Medieval History

Medieval history studies medieval Europe and its neighboring regions through critical evaluation of chronicles, charters and administrative records, tested and published as peer reviewed scholarship rather than compiled as antiquarian curiosity. The discipline's professionalization in the English speaking world is marked by the founding of the English Historical Review in 1886, the first academic history journal in English, whose founding editor Mandell Creighton was himself a historian of the late medieval and Reformation papacy, giving medieval and ecclesiastical scholarship a dedicated peer reviewed venue for the first time alongside modern history.

The medieval church, its councils, papal administration, monastic institutions and popular religious movements, is a central subject of medieval history as a discipline, and the field's documentary standards, requiring a claim to be checked against surviving charter, chronicle and administrative record rather than later tradition, apply directly to how the atlas describes medieval Christianity, its heresies and its institutional development. The atlas relies on medieval history wherever a claim about the medieval church rests on a specific chronicle or document rather than later summary.