Remembering Kings Past: Monastic Foundation Legends in Medieval Southern France by Amy G. Remensnyder (review)

768BOOK REVIEWS that ignore the shifting character of papal-imperial relations in this period. Finally , this volume would have profited from additional study of such recent works, omitted from the bibUography, as Michael Koehler's Allianzen und Vorträge zwischen frankischen und islamischen Herrschern (Berlin, 1991), with its superb insights into both western and Islamic sources. On the whole, however, the editor and contributors have made a worthwhüe contribution to an important but often vexed field of study. James M. Powell Syracuse University Remembering Kings Past: Monastic Foundation Legends in Medieval Southern France. By Amy G. Remensnyder. (Ithaca, NewYork: Cornell University Press. 1995. Pp. xv, 355. $49.95.) Monks of the eleventh and twelfth centuries imaginatively recreated their past to serve the needs of the present, writing accounts of events that they were fairly certain were true, or wished were true, or at least which supported the current needs of their monasteries.Amy Remensnyder here examines such imaginative recreation specificaUy through the foundation legends created by the black monks of some forty houses located in the southwest quadrant of France.Though concentrating especially on written accounts (these sources are discussed in depth in the appendix), she also treats the portrayal of such legends in the sculptural programs on the fronts of monastery churches (as at Conques and Perse), and suggests how the very decoration of the manuscripts in which these legends were written helped convey the dignity of glorious, generaUy royal foundations. Remensnyder's work is highly original,thoroughly researched,and convincingly presented. Like Patrick Geary's recent Phantoms ofRemembrance (Princeton, 1994), a book which also treats the ways in which medieval writers reshaped their past, though using very dUferent sources and analytic framework, Remensnyder 's Remembering Kings Past draws much of its strength from her unwUlingness to treat "authentic" and "forgery" as meaningful categories. Even "authentic" accounts of foundations necessarily record as momentary a series of events that often had stretched over years, by the time that land was obtained , a group of monks assembled, reUcs acquired, and a new church consecrated . (Thus one should not be surprised to find a long-dead donor as a signatory in an authentic foundation charter U he or she had given some of the original land or privileges, even though the charter was drawn up only years later.) And to dismiss forgeries as worthless because not factually accurate, as this book makes clear, would be to miss the fascinating questions of how the monks would have liked to see their past, and the events that impelled them to depict a past that should have existed. BOOK REVIEWS769 Remensnyder's argument unfolds graduaUy and carefully.After exploring the question of real versus legendary in Part One, she turns in Part Two to the founders that southern French monks chose, often in defiance ofchronology,to have first established their houses. Perhaps surprisingly in a period in which kings were distant and shadowy figures, the monks of the period between about 1000 and 1200 chose by preference to attribute their foundations to CIovis , to Pippin the Short, and to Charlemagne. Clovis represented a link between Roman and Frankish rule; Pippin the Short could subsume any authentic deeds of Kings Pippin I and II of Aquitaine into a much more glorious context; and Charlemagne was, by the late eleventh century, Unked expressly with the epic king of the chansons de geste. Some monasteries, by positing a series of barbarian invasions and refoundations,were able to have aU three kings memorialized as their founders.These kings were often given connections to relics of Christ, such as pieces of the True Cross or the richly developed accounts of the Holy Foreskin, which connected Frankish monarchs with the King of Kings. In PartThree Remensnyder turns to the context that inspired monks to recreate their origins, the starting points that defined their monasteries. She argues that foundation legends were used especiaUy as weapons in conflicts, not in general with lay aristocrats or local bishops, as might be expected, but rather with other monasteries. From the eleventh century onward, she suggests, as monasticism became more hierarchically organized, monks often struggled to maintain their identity in the face of incorporation, often...