Philip
Gavitt
Book
Review
Constance
Bouchard, Rewriting Saints and Ancestors: Memory
and Forgetting in France, 500 - 1200. University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia,
2015), xiv + 363pp. ISBN: 978-0-8122-4636-0
1> It seems only appropriate that a
history of medieval memory should begin at the end of its chronological period
and work its way back to the beginning. Unlike studies of medieval memory and
mnemonic devices undertaken by Mary Carruthers and many others, Bouchard
attempts a project more like those we associate with studies of more modern
memory: the active rewriting of the past in which the past is not merely
present but is also a malleable instrument to be revised, rewritten, and
reworked according to the urgent, practical needs of the present. Historians for some time have realized that
our perceptions of the medieval and early modern period come to us refracted
through the lens of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By comparing the evolution of accounts of
events over time, Bouchard locates the origins of our current historical
accounts of the middle ages not just in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
but in the practices of abbots, kings, noble families, monks, and chroniclers
throughout the medieval period.
2> This is a far more subtle book
than what is expressed by the old saw that history is written by the winners.
The early chapters of the book concern themselves with types and purposes of
medieval documentation: cartularies, chronicles, and polyptiques, from which
the author moves on to the great “age of forgeries,” the early and mid-ninth
century, before turning her attention to Carolingians, Merovingians, monastic
life, and great noble families. Cartularies reworked and simplified the earlier
documents on which they were based in an effort to preserve a memory of the
past—not with an eye to completeness but to their political utility. The monks
of the Saint Denis cartulary went farther than most in falsifying their past to
avoid losing their lands, even writing their forgeries on the backs of existing
papyri to lend them “a specious air of authenticity” (16).
3> Much as early Renaissance
humanists might complain about mistakes in medieval manuscripts that “corrupted”
the transmission of texts, medieval scribes, who were often copying documents
from three or more centuries earlier, might have been challenged, as are we, by
mysterious scripts. But there is no indication that lack of interest or
carelessness played a role in the transmission of text. As Bouchard points out,
a nun of Auxerre wrote in the margins of one of her copies that it had been
collated with the original (26). Similarly, the ordering of documents in
cartularies was unlikely to be strictly chronological but, like medieval
illuminations, to blend distinct eras into a single tableau. In some cases
copies could be improvements over their “originals,” when a scribe might know
from other sources which missing names should fill gaps in the earlier document.
4> Bouchard valuably demonstrates how
many of our preoccupations with objectivity make our readings of medieval
documents more problematic than they need to be. We are far better served, in
her view, by looking at medieval cartularies as commemorative documents than as
justification for staking out legal claims. Our approaches to polyptiques are
unnecessarily obscured when we attempt to treat them as fiscal documents. Even
the eleventh and twelfth century scribes who attempted to reconcile polyptiques
with each other and with other kinds of documents understood that differences
in vocabulary made it extremely difficult to do an accurate historical
accounting of previous holdings. Above all, the polyptiques make clear that by
focusing on the institutional and economic changes of the early eleventh
century, historians are missing the opportunity to examine what may have been
dramatic changes in the rural economy a century earlier.
5> There is perhaps no clearer
example of the importance of a useful past than the forgeries that abounded in
Charlemagne’s era. Where Giles Constable argued that forgeries represented a
resistance to change during the Carolingian era, Bouchard argues that the
relative absence of extant documentation in the Carolingian period combined
administrative and intellectual vitality to make the creation of a well-documented
though contrived past a matter of urgency. Bouchard examines at length the Le
Mans forgeries and the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals (of which the famous forgery
of the Donation of Constantine was a part) and concludes that both were
products “of concerted campaigns to
create a useful past that was completely false”(66). The Pseudo-Isidorian
decretals in particular, she argues, used the veneration of the written word in
the service of defending ecclesiastical rights to property and to discourage its
misappropriation. Not all such forgeries were successful, however, and not all
had to await the Italian Renaissance to be suspected and revealed as such.
6> The following chapters deal with
the use that Carolingians made of documents to reinforce their own legitimacy
and how, in doing so, they created the portrait of their Merovingian
predecessors as weak and disorganized that still prevails in our undergraduate
teaching. Bouchard suggests that the Carolingians’ view of the Mayors of the
Palace is largely a colorful fiction, and that the Merovingians offered far
more support of monastic institutions than their successors gave them credit
for. Indeed, Carolingian attention to monastic institutions was far more
self-interested and controlling than beneficial. Competing chronicles, Paul the Deacon’s and
the Annals of Metz in particular, show Carolingian chroniclers employing rival
versions of genealogical research to deal with the touchy problem of the
transition from Merovingians to Carolingians.
7> Bouchard’s arguments are based on
research in primary sources that is both broad and deep, and should stand as an
excellent example of how recent theoretical attention to memory and its
manipulation can successfully challenge our assumptions about the early
medieval past that often are also more useful than accurate. Not all will agree that this book means that
substantial changes in our views of the early middle ages are long overdue, but
the author deserves our gratitude for injecting a healthy dose of skepticism
both about traditional narratives of medieval history that we take for granted,
and also for her welcome skepticism about the unambiguity of primary sources.
_____
Philip
Gavitt
is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Saint Louis University. In
1992 he founded the Saint Louis University Center for Medieval and Renaissance
Studies, and is the author of Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence:
The Ospedale degli Innocenti, 1410-1536 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 1990) as well as Gender, Honor and Charity in Late Renaissance
Florence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). He is co-editor
(with Rebecca Messbarger and Christopher Johns) of a forthcoming volume of
essays on Pope Benedict XIV: Art, Science, Spirituality to be published
in 2016 by University of Toronto Press. He is also working on a book-length
project on religious orders and the early Catholic Reformation.
_____
APPOSITIONS:
Studies
in Renaissance / Early Modern Literature and Culture,
http://appositions.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1946-1992,
Volume
Eight (2015): Dialogues & Exchanges
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