Rewriting Saints and Ancestors: Memory and Forgetting in France, 500–1200 by Constance B. Bouchard (review)

The issue of memory and its construction and application in the Middle Ages has developed in the last thirty years into a truly interdisciplinary subfield, incorporating elements from the study of literature, history, art, religion, and liturgy. Bouchard’s contribution rests on the power of texts, including charters, cartularies (collected transcriptions of original documents), polyptyques (lists of territorial possessions), historical narratives, and hagiographic vitae as tools for the creation and modification of memory as a means to affect contemporary notions of identity. The area of focus is broad in its chronology. Bouchard considers how those living in the sixth through twelfth centuries in what is today France made sense of, and re-contextualized, the events of the past, as they copied, interpreted, modified, or even ignored the documents relating to the foundations of monastic, ecclesiastical, and political institutions.

Like the process of memory that Bouchard describes, the book is organized chronologically “backwards,” beginning with cartularies written in the twelfth century. It describes the ways in which the copying of original charters (frequently donations or the rights offered to the institutions by kings or popes, many already centuries old) into a single volume helped to preserve what the community wanted to remember and to offer proof of its historical status. The examination of how and why the cartularies were composed and used reveals that the documents contained therein were neither randomly selected nor intended to be representative of the entire archive, but carefully deployed to serve the institution’s communal and internal memory, mirroring the incorporation of documentary texts into narrative histories of the same period.

Bouchard gives similar treatment to other types of “memory creation,” many of them with vastly different kinds of texts, subjects, and intentions: the production, memorial integration, and rejection of forged charters; historical narratives of the Carolingian dynasty (with respect to the memory of their predecessor, their genealogy, and especially their relationship with Frankish churches and monasteries); memories of the pre-Carolingian aristocracy and contemporary monasticism; and texts created in the sixth century to provide histories that would lend legitimacy to saints and their relics. The sources of this subject matter are revealed to be more than just historical records or hagiographic narratives; they are vehicles for the propagation of a particular kind of past that reinforces or challenges the status of the institutions to which the authors and compliers belonged.

In dealing with different types of written sources and subjects, Bouchard shows how—for the authors, copyists, and compliers involved—the composition, collection, or rewriting of texts (both literary and documentary) is as much about recording events and exchanges as it is about influencing the social perceptions of the present and forming memories about the past. What is clear from the many examples offered in this volume is that in the Middle Ages, every type of text, regardless of its format or stated intention, was adaptable for these purposes.

In its style, its organization, and its explanation of documents and technical terms, Rewriting Saints and Ancestors proves itself to be accessible to a larger audience than just medievalists. It offers a unique perspective on how those who sought to make sense of the past assembled and navigated documents and texts to reconstruct it.