Kaiserchronik (both twelfth century) illustrate, how rhetorical basic gestures form components of messages on the three narratological levels in medieval historiographical texts. These gestures of instruction, of the construction of claims to validity and of evaluation must be seen as rhetorical text-acts.