Below a short summary of what this project is about. Future posts will be shorter!
Medieval writers and modern debates
Medieval narratives about the past tell us much about modern debates concerning unity and diversity in European culture. From c.1100-1135, and largely independently of each other, writers in Poland, France, Bohemia, England, Germany, Iceland, and Denmark produced communal histories, i.e., accounts of a past centring on a community defined by shared political or dynastic traditions. The first wave of regnal histories was followed by similar ones c. 1180-1200, and c. 1250-80. We are thus dealing with a transeuropean development that transcended both modern nation states and medieval polities.
Exploring these accounts is, therefore, about more than just the writing of history. Rather, it points to a recurrent feature in European politics and society: a fundamental tension between transeuropean movements and ideas, and the emergence of political particularism. The central Middle Ages, in turn, remain the first period for which we have sufficient evidence to trace these tensions fully. The rediscovery of the medieval past during the nineteenth century, in turn, ensured that these high medieval constructions of distinctiveness became embedded in a discourse of national identities that continues to define modern European politics to this day.
A common textual culture
European historical culture was rooted in a shared textual inheritance. Chroniclers drew on exemplars of classical Latin (Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal), ancient and late antique history (Sallust, Valerius, Solinus) or rhetoric (Cicero), and of early Christian authors (St Augustine, Gregory the Great, Orosius, Isidore of Seville).[1] Tellingly, these textual foundations extended to medieval chronicles. Cosmas of Prague (c. 1123) drew on Regino of Prüm’s tenth-century chronicle; when writing his Ancient History of the Norwegian Kings (c. 1190), Theodoricus Monachus consulted Sigebert of Gembloux (d.1112), and Hugh of St Viktor (d. 1141), active respectively in the Holy Roman Empire and Paris; Adam of Bremen’s history of the archbishops of Hamburg (c. 1078) was consulted in thirteenth-century Croatia; the writings of Gerald of Wales surface in crusader Acre and imperial Burgundy.[2] Medieval literary culture transcended modern national and linguistic boundaries.
Three waves of writing history
A common textual culture further manifested itself in shared patterns and practices. Across Europe, historical writing initially often centred on representations of the sacral past (as in the cult of saints). Narratives of a regnal past only followed a generation or two later.[3] This was the case in post-Conquest England, in Scandinavia, and in Hungary. Even changes in approaches towards representing the past manifested themselves in recognisable transeuropean patterns. The writings produced c. 1100-1130 often provided the first full – or the first Latin - account of a communal past, as with Hugh of Fleury in France (c. 1110), Cosmas of Prague in Bohemia (c. 1123), or the Chronicon Roskildense in Denmark (c. 1138). Frequently, these also coincided with the emergence of new polities and regnal entities.[4]
During the second wave, many earlier narratives were rewritten (and new ones were composed) to reflect changing expectations about what constituted common European norms, and regnal distinctiveness. Rome and Classical Latinity became central. In Hungary, the Anonymous Notary wrote a history of the Hungarians modelled on Dares Phrygius’ fifth-century history of the Trojan War, while in Poland and Denmark respectively Vincent Kadlubek and Saxo Grammaticus set out to refashion earlier narratives that no longer met standards of elegant Latin. They also established new origins: Saxo traced Danish history further back than any other writer (to Dan and Angel, active before the Trojan War), and Vincent recorded how a Roman patrician had first ruled the Poles.
Between c. 1250 and c. 1280, writers embarked on a third wave of refashioning. The dividing line between universal and regnal history became blurred. Contemporary affairs could no longer be reported in isolation from either Christendom at large or the world beyond it. Simultaneously, renewed efforts were made to assert regnal distinctiveness. In England, these resulted in a rewriting of the Anglo-Saxon past, in Iceland in the emergence of family sagas recording the settlement period (c. 890-1020), and in Castile in a refashioning of the Visigoth and in a quest for connections with the Classical past. While writers sought to assert the distinctiveness of a given community, they did so employing shared textual foundations, and in relation to a shared framework for asserting such distinctiveness.
Historical writing as social effort
How was this possible? How could writers in thirteenth-century Croatia access texts produced in eleventh-century Germany? Why did authors in Poland and Denmark, in Castile, England or Iceland choose similar approaches and themes?
The sociologist Howard Becker’s study of contemporary art provides helpful parallels: musicians, for instance, were embedded in cultural traditions of how music ought to be written and performed. These, they might seek to supersede, revive, or refine. Yet to be able to do so, they also needed training, and they required access to others who had received similar training, for instance, in performing and recording music. Furthermore, what they were able to accomplish reflected what was technically feasible and economically viable. Finally, there were those who paid to attend, who listened to, or commented upon a piece or its performance, and thereby helped shape expectations about the value of a particular work and its rendition.[5] Artistic production was made possible by and reflected a wider social framework.
Comparable factors were at play in high medieval Europe. Writing history required training, for instance in Latin composition. Knowledge of classical and Biblical models had to be acquired, as had the ability to engage with them. The extent of coverage reflected the expectations and the means of peers and patrons: the resources they were willing to invest so that a writer could access earlier texts and other materials, the expectations they might have of what should be recorded, and how it should be represented, but also how the information collated was communicated to them, and how they used it. Practices and expectations were subject to change. The economic expansion of Europe c.1150-1300 resulted both in the proliferation of new information, and the emergence of new actors, informants, and patrons. Manuscript production almost quadrupled.[6]
We can also trace how the concerns of urban communities and those of an emerging professional class of Latinate non-clerics (lawyers, officials, merchants) helped redefine what was considered worth recording. Still, familiar concerns predominated. In thirteenth-century England, royal administrators collated information about the Anglo-Saxon past (which they then passed on to monastic chroniclers), while the history of the German city of Worms, likely commissioned by local merchants c. 1290, opened with the community’s sixth-century royal visitors.[7] New actors continued to employ well-established approaches and practices. More significantly, the wealth and range of materials produced enables us to trace debates and rival readings of the past.
The importance of a useful past
Knowing about the past was, as the English chronicler Henry of Huntingdon (fl. c. 1129-54) explained, a mark of civilisation: animals and brutes had in common that they lacked knowledge of their origins, and of the affairs of their homeland. In fact, brutes were worse than beasts: while the latter could not have a past, the former wilfully refused to know theirs.[8] Comparable statements occur across high medieval Europe, and form part of the background for the highly stylised Latin compositions of Kadlubek and Saxo. Equally important was the role of precedent and of the implied truthfulness of history.
Antiquity bestowed legitimacy: it rooted the origins of a community in time, and set it apart from its neighbours. Examples include the desire to postulate Trojan origins in Wales, as distinct from an English self-perception that centred on conquest by Angles and Saxons, while in Bohemia, Denmark and Hungary Trojan origins were explicitly rejected, partly perhaps because of the Roman (and hence Trojan) pedigree invoked by the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire. Similarly, the citizens of Trier postulated a foundation 1500 years before Rome’s, and hence preceding any episcopal or imperial authority over the town.
The truth of history
Paradoxically, such flights of fancy were both possible and necessary because history was expected to be truthful. Finding the evidence to back up claims was thus key, and shaped the international textual culture of history: materials had to be secured from across Europe. To ascertain their truth claim, newly fashioned narratives, in turn, had to conform to established conventions of how truthful history ought to be written. Moreover, precisely because of this truth claim, the past was frequently disputed. Debates manifested themselves in rival narratives, but also in attempts by writers to verify information, to compare disparate accounts, and evaluate information critically.
Now for the questions
To what extent were narratives of distinctiveness based on textual models, and how far did they reflect social realities?
Did authors across Europe, and irrespective of the community about which they wrote, adopt similar approaches because they dealt with similar social, economic and political conditions or because they read each other’s works, or at least the same foundational corpus of sources?
[1] E.g.: Cosmas of Prague, Chronica Boemorum, ed. B. Bretholz, (Berlin, 1923), xxvi-xxxii: among others, Vergil, Ovid, Horace, Lucan, Pliny the Elder, Sallust, St Augustine, Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville, Regino of Prüm; Godfrey of Viterbo, Opera, ed. G. Waitz, MGH SS 22 (Leipzig, 1872), 3-4: Vergil, Seneca, Juvenal, Ovid, Horace, Jerome, Isidore of Seville, Valerius Maximus, Orosius, Dares Phrygius, Regino, Otto of Freising; Alberic of Troisfontaines, Chronicon, ed. P. Scheffer-Boichorst MGH SS 23 (Leipzig, 1874), 656-7: Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, Solinus, Eusebius, Flavius Josephus, Orosius, Gregory of Tours, Flodoard of Rheims, William of Malmesbury, William of Tyre, Godfrey of Viterbo; Martini Oppaviensis Chronicon, ed. L. Weiland, MGH SS 22 (Leipzig, 1872), 391-3: Vergil, Juvenal, Livy, Orosius, Solinus, Isidore of Seville, St Augustine, Gregory the Great, Paul the Deacon.
[2] Theodoricus Monachus, The Ancient History of the Norwegian kings, transl. D. and I. McDougal (London, 1998), 1-2; Cosmas of Prague, Chronica Boemorum, xxvi-xxxii; The Historia Occidentalis of Jacques de Vitry, ed. J.F. Hinnebusch (Fribourg, 1972), 186; Alberic of Troisfontaines, Chronica, 861; Thomas of Split, Historia Salonitanorum atque Spalatinorum pontificum, ed. & transl. O. Peric et. al. (Budapest and New York, 2006), 36.
[3] L.B. Mortensen, ‘Sanctified beginnings and mythopoetic moments. The first wave of writing on the past in Norway, Denmark, and Hungary, c. 1000-1230’, in: The Making of Christian myths in the periphery of Latin Christendom, c.1000-1300, ed. L.B. Mortensen (Copenhagen, 2006), 247-73.
[4] Weiler, ‘Tales of first kings’.
[5] H.S. Becker, Art Worlds, 2nd edition (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2008).
[6] E. Buringh, Medieval Manuscript Production in the Latin West: explorations with a global database (Leiden, 2010), 368.
[7] B. Weiler, ‘Monastic historical culture and the utility of a remote past: the case of Matthew Paris’, in: Historical Cultures, ed. Lambert and Weiler, 112-3; The Histories of a Medieval German City, Worms c.1000-c.1300, transl. D.S. Bachrach (Aldershot, 2014), 81.
[8] Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum (History of the English People), ed. & trans. D. Greenway (Oxford, 1996), 4–5.
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