Histoire, mémoire et pouvoir: les généalogies en rouleau des rois d’Angleterre (1250–1422) by Olivier de Laborderie (review)

This book is a condensed and reworked version of Olivier de Laborderie’s six-volume doctoral thesis of 2002. It makes a remarkable work of scholarship available to a much wider public than those of us who have been fortunate enough to read the original. Research has carried on apace since 2002, so it is good to see him engage with the editions by Julia Marvin (The Oldest Anglo-Norman Prose Brut Chronicle (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006)) and Heather Pagan (Prose Brut to 1332 (Manchester: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 2011)). Laborderie is unable to mention a book that must have been in press at the same time as his: John Spence’s Reimagining History in Anglo-Norman Prose Chronicles (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013). Nevertheless, the gist of Laborderie’s conclusions remains unchanged. He ascribes the first Anglo-Norman genealogical roll to Matthew Paris and his circle. The historiographers of St Albans adapted a teaching support that was to hand: the rolls that had been devised by the chancellor of the University of Paris, Peter of Poitiers, to teach the history of the Old Testament through the genealogy of Christ. Genealogical rolls create an accessible ‘timeline’, and can absorb parallel or converging lines of succession. Laborderie’s book stresses their transition from the cathedral schoolroom into ‘un abrégé d’histoire profane et nationale destiné au monde laïc des “illiterati”‘ (p. 143). Tantalizingly (but hypothetically), Queen Eleanor of Provence might have been their first intended recipient, possibly disseminating copies to her children and grandchildren. The copies in Latin seem to have had religious owners. Anglo-Norman rolls, on the other hand, can be traced from the royal family circle down to much less prominent families. Laborderie traces the adoption of the texts by the courts of Edward I and Edward II as a means of presenting a powerful (if ambivalent) image of English royal authority just as claims were being affirmed over Wales, Scotland, and part of Ireland. The rolls confect a narrative of continuity out of England’s discontinuous history, from the Heptarchy to the Plantagenets. They are interested in more than lines of succession, because they cite siblings who had no issue, including nuns. Their commitment to unchallenged, dynastic, Plantagenet claims may have been useful for the Anglo-Scottish wars, but they might have made uncomfortable reading after the fall of Edward II: fewer copies were made after 1327. Laborderie kindly describes the sections of his thesis he has cut. Those who have read it cherish its transcriptions and illustrations, which are absent from the one-volume book. This volume reproduces only one section of Harvard’s Houghton Library MS Typ. 11, which is available in full online, open access, and in colour (p. 9). However, there is one thing to note: since 2002, only three of Laborderie’s corpus of forty-one rolls have been made available online. I am sure more will soon appear, thanks to the swift development of word-and-image studies through the digital humanities, but thanks also to this book.