Download PDF | (The Middle Ages Series) Constance Brittain Bouchard - Rewriting Saints and Ancestors_ Memory and Forgetting in France, 500-1200-University of Pennsylvania Press (2015).
380 Pages
Preface
In medieval France thinkers constantly reconceptualized their past. The proper interpretation of past events could give validity to the present and help control the future. The saints that now presided over churches and the ancestors that had first established a dynasty were an especially crucial part of creative memory. Scholars have long known that many of our primary sources for the period were written well after the events they describe, so that, for example, the reign of Clovis is known principally from the Historia of Gregory of Tours, composed nearly a century later. Such post facto accounts form the heart of this book, including twelfth-century scribes contemplating the ninth-century documents they copied into cartularies; ninth-century churchmen considering their sixth-century predecessors; and sixth-century writers in Gaul coming to terms with the Christianity of the fourth and fifth centuries. The changes and upheavals of the period 500-1200 were met by rewriting and re-remembering. Memory was always malleable, as each generation decided which events of the past were worth remembering and which were to be reinterpreted or else quietly forgotten.
Memory is a potentially enormous subject, and this book has constantly sought to become the thousand-page wonder that makes academic publishers of the twenty-first century recoil in horror. To keep it manageable in size, I have omitted many interesting topics—some of which were spun off as articles, summarized only briefly here—and tried (not always successfully) to pare down the endnotes to the most recent or most influential works. I urge those seeking a fuller historiography to consult the notes to the books and articles cited. References are generally given in short form; full details are reserved for the bibliography.
Notes on Terminology
Royal lineages had no official names in the period covered by this book. Members of these lineages did, however, clearly recognize their relatives, and it has not therefore seemed an undue stretch for modern scholars to give collective names to those related in the male line. The Merovingians were those descended according to legend from Meroveus, offspring of a fifth-century sea serpent. The Carolingians, the family of Charlemagne (d. 814), are here the Arnulfings (or occasionally the Pippinids) before Charlemagne’s time.' The Capetians are the kings related in the male line to Hugh Capet, who replaced the last Carolingian on the French throne in 987, even though he was not in fact the first king in his family, a distinction that goes to his great-uncle. Before Hugh, the lineage is usually called Robertians, after his great-grandfather Robert the Strong.
Most of the people who appear in the book have names that could be spelled three or four or even more different ways: in modern English, French, or German (or occasionally Italian), or in medieval Latin. Thus Hugo, Ugo, Huo, Hugh, and Hughes are all possible ways to refer to the same person. If I have not always been completely consistent in choosing which version of a name to give someone (e.g., Charlemagne rather than Karl der Grosse, but Theoderic rather than Thierri), at least I have always called the same person the same thing. For clarity, I make a distinction in how I refer to a saint and how I refer to a church dedicated to that saint: Saint Martin indicates the person himself, St.-Martin a church dedicated to him.
Most of the examples in this book are from the regions now called France and Belgium, plus the westernmost edge of Germany (although the French-German border was not then where it is now, and Belgium did not exist as a country until the nineteenth century). In late antiquity this region is Gaul. In the Carolingian age it is Francia. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries it is simply France (although the French kingdom of the high Middle Ages did not include the lower Rhéne, which had been part of Roman Gaul but in the twelfth century was part of the Holy Roman Empire). Although I take my examples from a broad geographic area, especially for the earlier period when the records are much sparser, the heart of my discussion is Burgundy-Champagne, the region stretching roughly from Chalons and Langres to Chalon and Macon, including Auxerre and Autun, the quintessential region “between the Rhine and the Loire.” Place-names are given according to their modern French spelling (Reims instead of Rheims, Lyon instead of Lyons), except for those located in modern Germany (Aachen, not Aix-la-Chapelle). The few exceptions are for places much better known to an English-speaking audience by a different version of the name (Cologne, not Kéln, and Burgundy, not Bourgogne).
Introduction
Time’s arrow moves in one direction only: forward. But memory moves backward. The past does not stand still but rather is in constant flux as it is remembered, remembered differently, or forgotten. In this book I examine, through the lens of memory, the sources from which modern scholars have constructed the church history and family history of France in the early and high Middle Ages in order to give the sources their full due as efforts to remember—or to create—a useful past for those who wrote them.
Medieval authors wanted above all to make sure that the events they recorded were remembered. Anselm of St.-Remy, giving the history of the 1049 dedication of his monastery and the great council at Reims, mentions memory three times in succession in his prologue. He wrote, he said, so that the events would not be “obliterated by silence.” He wanted to be sure that the deeds of Leo IX, “of blessed recollection,” be recorded, as worthy of memoria. And he wished to have the “memorable conclusion” to his monastery’s rebuilding program preserved. At almost exactly the same time, a scribe at the monastery of Béze began a charter recording a nobleman’s gift to his monastery by saying, “The human mind is changeable, and what has been done is soon lost to memory, unless recorded in charters.”! Sources thus should be seen as written so that certain events be properly remembered—or that those events not recorded be allowed to pass into oblivion. The past was malleable, and writing itself became an act of power, an effort to use the past to make sense of the present.
Medieval society was a “traditional” society—not in the sense that society was unchanging, because in fact society and culture were highly dynamic. But it was traditional in that tradition legitimized: “We have always done so” carried enormous moral and legal weight.” But the exercise of memory allows one to alter—or at least be selective with—tradition. The “old ways” provided validity even when those ways were being changed as they were invoked.’ By changing what was “always done” in the past, one could change the present. Historical writing involved a conversation with the records of the past, at least some of which would have seemed disturbingly strange. Yet the past was the source of present custom and even identity, so writers had to be creative. Hence I shall discuss how medieval thinkers reconceptualized their pasts, sometimes altering tradition quite consciously but more commonly trying to interpret a past that seemed highly foreign in order to make it comprehensible to their own time.
Medievalists have always realized that the primary sources do not give a transparent window into the Middle Ages.* These sources were rarely written at the same time as the events they described. For example, even the essentially contemporary documents detailing property transactions between monks and laymen tended to be drawn up once the event was over, after all the negotiations had been completed, after the various people whose involvement was deemed necessary had been sought out and their consent given. Narrative composition was even further removed from the events recorded. Even in year-by-year “Annals,” a selection was still made of which events, perhaps many months in the past, were significant enough to merit a record. Indeed, most surviving “Annals” were written substantially later, with a single author telling a continuous story even if he broke it down year by year. An additional distance is put between event and surviving record because, in the majority of cases, we have not the original manuscript but rather a later copy of it, which itself might have been reworked to serve the needs of its own time.
Forgeries are also a key element of the study of creative memory.’ Yet their study has been primarily restricted to German-speaking scholars and diplomaticists and to the question of whether particular charters should be considered false or authentic.‘ But false charters, like narrative sources, could reflect the past their composers would have liked to remember. Monks creating forged charters may sometimes have convinced themselves that they were only writing down what would or should have been written originally, or in other cases they may have knowingly tried to pass off blatant confections as genuine. They did at any rate often fool their own successors.
Merely to ask if a charter is “true” or “false” is not enough. I would certainly not suggest that medieval authors failed to understand the difference between real or imaginary. When medieval authors forged, they knew it. Both late imperial and early medieval law codes took forgery very seriously, and penalties were severe.’ But one could not merely conclude that these authors hypocritically committed forgery behind a pious facade. To re-remember the past, even to the extent of creating documents that should have existed, was to engage in activities that, for them, were true.
Given the relative sparsity of sources in the first place, their unreliability (in a positivist sense) can cast something of a pall over efforts to write history. But medievalists have been asking not “what really happened” but “what did contemporaries find significant” or “what were the authors’ attitudes toward the events they described” long before postmodern theory became established within the historical discipline.* This is not to cast doubt on the possibility of studying early medieval history at all or to flog the gap between document and reality, already too well understood. Rather, it emphasizes the need to study the ways that medieval chroniclers and cartulary compilers used, understood, and reworked their own sources for the history of their past.
Recently a number of scholars have decided to make a virtue rather than liability out of the gap between event and record. “Memory” has rather abruptly become one of the more exciting ways of approaching medieval history.’ If von Rankian positivism has not been completely abandoned, then the question has still certainly shifted. Three scholars essentially began the current study of memory in the Middle Ages, two historians and a literary specialist: Walter Goffart, Patrick Geary, and Mary Carruthers. Goffart studied the great “national” narratives of the early Middle Ages, not to mine them for nuggets of information but rather to ask about the meaning of the past they portrayed for their own contemporaries. Geary argued that the modern vision of the tenth century asa rather dark and chaotic period is based not on tenth-century sources but rather on sources written by eleventh-century authors, who deliberately created such a vision in order to draw a contrast with their own period. Carruthers focused on how medieval thinkers conceptualized the process of memory itself, including their methods for remembering complicated texts and the importance of preserving the memoria of sacred events.’°
Initial scholarly doubts as to whether there could be anything useful to be learned by the study of memory were quickly cast aside, as growing numbers of historians have found it much more worthwhile to ask how medieval authors thought of their own pasts than to pursue a rather fruitless search for historical “truth.”'' Modern psychology has also made clear how flexible human memory is, with remembered events continually subject to change, shuffled and altered to make emotional or intellectual sense.
Medieval people’s memory and the shaping of that memory for present needs have thus become a focus of study in their own right. The study of medieval memory has also begun to merge with hagiographic studies, which have shaken off the old label of “history of superstition.” '? Because a saint's life was often written long after the saint herself had lived or was rewritten a century or two later even if there was a roughly contemporary vita, such lives were long considered useless as sources of accurate history. But they have more recently been recognized as extremely useful sources for discovering how medieval people conceptualized their own pasts.'? Patrick Geary, a pioneer in treating saints lives as a fit subject for study just as he was later a pioneer in memory studies, at first received strong discouragement in this area as well." But almost immediately a number of other medieval scholars began treating saints lives as a new, previously undiscovered source with which to ask questions about everything from gender to power relationships, and by the 1990s the need to justify the use of hagiographic materials was over.’ Merovingian studies especially, once nearly moribund, have been revived by the new interest in the vitae of Merovingian-era saints, especially women saints.'°
In this book I take the study of medieval memory one step further, using it as a tool to ask questions about both the political and ecclesiastical history of France in the early and high Middle Ages. Here I address the ways that the past was creatively remembered, not simply as an exercise in memory but as part of self-definition and the creation of identity. I shall provide close examinations of how clerical authors viewed, tried to come to terms with, and often reworked the histories of their churches and of how noble families sought to define their authority and their ancestors. Representations of a family’s past could serve as a bulwark for their political and social position in the present.'”
The most important ecclesiastical sources for the present study are cartularies, chronicles, saints’ vitae, and “Gesta,” the latter being histories of the abbots or bishops who headed a particular church. Secular sources include the family histories and royal chronicles that served a similar function as “Gesta,” although for different sorts of rulers. In addition, sources include forged documents, which deserve to be analyzed much more broadly than they often have been.
By focusing on the creation of written works, forged or authentic, Iam of course privileging literacy over orality, but this should not be taken as any a priori judgment on the worth of the literate. After all, the line between literary and oral is not the same as the line between elite and popular, for many authors wrote down accounts they said they had heard orally, and even the illiterate could and did have stories read aloud to them. Literacy was also (relatively) common in the Middle Ages, scholars now agree, at least as much so as before the origins of modern schooling in the eighteenth century. Recent studies of medieval memory have thus discarded the artificial distinction between oral memory, assumed to be flexible, and written memory, assumed to be invariable. A study of records necessarily focuses on the written word, but one must always recall that words were generally spoken before they were written and that oral comments upon the completed page would have been part of the written page’s uses."
In addition, the written word was used to validate nonwritten sources and vice versa. Abbot Bovo’s eleventh-century account of the discovery (inventio) of the relics of Saint Bertin, the patron of his monastery, justified his own authority and the spiritual power of his house, but his written text would not have sufficed without the relics themselves, and the relics would have had little value without his account validating their identity.'? Hence, although the following discussion focuses on the creation of the written word, it must always be kept in mind that the present silence of the surviving parchment and the words written on it masks an original context of doubtless noisy conversation.
The monks, bishops, and kings who reworked the received memories of their own pasts, of ancient saints and ancestors, creatively reworked memory so powerfully that the paradigms they created have persisted in modern historical memory. That is, the modern conception of Roman Gaul is heavily influenced by the historians of the sixth and seventh centuries, and the modern view of the Merovingian period is still that shaped by their Carolingian-era successors. Carolingian history itself tends to be studied with an eye toward the tenth and eleventh centuries, when supposedly it all came apart, or even (sometimes) toward the European Union, when supposedly it all came together again.*” Even when we still have the sources on which medieval chroniclers drew to create an account of their past—which we do in a surprising number of cases—scholars tend to accept medieval authors’ perspective on what these sources mean.
Here I am not so much interested in creating new paradigms to replace the ones that have held sway from the early Middle Ages until now—although to some extent that is the result—as in examining how those paradigms were created in the first place. I want to emphasize that my central purpose is zo¢ to create a more “accurate” version of early medieval history. Rather, this book explores how the version that writers of the Middle Ages wanted to be remembered was constructed and how elements that did not fit into that vision were reworked, reexplained, or quite deliberately forgotten.
Thus the contrasts between what one period remembered and what the sources of an earlier period suggest may in fact have happened indicate that cartularies were far more than transcriptions of a church’s archives; that monasticism became well established in Gaul only in the seventh century, not the fifth; that the Merovingian church was not in decline when the Arnulfings rose to power; that Pippin the Short’s ancestors were not a straight line of mayors of the palace leading inevitably to the Frankish throne; and that monasteries of the high Middle Ages had very different records, rules, and patrons than those in late antiquity. Though these will not be novel insights to modern historians, the point is that all of these issues were seen quite differently by medieval people themselves, looking back at their own pasts. Throughout, even if I cast doubt on the accuracy of medieval memories, I strive not to denigrate the integrity and dignity of those whose memories they were. They remembered in a certain way for certain reasons, and their reasons are this book’s true focus.
This study spans a broad period, from the sixth century to the twelfth, from the establishment of what one might term the medieval form of Christianity, to the rise and decline of Carolingian hegemony, to the broadest flourishing of monasticism. Or rather this study spans the period from the twelfth century to the sixth, because for a study of looking backward I have structured the book to move chronologically backward. The reverse chronology was chosen in order to emphasize that my central concern is not particular events but rather the memory of those events. If a chapter (say) on ninth-century records were followed rather than preceded by one on the use of such records in the twelfth century, it would be too easy to make the principal question whether the twelfth century got it right. The chief geographic focus is the region of Burgundy-Champagne, but for earlier centuries, with a much smaller number of surviving sources, the territory from which materials have been selected expands.
This book builds on yet goes well beyond my earlier work on the medieval church and noble families. The organization here, starting in the twelfth century and then moving back toward the sixth, mirrors my own scholarly career. Previously I tended to focus on the new, on reformation of the old or the creation of entirely novel forms of thought and religious life.” Here, however, I examine how monks in houses with long histories tried to understand the documents in their archives, many of which made little sense for contempotary purposes, and to come to terms with the events of earlier centuries as reflected in those documents. In my previous work on Carolingian-era family trees, I tried to work out what family connections really existed, as well as what these family connections can tell us about contemporary family structure,” but here my main interest is how some relatives were deliberately added to family genealogies—and which ones just as deliberately left out.
In taking the story of memory back into the Merovingian era, I am entering a new field of study. Scholars of the early Middle Ages have for years been trying to persuade those of us primarily focused on the twelfth century that “our” century did not invent religious reform, literacy, government, or family consciousness, and it thus seems appropriate for someone who began with twelfth-century studies to go back to the first medieval centuries for a good look.
Many other extremely able scholars have of course worked with early medieval sources before me. Because of the relative scarcity of those records (and also somewhat ironically, given these scholars’ zeal for informing others of the importance of the period), historians studying the era often become highly protective of their sources and contentious over what they tell us. Some could thus be irritated at a historian entering their territory from a twelfth-century perspective. Perhaps because it has been so difficult to answer the basic questions about the narrative of events in the sixth through eighth centuries, those studying the period are still trying to address them, but these are not the only questions worth asking.
If I do not always appear properly appreciative of the historiography of a modern dispute (for example, over the functions of a Merovingian royal official), it is not because I am dismissive of such scholarship but because I believe it crucial to include the beginnings of the Middle Ages within broader medieval history. Gaul’s saints were the principal saints revered in medieval France, and the Merovingian kings were the original model for what the Carolingians and later the Capetians either had to adopt or react against. The memory of late antiquity needs to be kept alive even among scholars who have not spent half their lives studying it, so that it shall not be forgotten in the twenty-first century any more than it was in the ninth century or the twelfth.
‘The first chapters of this book focus on chronicles and charter collections from the high Middle Ages, as compositions intended to order the past and make it useful. I begin with cartularies, which were, in the form they acquired in the twelfth century, a way of making sense of the Carolingian past. I also study chronicle sources that put the histories of the authors’ own monasteries at the center of global history, as constructed by monks trying to be true to the records they found but also trying to create something useful for their own present.
Next I turn to the Carolingian era, when polyptyques were compiled to order both the more recent and the more distant past, when forged documents took the creation of memory to new levels, and when noble families reorganized themselves around the imperial center. Crucial to this section is the Carolingian royal family themselves: how they justified their position by reworking the memory of their family, with the assistance of clerical authors at court, and how the monks of the Carolingian empire reacted to them. The transitional period between the Merovingian and Carolingian eras, I shall argue, was to a large extent a true time of forgetting.
Finally I turn to the Merovingian period, for even an age that may now appear long forgotten looked at its own forgotten past and tried to revive it. Here I reexamine the rise of the cult of the saints through the lens of memory, specifically the way that hagiographers of the sixth century tried to deal with the almost complete gap in veneration between the time when martyrs lived and died and their own time, when those martyrs were honored and their bodies dispersed among the churches—a gap which, from the hagiographers’ point of view, should not have existed. When people lived in times of long ago, they never thought they lived long ago. They thought they lived Now.
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