Medieval Historiographical Terminology: The Meaning of the Word Annales

The term annals/annales as it is generally used by modern medievalists – to describe Easter tables with infrequent historical notations or similar works without the Easter table apparatus – is inaccurate and can be dangerous, because it can give us a false idea of the development and nature of medieval historiography. The word was never used with this strict meaning in the Middle Ages, when it generally meant only ‘history’ or ‘written record of the past’ and after c. 1200 gradually came to be used as a synonym for chronicles as well, a development that arose from a misunderstanding of descriptions of early Latin historiography in Cicero and the newly popular Aulus Gellius. Therefore annals and chronicles were never contrasted in the Middle Ages as two distinct genres as they often are today. Believing that they were distinct genres with separate origins leads to erroneous conclusions about the works described by medieval authors as ‘annals’, the development of these works, and their relationship to chronicles. We should, therefore, call such works ‘chronicles’, which is what they are, and in order to distinguish them from other types of chronicles, like those of Jerome or Sigebert, we should use a term like ‘paschal chronicles’ or ‘Eastertable chronicles’.