This dissertation examines a group of innovative historical texts produced at the turn of the thirteenth century that incorporated information about the material world, namely descriptions of animals, plants, stones, and geographical features, into their narratives of human history. The historians who wrote these texts saw history as a literary genre that described the individual elements of creation in its entirety, and they understood studying and chronicling all of creation to be an ethical act. The first two introductory chapters chart the ethics of history writing and the study of natural particulars during the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The texts studied in this dissertation were particularly striking manifestations of developments that were shaping the study of the human past and the study of the created world more generally. The first chapter outlines historians' reflections on the ethical implications of history writing. Understanding how historians saw their intellectual work as a moral good, and increasingly championed history writing as an ethically beneficial activity because it could serve as a source of pleasure for historians and readers, provides a key to understanding why historians turned their attention to creation in its entirety. The second chapter charts changes in the theory and practice of the study of natural particulars. During this period, there was an increase in discourse on the ethical implications of viewing creation as a pleasurable source of beauty and wonder. The next three chapters explore individual historians and their works. The third looks at Gerald of Wales, who treated the history and nature of Ireland and Wales to establish his own authority as an author and to argue for the ethical benefits of taking pleasure in history, creation, and literature more broadly. The fourth explores the Otia imperialia of Gerald's contemporary, Gervase of Tilbury, who wrote a hybrid universal history and catalogue of marvels to make a bold claim for the benefits of history and literature as sources of pleasure that inspire the praise of God. The final chapter analyzes Jacques of Vitry's Historia Hierosolymitana. In many ways the most traditional of the historical texts studied in this dissertation, Jacques's history presents a catalogue of eastern marvels that is designed to emphasize the unity of creation, both to encourage and to facilitate the conversion of Christians as a means of hastening the recovery of the Holy Land and the eradication of heretics throughout the world. This dissertation argues that at the turn of the thirteenth century, historians understood the literary/ethical and scientific/practical functions of their work to be intertwined and mutually reinforcing. They saw both functions as derived from a literal reading of historical events and natural particulars, a way of reading that produced pleasure and wonder that had ethical consequences in this world and in the next.