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

Conclusion

Conclusion The saints and ancestors who were remembered, rewritten, and reconceptualized between the sixth century and the twelfth all had one significant aspect in common: they were dead. The living, too, were worthy of memory, as Anselm of St.-Remy made clear in the eleventh century when he recorded the events of the Council of Reims. But control of memory principally meant control of the dead. Even before the development of a unified liturgy of Christian death in the late ninth century,1 the dead were a crucial part of the community of the faithful, perhaps the most important part, and how they were remembered shaped the living present. When chroniclers and cartulary scribes worked in the high Middle Ages, re-creating the histories of their houses, placing them in the history of the world as a whole (or at least the part they knew), or organizing, trying to make sense of, and copying charters that had been accumulating in the archives for as long as six centuries, they wrote of those long dead. But those who had come before had constant relevance for the present, a relevance that could indeed be improved with judicious reinterpretation. The dead were thus a crucial element in the early medieval construction of memory.2 Because their predecessors had created the past that thinkers assumed ought to shape contemporary experience, and because the dead continued to be present, the distinction between long ago and right now could easily be blurred. Overcoming death through resurrection of the body had of course been a central tenet of Christianity since its earliest days.3 The dead were thus not to be feared but rather to be embraced, and the presence of human remains was not a reminder of mortality but a marker of immortality. Once early Christianity had made the transition, in Alan Bernstein’s terms, from death as a neutral event to death as a moral event, and the choice between heaven and hell loomed large for the dying,4 it is not surprising that Christians preferred burial at churches. By making tombs of stone, Merovingian-era Christians were assuring that these tombs could be quite literally incorporated into their churches. Conclusion 229 The crypts of ancient churches from Arles in southern France to St.-Laurent of Grenoble in the Alps to St.-Germain of Auxerre in Burgundy to St.-Denis outside of Paris to Diekirch in Luxembourg not only are full of Merovingian sarcophagi but are in fact partially constructed of these sarcophagi. The biographer of Bishop Caesarius of Arles, writing in the middle of the sixth century, described the saint paying for stone sarcophagi with which he covered the floor of a basilica in Arles so that the nuns he had established there would be “relieved of concern” for how they would be buried.5 Excavations at the church of St.-Laurent of Grenoble have revealed a fifth-century stone mausoleum where the tapered sarcophagi were neatly lined up to fill all available space. By the early seventh century it was a fully developed cruciform church, with altars and sacristy—and hundreds of tombs. The Christians of Grenoble were buried in the church itself, and subsequent rebuildings of the church, in first Carolingian and eventually the present Romanesque styles, all preserved the layers of crypts from previous centuries.6 In church for mass, baptism, or ordination, medieval people were always reminded of the continuing presence of the dead. But nearly as important as the bodies of those who had gone before were what had been written by or about them. Charters and vitae were not just historical artifacts but living testimony to events still highly important. Times and dates, the starting point for understanding history for modern scholars, were much more flexible in early medieval thought. Indeed, one of the purposes of memory was to bridge the gaps that time might create. Thus the creation of a cartulary took the individual charters out of their temporal context and reordered them in a way that corresponded to the needs or perceptions of the cartulary scribe and his contemporaries. Even the universal chroniclers who recounted several thousand years of history, in order, viewed the past teleologically : biblical history led up to the atonement, and a monastery’s history of foundation, difficulties, and even destruction led up to its present glory. Only those documents that could not be interpreted to meet a community ’s present needs, most notably the polyptyques, were allowed to disappear quietly...