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Abstract
This paper relates the ‘new management’ that R. W. Southern argues overtook histonography towards the end of the twelfth century to the changes that Bernard Guenee claims characterized thirteenth-century historiography, concluding that a ‘compilatory’ or comprehensively ‘exemplary’ approach to chronicling replaced a more expansive, ‘rhetorical’ one in which exemplary elements were sewn into larger and more generalised structures. This ‘compilatory’ approach was linked to the new and more focussed purposes that faced historians after c. 1200 A.D., when history-writing lost status and was linked to narrower, propagandist purposes on the part of institutions such as the Cistercian order or the Inquisition. Monastic historiography, which had aimed at larger, more generalised goals in the twelfth century, was also made over in the thirteenth, as the historiography of the seculars (in particular the archdeacons) joined the more specialised, preaching-oriented historiography of orders such as the Cistercians and Dominicans. The paper concludes by hinting that an oscillation between ‘rhetorical’ and ‘compilatory’ / ‘exemplary’ historiography is also noticeable in later times, and, in particular, in our own day, as less institutionally-focussed, ‘persuasive’ (rhetorical) history-writing aimed at the general public and touching upon such ‘cultural studies’ issues as gender, the body, minorities, oppression, race, children, replaces the more professional ‘empirical’ historiography developed in the universities from the later nineteenth century onwards and designed to illustrate ‘narrow’ institutional developments such as concerned the evolution of parliament, nations, empires, the papacy, universities etc.