In his preface to the booklet of abstracts to the second international conference on the Medieval Chronicle in 1999, Erik Kooper looked back at the first conference, which he had hosted in Utrecht in 1996, and stated: ‘the chronicle was then, and still is, a little studied topic’. When in 2023 we come together for the tenth international conference, we will be able to say with confidence that the study of medieval chronicles is now firmly established as a focus of research in the whole range of disciplines which comprise Medieval Studies: medieval literature, history, art history, linguistics, book history, digital humanities, and so forth—and communicates productively with both Classical Studies on one side and Early Modern Studies on the other. This is due in no small part to the series of conferences instigated by Erik, the book series The Medieval Chronicle which originated as the conference proceedings, the Medieval Chronicle Society which Erik founded and over which he presided in its infancy, childhood and adolescence, and the Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle which it produced. It is therefore with great indebtedness and gratitude that we, members of the Medieval Chronicle Society, present this volume of essays to Erik on the occasion of the 10th International Conference of the Medieval Chronicle Society, as a special issue within the series The Medieval Chronicle.
This volume, co-edited by Erik’s successor as president of the Medieval Chronicle Society, Graeme Dunphy, and the co-editor with Erik of the series The Medieval Chronicle, Sjoerd Levelt, is a collection of essays written for Erik Kooper by members of the Medieval Chronicle Society—in particular those involved in the organization of the successive conferences of the Society, those who currently hold positions in the running of the Society, and those who have or have had roles on the advisory board of The Medieval Chronicle.
Contributors were asked to focus their chapters on the kinds of materials and arguments in chronicle studies that each author would like to talk with Erik about: a chronicle of interest, a remarkable manuscript, an aspect of a particular historiographical corpus, a particularly interesting stylistic issue, a small but significant historical discovery, etc. Each article presents a brief case study, balancing the particulars of the chosen materials with some more generalized conclusions about their significance. In line with this brief, contributions have been kept relatively short, in order to accommodate as many contributors as possible, for the number of scholars in Medieval Chronicle Studies indebted to Erik greatly surpasses the maximum number of papers that can be contained in a single volume. The resulting collection is an anthology of different approaches in Medieval Chronicle Studies, and while not aiming to be exhaustive presents a rich overview of the geographical, linguistic, chronological and methodological diversity of chronicle research as it has developed since the first Conference of the Medieval Chronicle in no small part thanks to Erik’s rallying.
The diverse community which Erik sought to nurture with his instigation of the Medieval Chronicle Society, and which came into being through the series of conferences, the production of the Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle, and the series of volumes of The Medieval Chronicle, is reflected in the list of contributors, which has a wide disciplinary spread: we include essays with a historical, a literary, a book-historical, a linguistic and an art-historical bent; a broad geographical sweep ranging from York to Byzantium and from Bohemia to Castile, including, in line with Erik’s particular drive to seek connections with scholars from the former Eastern Bloc, a significant number of contributions focusing on Central and Eastern Europe; an extensive chronological scope from the ninth to the seventeenth century; and contributions by both established and independent scholars, including a number who have been encouraged and supported by Erik from a very early stage in their careers.
Some who would have been asked to contribute had already contributed to the earlier volume of studies presented to Erik, People and Texts: Relationships in Medieval Literature: Studies Presented to Erik Kooper, edited by Thea Summerfield and Keith Busby (Brill, 2007), on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday and retirement from the University of Utrecht, where he taught Old and Middle English. In this current volume, we update the previous volume’s select bibliography of publications by Erik Kooper with his publications since 2007.
Others we were unable to reach, and the work of yet others has since their engagement with the Society moved away from chronicle studies to such an extent that they felt unable to contribute. Many other stalwarts of the Medieval Chronicle Society—regular attendees of its conferences, contributors of articles to the series The Medieval Chronicle and/or entries to the Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle—would have been more than welcome, and no doubt eager, to contribute had there not been a page limit to the projected volume; they are with us in spirit. We have been able to include papers by twenty-eight authors, but this is a present to Erik Kooper from hundreds of friends and colleagues: the entire membership of the Medieval Chronicle Society.
The editors would like to thank Marie Bláhová, Peter Damian-Grint, Isabel Barros Dias, Márta Font, Chris Given-Wilson, Michael Hicks, David Hook, Carol Sweetenham and Jaclyn Rajsic for lending us their expertise in reviewing the contributions, Kate Hammond and Marcella Mulder of Brill for welcoming our volume as a special issue in the series The Medieval Chronicle, and finally the two anonymous readers for the press for their invaluable suggestions.
Sjoerd Levelt and Graeme Dunphy