Rewriting Saints and Ancestors: Memory and Forgetting in France, 500–1200 by Constance Brittain Bouchard (review)

‘The past does not stand still but rather is in constant flux as it is remembered, remembered differently, or forgotten’ (p. 1). In her book, Constance Brittain Bouchard treats us to a thought-provoking and admirably lucid study of seven centuries’ worth of sources used by modern scholars to narrate the political and ecclesiastical history of early medieval France. From twelfth-century cartularies to sixth-century hagiographies, these sources cannot be classified simply as authentic or forged: all can be understood as attempts to revivify the past in the present by exercising ‘creative memory’. Following in the footsteps of the pioneers of medieval memory studies (Walter Goffart, Patrick Geary, and Mary Carruthers get special mention, p. 3), Bouchard not only examines how clerics re-remembered their saints, and noble families their ancestors, but also explores the role played by memory and forgetting in identity formation. Aptly enough for a book concerned with the retrospective construction of meaning, the reader is taken backwards in time from the Capetians via the Carolingians to the Merovingians. Each chapter dwells on a particular type of written record (with case studies centring less on the France of the title than the Burgundy and Champagne regions that Bouchard knows so well). Chapters 1 to 3 consider the ways in which the past was reconfigured in twelfthcentury cartularies and chronicles to make it useful to the present. But it was during the ninth century, Bouchard argues in Chapter 5, when outright forgeries were combined with authentic documents, that ‘creative memory was at its most creative’ (p. 63). The central chapters deal, sometimes contentiously, with Carolingian efforts to rework the memory of their own family line and forget that of the Merovingians. Bouchard’s argument in Chapter 8 that ‘in many ways the rise of the Carolingians did not contribute to the regularity and well-being of Frankish churches but was instead a disaster for them’ (p. 128) is likely to prove provocative. There follow stimulating readings of two lacunae in the historical record, concerning Burgundian monasteries and aristocratic family history, that coincide with the transitional period between the Merovingian and Carolingian eras. Chapters 11 and 12, finally, take us back to the sixth century, when thinkers at the dawn of the Middle Ages creatively remembered saints and relics as having always been venerated exactly as they were being venerated in the present. In terms of its scope, its engagement with neglected gaps in documentary evidence, and its reminders that our own narrative accounts of the history of medieval France are heavily reliant upon our forebears’ creative memories, Bouchard’s book excels. Essential reading for all those interested in medieval history up to 1200, this major study brings not just the past but remembering the past to life.