Talk:Annals

Scope

We should have an article about this but it seems rather odd to crib Hayden White if—as policy here—we're going to insist on dumping our pages on annals into Category:Chronicles. Is there a discussion of that somewhere? or did the original editor just not notice the difference? — LlywelynII 21:06, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

Formatting

Obviously the journals' titles are italicized. Isn't it standard to not italicize the titles of most annals, though, as they are not entitled "Annals" but called by that name? — LlywelynII 21:11, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

Recent medieval scholarship

I don't have time to do it right now, but this article needs to be substantially rewritten in the light of changes of scholarly views in the last twenty to thirty years. In particular:

• the use of the term "annales" for classical literature and for medieval literature need to be more clearly separated. The very old Encyclopedia Britannica definition cited in the lead relates only to the medieval tradition, not to the classical one. There is no continuity - the term fell out of use around the third century and was reintroduced for a different kind of texts around the ninth century. In the classical period, annals were narrative histories, and precisely not year-by-year accounts.
• nevertheless, there WAS a continuity between other kinds of classical historical texts which the ancients would not have called "annales" (e.g. consularia) and the medieval texts which we call "annals"
• in medieval use, the word "annales" was first used around the ninth century for courtly records, the Carolingian "Reichsannalen". But medievalists use it for older texts too, most usually monastic annals.
• there are also late medieval urban texts which are traditionally called "annals"
• the generic distinction between annals and chronicles can no longer be sustained. At best, the two groups of medieval texts which we usually call "annals" (imperial and monastic annals) are milieu-related sub-groups of the chronicle tradition. Medieval writers used the terms "annales" and "chronica" interchangeably. Since the 19th century, scholars have used them to make a generic distinction, but the basis for that distinction has now been discredited. Wikipedia has taken this on board at the article chronicle but needs to do the same here.
• the view that monastic annals began with easter tables has been disproved. This is because the Irish annals are now know to be older than Bede, who invented the western easter table tradition. Monastic annals began in Ireland as "continuationes" to world chronicles, which in turn developed out of classical forms. From there, monastic annals spread to England, then to the court of Charles The Great, and then to the rest of Europe. Easter annals are a sub-group of monastic annals, and need to be dealt with as such. .

For all of this, see Dunphy, Encyclopedia of the medieval chronicle, and Brugess, Mosaics of Time. (And to keep everything above board, note my CoI declaration on my userpage) --Doric Loon (talk) 14:02, 9 August 2017 (UTC)