Entertainment / Literature / Historia: (pluralhistoriae): This Latin word gives us the modern word history, but the connection between the two terms is tenuous. Most modern readers think of a history or a historical treatise as a scholar's attempt at creating a factual or scholarly narrative of events from humanity's past. Some ancient texts do fit this model to a certain extent, such as certain biographies (Plutarch's Lives) or Sallust's The Jugurthine War. Other classical works have a veneer of factuality, but may disguise deliberate propaganda or accidental (but distorting) authorial assumptions, such as Julius Caesar's The Conquest of Gaul or the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. However, in ancient times, the word historia meant roughly the same thing as the modern English word 'story' (i.e., any narrative whether factual or fictional). Latin writers, especially in medieval times, might on occasion use the word historia refer to history, to legends, to vitae, mythology, folklore, hearsay, gossip, and rumors. The term has no necessary connection with factuality, and this often confuses those students (and sometimes even amateur scholars!) Working with medieval or Arthurian material, since many of the Arthurian works such as Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain are technically historiae rather than histories in our sense of the word. See also annals and contrast with historical novel.
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Entertainment / Literature / Historiated Initial: In the artwork of medieval manuscripts, an historiated initial is an enlarged, introductory letter in a written word that contains within the body of the letter a pictoral scene or figure related to t MORE