Download PDF | [Studies In The Early Middle Ages 16] R. Balzaretti, E. Tyler (editors) - Narrative And History in the Early Medieval West (Studies in the Early Middle Ages 16), Brepols 2006.
277 Pages
PREFACE
The idea for a book which explores the connections between narrative and history across the early medieval period came about as we, a literary scholar and a historian, collaborated as editors of the Brepols book series ‘Studies in the Early Middle Ages’ (together with the archaeologist Julian Richards). Increasingly literary scholars and historians have been drawn to read each others’ texts and been influenced by each others’ methodologies, and we hoped, in organizing this volume, to create a context for scholars working within these two disciplines to meet and work together. The papers gathered in this volume were all given in 1999 — at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds, and finally during a day conference in November held at York. Each occasion was marked by active exchange between speakers and also our audiences, all of whom were generous with ideas and encouragement.
The participants at these occasions also challenged each other to think more clearly and learn from a chronologically and geographically wide range of comparative material. Our thanks are due to Simon Forde at Brepols and to the contributors and all those who participated in the sessions at Kalamazoo, Leeds, and in the conference at York. We are especially grateful to Julia Barrow for commenting on the Introduction. Finally, we hope the essays in this volume reflect the engaging conference exchanges and suggest as well new possibilities for further interdisciplinary work. Elizabeth M. Tyler Ross Balzaretti
INTRODUCTION
Elizabeth M. Tyler and Ross Balzaretti
This collection, Narrative and History in the Early Medieval West, deliberately brings together work which is chronologically, geographically, and generically diverse. In exploring the nature and function of narrative in texts which modern scholars use to study the Middle Ages, each essay participates in what is currently a lively area of research, especially for intellectual history. The contributors to this volume, both historians and literary scholars, seek to extend the boundaries of this current research. In combining social, political, and literary, as well as intellectual, history, they make the case that looking at narrative in a wide range of the forms which have come down to us from the Middle Ages provides new vantage points from which to view the period. The contributors to this volume draw on different scholarly traditions, fields, and training and yet they speak to each other. This introduction aims to map the intellectual framework within which the essays are situated — a framework which, importantly, makes that speaking, that interchange possible. To begin this mapping, rather than providing an overview of each essay, we will consider the key terms of this volume’s title: ‘narrative’, ‘history’ and ‘early medieval West’.
Narrative Although the essays here testify to the variety of ways in which ‘narrative’ can be interpreted, underlying them all is an understanding of ‘narrative’ as the principle means by which coherence or order is given to events in the act of shaping an account of them. Thus each contributor is working within a space opened up most notably by the historian Hayden White. Since the 1980s White’s insistence on the content of the form — that is, that form, far from being ideologically neutral, participates in the meaning of a text — has transformed the way historians read their sources and how they write their own accounts of the past. White’s work is part of a larger ‘linguistic turn’ in historical scholarship, which, in maintaining that texts do not provide direct access to events of the past but rather mediate those events through language, has transformed the relationship between historical and literary studies. For early medievalists, White’s focus on form complemented important scholarship on the historians of the early and high Middle Ages, especially that of Nancy Partner and Richard Southern; and White also directly influenced work on historiography such as Walter Goffart’s study of Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede, and Paul the Deacon. The work of 1 these scholars has been instrumental in showing how attention to the ways early medieval historians crafted their accounts of the past are as much a part of their stories as what they say, and thus reveal much about the past itself. Southern, Partner, Goffart, and many others have taught us to be attentive to the meaning of the form when we read sustained narrative accounts of the past, a group of texts we might gather together under the rubric ‘historiography’. The post-Romantic formation of White’s notion of narrative is perhaps most evident for the early medievalist in his dismissal of annals and chronicles as lacking narrativity because they lack closure, which is not just an ending, but a sense of a destination which governs the shape of the entire narrative. Yet, as almost every essay in this volume explores, this expectation that narrativity be contained within the boundaries of a text — that the story a text tells will be evident in the words on the page — is at odds with the reality of early medieval textuality. Writers from this period were able to link events which appear to us not to be connected in order to tell their stories about past events which do not necessarily ‘make sense’ to us as history. While the texts they set down may seem to us to lack narrative closure and meaning, this may well be because we ourselves have an imperfect understanding of the social context within which the texts were produced and meant to function. From this perspective, it is argued here, medieval texts, the products of a world in which orality remained primary, are completed by a web of social and textual relations which call into question modern expectations that coherence relies on a single author’s vision, or that closure must be woven into the text rather than, for example, supplied by a shared understanding of the progress of time within salvation history, or by the social ritual in which a text played a part, or by the place of a poem within poetic tradition.
This volume aims to use attention to narrative as a tool to open up texts which record events but which in a range of ways challenge modern notions of what constitutes history-writing: these include documents such as charters and records of dispute settlements, saints’ lives, miracle collections, chronicles, and poetry. Hence, we have arranged the chapters to highlight the importance of form over more conventional organizing principles, such as time and place. In juxtaposing these types of texts with each other, and bringing their study alongside that of historiography, whose forms have benefited from scholarly attention, the essays in this volume simultaneously contribute to a fuller and less anachronistic conceptualization of the nature of narrative in the early Middle Ages and to the continuing development in how we use texts to understand the past.
History Our term ‘history’ is an exceptionally polyvalent term simultaneously encompassing the past itself, in the sense of what actually happened, sustained writing about the past (including both accounts from the past and the accounts we produce ourselves about the past), and the discipline of history as practised by scholars in the modern academy. Away from the Anglophone world, in both Romance and Germanic languages, words such as histoire and Geschichte extend as well to incorporate what would in English be denoted as ‘story’. While we can distinguish these different categories of ‘history’, the scope of the word forcefully reminds us that these conceptual distinctions constantly threaten to break down. Thus the word ‘history’ itself makes it impossible to evade the complex and diverse relationship between events and their linguistic mediation and the ways that scholars study events and their representation. In making narrative their subject, all the essays in this volume thus make the linguistic mediation of history their subject. In many different ways, their explorations of the nature of that mediation acknowledge or are informed by, but then step away from, the philosophical position, characteristic of post-structuralism, that only discourses about the past are knowable to us and that the past itself remains fundamentally unknowable. These explorations of narrative — of mediation — are as varied as the intellectual formations of the historians and literary scholars who have written them, but strikingly each uses an awareness of narrative to step out of the textuality of history, that is, to gain perspective on the texts which allows them to consider the real people in real circumstances who produced them and thus to gain insight into the past, rather than being subsumed by the perspectives offered by the texts. Essentially these essays are all very practical — in the sense of being rooted in the practice of reading texts (in order to use them to better know the early Middle Ages) rather than engaged with the philosophy of history. However, each essay is made more rigorous — more disciplined in its study of the past — by its author’s conscious negotiation of the linguistically mediated nature of our access to the past. In this present context, consideration of the Latin term historia illustrates clearly the important point that the polyvalence considered above is far from being distinctive of modern notions of history. The complexity of the term historia, which is no straightforward equivalent of its descendent ‘history’, is evident in the efforts of classical and medieval writers to make clear how they were using the term by offering successive definitions, redefinitions, and reformulations. Of central importance, historia denotes both events and accounts of events. Thus for the Middle Ages too historia holds together both events and their linguistic mediation. Isidore influentially conveyed classical understandings of historia to the Middle Ages when he wrote: ‘Historia est narratio rei gestae, per quam ea, quae in praeterito facta sunt, dinoscuntur.’ That Isidore understands 2 narration as a heuristic tool which can be used to discern what happened in the past rather than as a direct representation of the past reminds us that medieval theorizing about history did not rest naively on an assumption of a correspondence between representation and reality. Moving away from definitions, usage also underscores the generic openness of the term historia. The extensive and shifting semantic field of this term demands that we think broadly when we examine narrative and history in the early Middle Ages. This volume, with its wide range of texts, tries to respond to this demand. The variety of texts which could be labelled as historia was in part a consequence of there being no formal discipline of history in the medieval period. Especially prior to the twelfth century, educational practices encouraged historiography to be seen as a branch of both poetry and rhetoric, and thus texts we might classify as historiography, while well-known and well-read, were not studied as ‘history’. Moreover, it is quite clear that many early medieval authors were able to write confidently about the past in a range of forms. There is no shortage of famous examples — Gregory of Tours, Gregory the Great, Bede, Paul the Deacon, Einhard. These people wrote formal histories, but they also wrote hagiography, poetry, moral treatises, homilies, letters, and so on. Many of the essays in this volume remind us that writers of history were also writers of documents, that hagiographers grappled with the same issues of credibility and authority which taxed historians, and that poets competed with chroniclers and historians. Thus in bringing the study of poetry, documents, hagiography, and chronicles alongside historiography, the essays in this collection attempt to respect medieval, rather than modern, taxonomies. Attending to the relationship of narrative and history within this broad range of texts allows us to learn more about these texts and the situations and people which produced them.
Early Medieval West The use of the term the ‘early medieval West’ in the title may seem to claim that this book addresses the topic of narrative and history throughout Western Europe in the period from c. 500–1100. In using this term we indicate that we have sought to bring together work from a wide chronological and geographical spread in the recognition that one of the distinctive features of the intellectual formation of medievalists is that, while we have particular areas of expertise, we are accustomed to listen to each other across national boundaries and across wide chronological spans. This breadth has been a source of intellectual strength for the study of the Middle Ages; and this is a strength which we have wanted to bring to bear on how we read medieval texts. Hence the essays gathered here move from Italy and Francia to Scandinavia and England, and examine texts produced from the seventh to the early twelfth century. Each of the essays presented here started life as a paper at a conference, and the discussions had in York, Kalamazoo, and Leeds and the subsequent circulation of drafts of the papers allowed contributors to learn from each other’s work as they addressed questions raised by texts produced in specific times and places.
Literature and Literary Explanation of the absence of the words ‘literature’ or ‘literary’ from this volume’s title can also help define its aims and delineate the contours. Although ‘literature’ and ‘literary’ are easier to define than ‘history’, these terms are only anachronistically used to describe aspects of textual production in the early Middle Ages. It is not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that ‘literature’ and ‘literary’ come to be used for a set of texts whose hallmarks include conformity to agreed upon criteria for aesthetic excellence, a fictional dimension, intentional complexity or ambiguity of meaning, and a place within a canon which forms part of an educational curriculum which distinguishes between high and popular culture. All of these features of ‘literature’ sit uneasily with the kinds of texts studied in this collection of essays; of particular relevance here are the issues of textual ambiguity and fictionality. Many of the texts considered here, while they now require careful analysis and interpretation to unwrap their meaning, particularly because we encounter them outside of their original social context, nevertheless used narrative specifically to limit ambiguity. The producers of competing hagiographic narratives, charters, chronicles, and historical poetry all sought to ensure that their version of events dominated: they meant their texts to be understood and to have an impact in both the present and the future. Post-Romantic notions of aesthetic excellence and high culture have little to offer the scholar aiming to uncover the sociability of early medieval texts. In leaving literature out of the title, we also signal that the texts examined here issued from milieux which did not recognize our category of ‘fiction’. Among the producers of our texts, only William of Malmesbury worked within an intellectual environment which was beginning to develop the concept we denote as ‘fiction’. The absence of a concept of fiction should not however be taken as an indication of a lack of sophistication or a tendency to credulousness on the part of the producers and audiences of early medieval texts; rather our distinction between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ could be said to reveal the narrowness of modern notions of factual discourse, which this collection seeks to bypass in its juxtaposition of hagiography, charters, chronicles, and poetry with historiography. Consequently, the bringing together of work on these different kinds of texts foregrounds the importance of stepping away from the habit, still common amongst historians, of trying to determine which parts of a narrative are ‘true’ and which ‘false’. Although we have not used the term ‘literature’, the techniques which have been developed for reading the texts seen as literary can be usefully applied to reading other kinds of texts. Literary study has attended productively to the relationship between what is said and how it is said — between content and form. The practice of close reading, honed in the twentieth century by literary schools as distinct as New Criticism and Deconstruction, provides a set of sharp tools with which to examine non-literary discourse, as long as this move does not entail an assumption that a charter or saint’s life, for instance, necessarily embodies the kind of ambiguity or indeterminateness we have come to prize when reading literature. The techniques of close reading also tend to be deployed to illustrate textual unity and coherence: qualities which have proved not to be characteristic — at least in their modern forms — of early medieval texts. The essays in this collection have sought to close read, without using this practice to impose modern values on medieval texts. In so doing, they have attempted to respect the nature of medieval textuality while using modern literary methods of reading. Such attempts can in turn sharpen our awareness of how culturally determined our own ways of reading and aesthetic values are. Literary study then has much to offer the historian as a set of skills — but conceived in this way, there is a danger of it becoming a handmaid, ancillary to the discipline of history. Interdisciplinarity entails a much fuller integration of literary and historical study. In this volume, in which no essay uses literary practice to look through form to the facts, but in which the form of the text itself becomes a way into understanding the past, literary and historical methodologies meet as equal partners. As is repeatedly explored here, to project modern notions of literature back onto the early Middle Ages closes off from literary study a whole range of texts which have much to reveal about the aesthetic values, imaginations, and story-telling, alongside the ideological commitments, of the people in the period 500–1100. We hope that each individual essay, as much as the collection as a whole, is characterized by a truly interdisciplinary integration of literary and historical study, in part fostered by the experience of hearing and reading each other’s papers. Furthermore, we hope that joining the essays together in a single volume has made explicit the links between literary and historical analysis and the potential for exciting new modes of analysis. Above all it seems to us that these essays raise the possibility that form itself is something that scholars should study in an interdisciplinary way, learning from each other.
Convention As the contributors to this volume brought together the study of history and the study of literature to explore early medieval narratives, convention came to the fore time and again. In essays which consider apparently disparate topics contributors have grappled with the meaning and function of conventions. Focusing on convention has emerged as a much more productive way to approach texts from the early Middle Ages than, for instance, considering which parts of a text might be factual or trying to uncover the ways in which a text might be described as unified. Of course, scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were deeply engaged with convention as they sought to establish the rules of diplomatic, to identify the topoi of hagiography, or reveal the formulaic nature of vernacular Germanic verse. Each essay collected here rests on this foundational work which began in the seventeenth century. But in looking at these papers in the round, it is striking that each contributor has moved forward with this work to ask questions about the social meaning of these conventions. Much of the social approach of these essays to conventionality has its roots in interdisciplinarity. For example, as emerges here when studies of poetry are set alongside studies of charters and dispute settlements, the formulaic nature of documents can suggest ways of approaching the use of formulas within poetic tradition, and vice versa. The recognition that conventions shaped many different kinds of narrative encouraged us to ask wider questions. Along with other scholars working from the final decades of the twentieth century onwards, rather than making the identification of convention our goal, as has often been the case in literary study, or viewing conventionality as an impediment to seeing what actually happened in the past, as has often been the case in historical study, we have sought explicitly and implicitly to explore the social dimensions of narrative conventions. Pursuing the meaning and function of convention has underlined the socially active nature of conventions; that is, that conventions were maintained, not by abstract diplomatic, poetic, or hagiographic traditions, but by people who found the conventions useful in shaping lived experience. That shaping involves the production of the written accounts we now study, but the impulse to use convention was not primarily about creating a text but about influencing real people’s perceptions of events and their actions. As the codified behaviour of ritual and ceremony reminds us, convention is not merely textual, it is fundamentally social. Viewed from this perspective, we see not people unthinkingly reiterating formulas, stock characters and plots, or hagiographical topoi. Rather when narratives are considered contextually, they demonstrate that their producers had a sophisticated grasp of the meaning of convention, which we can only begin to recover by drawing on the skills of both historians and literary scholars.
Conclusion Each of the essays in this volume brings the study of form and the study of people together. In so doing, each of the contributors uses his or her imagination, judiciously, to people the space around the forms used in the texts they study. In so doing, they treat form not as a literary abstraction, but as something created and maintained by people. Approached from this perspective, the relationship of form and power emerged strongly in areas as diverse as Anglo-Saxon charters, Italian hagiography, and Old Norse poetry. Crucially, when the power of form is placed in the foreground, the producers of early medieval texts present themselves as aware that form had meaning and as capable of using the ideology of their forms in conscious and sophisticated ways to take control of their environments. The power of medieval narrative forms extends into the present day too as it shapes our own views of the past. Narrative form thus stands as an important source for knowledge about the past — but one which can be accessed only through collaborative work which demands that historians and literary scholars not only learn from each other but that they think together.
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