We're thrilled to announce the publication of Prof. Johannes Junge Ruhland's new book, Making History in Manuscripts: The Materiality of Historiography in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. This remarkable volume offers a fresh perspective on how history was conveyed to readers during the medieval and early modern periods.
Dr. Junge Ruhland's work, a significant contribution to academia, explores the profound role of the manuscript medium itself in shaping historical narratives. The book argues that the material features of manuscripts—such as layout, rewriting, illumination, compilation, choice of script, and annotation—were instrumental in defining history conceptually. This means that the makers of these manuscripts played as crucial a role in history-writing as the authors themselves.
Spanning the ninth to the sixteenth centuries and drawing on examples from across Western Europe in both Latin and vernaculars, the ten chapters uncover specific contexts, from 13th-century Corbie to 15th-century Zurich, while highlighting a shared practice of history-writing. Making History in Manuscripts invites us to reconsider medieval and early modern historiography by acknowledging its fundamental material dimension.
We congratulate Dr. Junge Ruhland on this outstanding publication and thank him for his invaluable contribution to the field.
