Now back to the nineteenth century. Muratori’s emphasis on Italian sources set the tone for the major editorial projects of the nineteenth century. Those both reflected the traditions I have sketched before, and departed from them in fundamental ways.
Both are exemplified by the impetus that Romanticism and nationalism provided for the study of the medieval past. And they attracted their fare share of crooks. Amongst the most colourful was Edward Williams (1747-1826), who adopted the pen name Iolo Morganwg. An opium addict, prisoner, failed preacher and farmer, he became a hobby archaeologist and leading figure in the romantic revival of Welsh as a literary language, and of Welsh history. His scholarly work remains significant because of his lexicographical efforts, but he is most commonly remembered for his extensive forgeries. He ‘found’ numerous ‘medieval’ manuscripts, for instance, that proved that Druidic religion had survived both the Romans and the conversion to Christianity, and was still alive and well in rural Wales; he forged histories that he claimed to have discovered; and he forged medieval bardic poetry. While he was not unmasked as a forger until the late nineteenth century, he had a profound impact on European romanticism in Wales and beyond.
Iolo’s efforts constitute the more disreputable version of a common motif: the desire to root in as remote as possible a past antecedents for what one considered to be an ideal national culture or religious form of life. He may have been a crook, but his motivations were not that dissimilar to those of Bolland or Schechter. And he was not alone. Even more popular proved to be ‘Ossian’, published by James MacPherson in 1760, which numbered Napoleon, Diderot and Wordsworth among its admirers. It even influenced a young Gustav Mahler. Ossian purported to be a collection of ancient Gaelic lore, much (though not all) of it invented by MacPherson himself. Cue masses of eager folklorists touring remote valleys and villages to gather ancient lore.
Iolo and MacPherson reflected a premise deeply rooted in classical Roman thought and shared by writers in the Latin Middle Ages: in order to be considered civilised, a community (or nation) needed to know its past. If no such past could be found, or if it survived in a way that did not conform to contemporary, ultimately Roman, expectations of what reputable history should look like, it had to be refashioned or had to be created in the first place. That was precisely what MacPherson and Iolo had done. They asserted the distinctiveness of Welsh and Scots Gaelic literature by procuring the evidence and by presenting their findings in a manner that made these traditions reputable and acceptable. Unwittingly perhaps, they followed in the footsteps of many a medieval monk faced with having to recover and present to patrons and peer a reputable communal past (there will be loads of examples of those to follow).
Macpherson and Iolo received some of their impetus from the emergence of nationalism as a political movement in the nineteenth century. Nations had, of course, existed before, but nationalism is something quite different. It was rooted in the desire to locate a cultural community that was defined by common customs, language and tradition, and that should for the natural unit of political organisation. While the former requirement had its medieval antecedents, the latter would have been something quite alien to authors like Vincent Kadlubek (c. 1200), who had no problem envisaging the early Poles as a conglomeration of Poles and Romans, or to rulers like St Stephen of Hungary (d. 1035), who viewed refugees and immigrants as a source of prestige, wealth and power.
In order for a nation to be recognised as such, it had to have an ancient, shared, and well-documented past. Something similar had underpinned Muratori’s efforts in relation to Italy, but it was the early nineteenth century that the state and other quasi-public bodies joined the game. The Rerum gallicarum et francicarum scriptores, for instance, a sequence of documents and extracts from narrative sources, divided up and ordered according to the reigns of successive French kings, had initially been begun by Martin Bouquet. He was a member of the Congregation of St Maur, centring on the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which had numbered none other than Mabillon, Martène and Durand among its members. Its publication was ultimately taken over by the French state, and, its frankly bizarre format notwithstanding, dragged on until 1904.
The government takeover and the insistence on an outdated format was partly a response to the Rolls-Royce of nineteenth-century editorial projects, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, short MGH (sadly, the ‘MGH’ stop on the red line in Boston has nothing to do with the Monumenta, but rather a lot with Mass General Hospital: picture one’s disappointment). It initially started in 1819 as a private literary society, though one heavily subsidised by the Prussian state (hence, predictably, Bavaria initiated its own series, the Monumenta Boica – but I digress). The MGH had been initiated by Karl Freiherr vom Stein, who had also been instrumental in overseeing the uniform of Prussian universities, ultimately setting the standard for the modern institution as one that combined the best available scientific method with teaching. For the MGH this meant that, from the outset, the goal was to draw on the methods developed by earlier scholars like Mabillon, but also to learn from the challenges they had faced, and to avoid the mistakes they had committed. In particular, they were indebted to the emerging discipline of philology, with its emphasis on textual criticism, and on developing the most reliable version of a text. In fact, Georg Heinrich Pertz, the MGH’s first editor, had studied philology at Göttingen. In order to edit a text, it was not enough simply to publish a manuscript, but to compare, contrast, and establish a lineage of manuscript transmission, in the search for a reputed Urtext. I’ll come back to this next week, in the post I originally meant to write. This was very different from many of the eighteenth-century projects, or from the French scriptores.
Importantly, the MGH was also a nation building project. It was about the historical monuments of Germany. Given the history of the medieval Reich, that necessarily included Italy, parts of France, the Netherlands, the newly established kingdom of Belgium, as well as Austria and Switzerland. It was also very much directed against the religious traditions discussed in the previous texts. As good Prussian protestants, most of the MGH’s early editors did, for instance, have little time for saints’ lives. Indeed, for anyone interested in hagiography, those early volumes remain a disappointing nightmare. They were like angry dwarves who stood only reluctantly upon the shoulders of Mabillon and Bolland.
With the first volume published in 1826, the MGH quickly established a standard for editing medieval texts, though one often admired in theory more than adhered to in practice. Within a generation or two, it inspired a series of comparable projects: the Monumenta Poloniae Historica (1864-93), the Fontes Rerum Bohemicarum (1871-1932), the Portugalliae Monumenta Historica (1856-1917), the Rolls Series – or, to call it by its official title, the Scriptores rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevii (1858-1911), the Fonti per la storia d’Italia (1887-1993), etc. etc. In the end, even French scholars relented.
Modern scholarship on the European Middle Ages is to a large extent dependent upon these nineteenth-century efforts (and upon various twentieth- and twenty-first century successor projects). Yet it is important to remember two things: the peculiar place of these initiatives within the historical profession, and the specific context from which they emerged. Most of these editors were not affiliated to universities. To this day, the MGH, while about 5 minutes walk from the history department of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, remains quite distinctive from the university. Many of the great editors of the nineteenth century were independent scholars. In England, the Rolls Series was largely the preserve of amateurs. Henry Richards Luard, for example, the editor of Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora for the Rolls Series, was initially a Maths lecturer, and then a university administrator, who in his spare time catalogued medieval manuscripts. William Stubbs, while later Regius Professor of History at Oxford, began as a humble parish priests who edited medieval chronicles on the side, before doing the latter professionally as librarian at Lambeth Palace, the residence of the archbishop of Canterbury. The Church continued to perform its customary role of providing source of income for budding historians.
This is not to say that interesting things did not happen at universities. They certainly did. With the expansion of higher education, and with the increasingly widespread adoption of the German model, the quality of output, and the professional sophistication of the scholarship produced increased exponentially. With that came an increasing degree of specialisation, in terms of chronology as well as of method, geographical and thematic focus. But partly because the recovery of the medieval past was also a nationalist project, university education remained embedded in a project of public education. Stubbs could so easily move into academia, because expectations were not that different. In Germany, university historians wrote novels and plays with which to form and direct public discourse about the past. Historians were not disinterested interrogators of the past, but its interpreters, who sought to shape politics and public culture as much as they were shaped by these in return. The expectation that they act as myth busters and truth-tellers inevitably required that they became distinctive from that wider public discourse. But that is a different story altogether.
Let me return to the issue of nationalism. That does, of course, come in a variety of guises. To begin, no reading of the past ever went unchallenged. In England, the invocation of an Anglo-Saxon ideal set the English apart from other Europeans. It justified and legitimised the existing political order. At the same time, chartists invoked the very same imagery to challenge that existing order (I owe this point to Jacob Dengate, who is preparing a more detailed study). Both were rooted in a common myth of national origins, but they applied very different readings to them, and sought to utilise them for very different ends.
When we are confronted with the nationalist origins of the profession, I therefore mean something quite specific: the neat compartmentalisation of high medieval Europe in particular according to political boundaries that emerged only in the nineteenth century. One is an expert on Catalonia or Castile, France or England, Germany or Italy. There also remains a desire to postulate ‘national’ distinctiveness: one’s pet region is somehow different from some broader ‘European’ norm, but what that norm might be, nobody really knows, though it is believed to be adhered to uniformly everywhere else. The result is a proliferation of exceptionalisms and Sonderwege. Yet if everything is exceptional, then nothing truly is. Maybe it is time to take to heart William of Conches, and to start looking further than the giants on whose shoulders we stand.
Note:
Again, some reading. As before, Daniel Woolf’s A global history of history makes for an excellent starting point, especially because it places the European experience in a broader global context. Anthony Grafton’s The Footnote is a rather splendid (and splendidly readable) account of what ‘scientific method’ meant in practice. His Forgers and Critics is equally enjoyable, and rather useful for contextualising Ossian and Iolo. For the ‘people without history’, see Jack Goody’s Theft of History, which also spells out what the concept meant for towards non-western cultures. There is a lot more to be said about the development of medieval history in the nineteenth century. It’s a fascinating story, and The Making of Medieval History, ed. Graham Loud and Martial Staub, provides an excellent point of entry. For the development of history as an academic discipline, one can’t do better than Making History, ed. Peter Alan Lambert and P.R. Schofield. For the wider field of historical culture, that is, the interplay between professional and non-professional historians, public memory, the lines of tradition linking the modern to the pre-modern, and the unexpected areas where the nineteenth-century did have a transformative effect, all of which approached from a truly global perspective, allow me to recommend How the Past Was Used: historical cultures, c. 700-2000, ed. Peter Lambert and Björn Weiler (though we take no responsibility for the publisher’s price tag).
This list made me realise just how male-dominated the field is. To counterbalance that, Jane Chance’s Women Medievalists and the Academy provides an essential starting point. For a specific case study, see Maxine Berg’s biography of the great Eileen Power. One of the underlying themes of this and previous posts has been the search for unpublished manuscripts. There is no better meditation on what this meant in practice than Arlette Farge’s The Allure of the Archive. While Farge deals with the eighteenth century, Carolyn’s Steedman’s Dust focuses firmly on the nineteenth- and twentieth centuries. Some of our forebears put an unwarranted degree of faith in the truthfulness of archival sources (as opposed to the chronicles and annals that this project is about). Natalie Zemon Davis’ classic Fiction in the Archives provides a rather useful corrective (and watch out for the bit about the dangers of playing tennis: a most lethal pursuit, it seems, in early modern France).
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