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Introduction
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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Introduction The past is never dead. It’s not even past. —William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun Time’s arrow moves in one direction only: forward. But memory moves backward . The past does not stand still but rather is in constant flux as it is remembered , remembered differently, or forgotten. In this book I examine, through the lens of memory, the sources from which modern scholars have constructed the church history and family history of France in the early and high Middle Ages in order to give the sources their full due as efforts to remember—or to create—a useful past for those who wrote them. Medieval authors wanted above all to make sure that the events they recorded were remembered. Anselm of St.-Remy, giving the history of the 1049 dedication of his monastery and the great council at Reims, mentions memory three times in succession in his prologue. He wrote, he said, so that the events would not be “obliterated by silence.” He wanted to be sure that the deeds of Leo IX, “of blessed recollection,” be recorded, as worthy of memoria. And he wished to have the “memorable conclusion” to his monastery’s rebuilding program preserved. At almost exactly the same time, a scribe at the monastery of Bèze began a charter recording a nobleman’s gift to his monastery by saying, “The human mind is changeable, and what has been done is soon lost to memory , unless recorded in charters.”1 Sources thus should be seen as written so that certain events be properly remembered—or that those events not recorded be allowed to pass into oblivion. The past was malleable, and writing itself became an act of power, an effort to use the past to make sense of the present. Medieval society was a “traditional” society—not in the sense that society was unchanging, because in fact society and culture were highly dynamic. But it was traditional in that tradition legitimized: “We have always done so” 2 Introduction carried enormous moral and legal weight.2 But the exercise of memory allows one to alter—or at least be selective with—tradition. The “old ways” provided validity even when those ways were being changed as they were invoked.3 By changing what was “always done” in the past, one could change the present. Historical writing involved a conversation with the records of the past, at least some of which would have seemed disturbingly strange. Yet the past was the source of present custom and even identity, so writers had to be creative. Hence I shall discuss how medieval thinkers reconceptualized their pasts, sometimes altering tradition quite consciously but more commonly trying to interpret a past that seemed highly foreign in order to make it comprehensible to their own time. Medievalists have always realized that the primary sources do not give a transparent window into the Middle Ages.4 These sources were rarely written at the same time as the events they described. For example, even the essentially contemporary documents detailing property transactions between monks and laymen tended to be drawn up once the event was over, after all the negotiations had been completed, after the various people whose involvement was deemed necessary had been sought out and their consent given. Narrative composition was even further removed from the events recorded. Even in year-by-year “Annals,” a selection was still made of which events, perhaps many months in the past, were significant enough to merit a record. Indeed, most surviving “Annals” were written substantially later, with a single author telling a continuous story even if he broke it down year by year. An additional distance is put between event and surviving record because, in the majority of cases, we have not the original manuscript but rather a later copy of it, which itself might have been reworked to serve the needs of its own time. Forgeries are also a key element of the study of creative memory.5 Yet their study has been primarily restricted to German-speaking scholars and diplomaticists and to the question of whether particular charters should be considered false or authentic.6 But false charters, like narrative sources, could reflect the past their composers would have liked to remember. Monks creating forged charters may sometimes have convinced themselves that they were only writing down what would or should have been written originally, or in other cases they may have knowingly tried to pass off blatant...