L’Après et son double: Reading Medieval History after the Linguistic Turn

Regelmäßig wird deren [der Fragen echter Methodik] Lösung über eine Revision der Fragestellung führen, die in der Erwägung formulierbar ist, wie die Frage: Wie es denn eigentlich gewesen sei? sich wissenschaftlich nicht sowohl beantworten als vielmehr stellen lasse.

—Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963) 25.

As a rule, the solution to strictly methodological questions will lead to a revision of the way the question is framed, which in this particular instance is formulatable this way: the issue is not really how the question “is this how it really was?” is to be answered in a scholarly manner. It is rather how that question can even be raised

(my translation).

In the midst of presenting a tense negotiation between King Louis VII of France and the Byzantine emperor Manuel Comnenus in 1148, Odo of Deuil, an eyewitness famous for the accuracy and quality of his testimony, suddenly reports a partial solar eclipse and tells us how it was interpreted:

On that day the sun saw a crime which it could not endure, but so that this crime should not seem equal to the betrayal of the Lord, half of the sun gave light to the world, and only half hid itself. Thus, when the army was proceeding without the king and saw the sun shaped like a half loaf of bread for most of the day, it feared that the king, who above all others shone with faith, glowed with charity, and attained celestial heights because of hope, had been deprived of some part of his light by the treachery of the Greeks.¹

But then Odo surprisingly says that the army’s assumption was wrong, and he provides what he calls a “more correct” explanation (rectius exposuimus):

But something else, equally lamentable, happened; for the German emperor . . . had been forced to withdraw after many thousands had been killed by Turkish arrows, as we shall record later. Because we later learned its meaning we have explained the heavenly phenomenon more correctly, saying that our king and the German emperor were one sun . . . and that half of the sun shone and half hid its rays because the Germans retreated while the king was proceeding with customary zeal.

(83–85)

This is exactly the sort of thing that gives medieval historical writing a bad name, and it can be found, as here, interrupting the flow of information in the most serious and trustworthy medieval historical texts. How are we to read such a passage now? Or do we, like so many generations of scholars in search of what actually happened in the past, simply dismiss it, wondering if they really believed things like this?

For some time now, it seems to me, we can find all sorts of statements to the effect that the great theoretical challenge to historical understanding, variously signaled as the linguistic turn in the human sciences or often simply as postmodernism, has been absorbed into the mainstream of critical historical practice.² To take just one example, already in 2007 the cultural historian Michael Roth commented: “the massive tide of language . . . has receded; we are now able to look across the sand to see what might be worth salvaging before the next waves of theory and research begin to pound the shore.”³ Statements such as this strongly imply that we may now recover real, positive knowledge of the past in ways that we could not do while the great wave of theory was breaking over us.

If this is indeed true, then it seems to me theoretically crucial at this moment to directly examine the fundamental problematic of historical representation in any narrative that makes a truth claim. This fundamental problematic stems from what is essentially and unavoidably a rhetorical sleight of hand: the claim truthfully to represent in a narrative something that happened independent of the confines of that narrative requires the reader’s assent to the narrative’s own formal techniques of representation. It requires the reader to agree that the text has...