Perceptions of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (review)

Rosamond McKitterick's work is extremely influential and highly regarded across all disciplinary aspects of medieval studies. Her latest work, part three of the Conway Lectures at the Medieval Institute, Notre Dame series, is a continuation of her response to cultural imaginings of the past in various literary historical periods, following her History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Broadly speaking, the present study can be considered historiographical, with emphasis on the "plural 'perceptions'" of the past, in particular the textual production—the regeneration of older works and the creation of new writings—of the Carolingians in the Frankish realm in the eighth and ninth centuries (p. 2). McKitterick's work takes nothing for granted, not least her own purpose as a scholar of layers and strata of history writing, collective and individual memory, and the manipulation of texts to particular ends. Her opening statements, albeit brief, eruditely theorize both her own work and the shift within the academy in terms of attitudes toward authority, the validity of historical writing as source material, and the ontology employed to describe both "original" and "borrowed" material. The argument here will be familiar to textual scholars, historians, literary critics, and linguists alike, and it is best articulated by McKitterick herself: that the identification of source material is but one step toward the full appreciation of the evolution of that work in subsequent contexts and that the "entire text of each history needs to be assessed, for it is this that can best offer insights into the intellectual world of the early medieval historical writers and compilers and their perspective on, and knowledge of, the past" (p. 4).

McKitterick's opening chapter, "Chronology and Empire," examines what she terms "beginnings" (p. 7): specifically, the first lines of the Book of Genesis and the Gospel of St. John, respectively; the associations made between the two by early Christian thinkers (including Jerome); and the notion of "parallelism" in terms of divine eternity and physical creation (p. 8). The Frankish interest in commentaries on the historical books of the Bible, she argues, can be understood in relation to the importance of the Genesis and St. John narratives in their perception not just of history writing and histories but also of space and time. McKitterick notes that the Creation story is the "beginning point" (p. 9) for most chronicles from the late ancient and early medieval periods, providing a foundation for wider world history. She shows how that starting point was also the generation of diverse narratives, strategies, and organization of material. In other words, commentators and chroniclers rewrite and evolve this imaginative locus of beginning in various ways: Orosius, for example, adds a geography of the world; Jerome, perhaps most influentially, translates the Chronicon of Eusebius "wanting his readers to think in terms of the history of the world from the Creation" (p. 11), but making manifest in his preface the addition of points of interest omitted by his source. McKitterick's interest in organization principles extends to the material text; she cites and reproduces the visual impact that a system of ordinatio had on early medieval copies and copyists. The chapter continues by tracing the Jerome/Eusebius texts throughout the early medieval period and into the early Carolingian period, when the Chronicon, alongside Bede's De temporum ratione, enjoyed a wide popularity and was taken up by various emulators: the anonymous author of the Chronicon universale (741), Ado of Vienne, and Regino of Prüm.

These three authors constructed histories of "an entirely different character" from their sources and from earlier, "universal" histories (p. 32), particularly in terms of their various representations of Rome. This—in particular, the "Roman imperial past, interwoven with the history of the Christian church" (p. 35) and the prominence it receives in Carolingian writings and imagination—is the subject of McKitterick's second chapter. Both Eusebius/Jerome and Bede...