'With eyes before and behind': Time, rhetoric, and the vision of medieval history (England, William of Newburgh, Henry of Huntingdon, Matthew Paris, Geoffrey of Monmouth)

This study provides a postcolonial theoretical framework for interpreting twelfth- and thirteenth-century English historiography. It argues that English history writers of this period, specifically William of Newburgh, Henry of Huntingdon, Matthew Paris, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, wrote their histories with as much concern for the future as for the past. This concern for the future, with its attendant anxiety over troubling events both past and present, results in what I have called disjunction: moments in the texts where the rhetorics of nationality, identity, and religion are destabilized and pointed toward uncertain conclusions. I argue throughout how disjunction serves as both a rhetorical effect of the historiographer's narrative vision and as an indicator of present-day negotiations with the medieval past. However strange that past may seem, our encounters with the medieval often reveal more similarity than difference. This study therefore concludes with a reading of the Old English poem "The Ruin" and the ways the medieval past intrudes upon the present, challenging us to imagine our own uncertain futures.