Medieval Narratives: Living On

Introduction

What we understand today by the term “narrative” is not universal or transparent. Nor is the cultural work that narratives do. That work varies across different cultures and at different times. According to the OED, the two main current definitions of narrative are the “spoken or written account of connected events; a story,” and the “practice or art of telling stories.” The first definition highlights the emplotting aspect of narrative, namely that it does more than describe events because it makes connections between them, while the second points to the narrator’s deployment of technique, expertise, and conventions within a defined social situation. Storytelling not only requires skill but also presupposes an audience. Medieval understandings of narrative share these broad modern definitions. But if we look at the more specialized meanings of the term, we see some differences in the range of meanings between now and the Middle Ages.

The word “narrative” is not a medieval one. It is first recorded in English in 1539 as a term in Scottish law meaning “[a] part of a legal document which contains a statement of alleged or relevant facts closely connected with the matter or purpose of the document” (OED). Its more common meaning—“[a]n account of a series of events, facts, etc., given in order and with the establishing of connections between them”—is first attested in 1571. Later, it acquires a more specialized meaning in the field of literary criticism, first recorded in 1843: “[t]he part of a text, esp. a work of fiction, which represents the sequence of events, as distinguished from that dealing with dialogue, description, etc.; narration as a literary method or genre.” In the second definition, a “narrative” unfolds chronologically (“in order”) and establishes connections: it is not the mere recounting of events and facts but an attempt to shape those events and facts by articulating their inter-relationality in a way that is intentionally meaningful—what we might call, in relation to literary texts, “plot.” In this sense, a narrative is more than a story. As the British writer and critic E. M. Forster puts it: “The king died and then the queen died is a story. The king died, and then the queen died of grief is a plot.”¹ In the third, literary critical or narratological definition, “narrative” is not only a characteristic of fiction—that is, it presents imagined events that are not (necessarily) true—but it also refers uniquely to that aspect of narrating that deals with time, the linear unfolding of events, as opposed to other literary modes, such as dialogue and description, which are not so closely connected to temporality.

In twentieth-century structuralist and poststructuralist theory, “narrative” acquires an even more specialized meaning: the “representation of a history, biography, process, etc., in which a sequence of events has been constructed into a story in accordance with a particular ideology; esp. in grand narrative . . . a story or representation used to give an explanatory or justificatory account of a society, period, etc.” (OED). One familiar medieval grand narrative that took many shapes, and that was current from at least the ninth century, is that of translatio studii et imperii, meaning the transferral of power from Rome, and of learning from Athens or Rome to Paris. The translatio narrative is imperialist: the translation of the “other” into the terms of first the Roman and second the Carolingian empire, through the cultural appropriation and displacement (often aggressive) of classical texts.² Narratives can thus also represent and organize historical events ideologically, enshrining the values and interests of ruling elites, and presenting the “truth” of what happened in highly specific ways. In Anna Wilson’s words, “culturally determined narrative structures shape . . . our perception of reality.” ³ These structures also shape the organization of time into narrative in historical works. As Wilson argues, the historian Hayden White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973) “organizes historical works into different dramatic forms and prefigurative narrative strategies. The ‘emplotment’ of history, White suggests, follows one of four generic narratives that have arisen from dramatic conventions in Western...