HISTORIANS OF THE MODERN and pre-modern worlds have often sought to make connections between the boundaries of states and the shape of their respective historiographies; in recent years they have scrutinised archival processes and the preservation of artefacts of the past, and they and their literary peers have examined the historical narratives which imposed order on the past and gave meaning to its remains. National historiographies are thus commonly ascribed active properties, as means by which elites might recognise and realise a collective future for their nation, stifle opposing views and assert a common will. If we accept the general principle that fields of historiographical interest will often coincide with political boundaries, actual or imagined, something impressed on historians by empirical observation, whether according to the model outline above or in ignorance or defiance of it, it follows that when competing historical trajectories meet they may be expected to generate turbulence at the very least. This paper concerns a book copied at a time of war before and during Edward I's conquest of Wales, a volume in which Welsh and English versions of history met and intersected.

The origins of Exeter 3514

By and large medievalists have embraced the broad historiographical trends just outlined, pursuing the connections between narrative and nation, construing the construction of narratives of national pasts as a form of nation-building, although they have produced fewer studies which analyse in the same vein the collection and deposition of information. Here they have at their disposal, of course, an additional form of record not available to their modern colleagues. In a manuscript culture the act of authorship stands in a very active relationship with other processes of book production, more active, we could argue, than in a culture dominated by print. The copying of each book represents a small-scale act of origination, comparable with authorship in some respects: a lesser investment of skills, time and resources, certainly, but an activity involving a measure of selection from received tradition, whether received tradition is accepted wholesale, as a body of texts, or only in part. Jacqueline Stodnick has recently attempted to construct a link between the two distinct forms of scholarly enquiry – codicology and discourse analysis – looking at the nation in truly skeletal form, as collections of king lists reproduced in manuscript.