Rewriting Saints and Ancestors: Memory and Forgetting in France, 5-12

3. Twelfth-Century Narratives of the Past

C h a p t e r 3 Twelfth-Century Narratives of the Past To write was to create a record for posterity. As Gregory the Great said, “What we speak is transitory, but what we write remains.”1 A twelfth-century bishop of Chalon put it just as clearly if not as elegantly: “Since, in this world, unless things are corroborated in writing, they are often lost to negligence or oblivion , therefore . . .”2 Thus anyone putting pen to parchment, an activity both difficult and expensive, did so because the words were important enough to need to be read again. At the same time as churchmen created cartularies to order their past, they also wrote universal chronicles, in which recent events in their regions figured prominently. Chroniclers since the third century had been starting their accounts with Creation,3 but they saw no difficulty in concentrating on their own period after a quick trip through the Bible and early medieval history. The twelfth-century chronicler of St.-Pierre-le-Vif of Sens, for example, began with a universal chronicle, proceeding from the year 1 to the sixth century, when he believed his house was founded, and then continued seamlessly with events— both local and international—down to his own time.4 The chronicle of Alberic of Trois-Fontaines begins with Adam but is primarily concerned with twelfthand early thirteenth-century Burgundy and Champagne.5 A number of chroniclers of the high Middle Ages, intent on placing their abbeys into their appropriate place in history, combined what would now be considered narrative history with integral copies of charters—what the French now call pièces justificatives. Such accounts reveal that both cartularies and chronicles were efforts to order and retain the memory of the past. Most chroniclers appear to have tried conscientiously to be what would now be considered scholarly, consulting earlier annals, saints’ lives, and charters. The twelfth-century chronicler of St.-Pierre-le-Vif, for example, relied in part on Twelfth-Century Narratives 39 the account by Odorannus, also a monk at St.-Pierre, written nearly a century earlier.6 But the past the chroniclers re-created was not the same as the story that modern historians can now re-create using essentially the same sources. Monastic chroniclers especially tended to make their houses older and more prestigious than their sources might support because their standing in the past increased their authority in the present. Cartularies and Chronicles Although to the modern medievalist cartularies are collections of legal documents , thus very different from narrative sources (indeed, in most French départements a deliberate if not completely successful effort has been made to put legal documents, including cartularies, into the Archives, and narrative sources into the Bibliothèques), to medieval monks the distinction was not as sharp.7 Several houses produced what are now known as cartulary-chronicles, where a narrative history of the house is interspersed with copies of documents from the house’s archives. Most of the early records of both St.-Bénigne of Dijon and St.-Pierre of Bèze, for example, are known only from such a chronicle.8 The first cartulary of St.-Père of Chartres, compiled in the 1080s, also mixes chronicle and document, although Paul, the compiler, attempted to distinguish the two forms for the reader. He began his work with a prologue (which Paul, proud of his scraps of Greek, calls an epilogus), in which he touched on highlights of his house’s history, an account that also called for documentary evidence. For the earliest documents he copied (dating from the tenth century), he followed each with a brief discussion of the subsequent fate of the relevant property. Sometimes it had been lost to the house, sometimes it had been augmented. In some cases he recorded more recent gifts in the same area by subsequent donors. At one point he mentioned that he tried to find out about a certain church by inquiring of the “oldest monks.”9 Or sometimes , more prosaically, the road that had marked the boundary a century and a half before Paul wrote had been shifted, and Paul explained the shift to be sure his readers were not confused. Chroniclers continued to include copies of charters along with other materials in twelfth-century manuscripts. The monastery of Flavigny produced a chronicle around the year 1100 that included copies of a number of charters.10 Flavigny’s chronicle was not intended as a substitute...