Narrative and History in the Early Medieval West (review)

In 1999, ten literary scholars and historians of the early Middle Ages gathered at three conferences to read and respond to one another's papers. This volume is the result of their collaborative inquiry regarding the methodological and theoretical assumptions made in literary and historical scholarship and the interdisciplinary connections among the fields. In the introductory essay, the editors outline the questions that unify the chronological, geographic, and generic diversity of the ten papers. The contributions collectively focus on how close readings of the narrative structures of medieval texts alter the historical conclusions that can be made from these texts. While profoundly influenced by Hayden White's seminal article on the importance of narrative form in historical texts, the authors interrogate White's conception of post-Romantic narratives and realize that the simple application of White's theories yields anachronistic assumptions about medieval texts. Instead, the authors collectively posit new criteria for how scholars use texts to understand the past.

The contributors focus on narratives in a variety of genres, including hagiography, charters, court documents, historiography, and secular poetry, genres that have traditionally been the exclusive domain of historians and are often ignored by literary scholars. After establishing that these genres possess the essential characteristics of narrative, all of the contributors conclude that it is more productive to ask why and how a medieval narrative was constructed and functioned than to try to divide a narrative into fictive and factual elements. The very choices a medieval author made while constructing a narrative reveal more about medieval cultural attitudes than simply mining a text for events with which to construct a chronological timeline. As the contributors thought together about their various projects, they began to appreciate the social dimensions of narrative conventions. Tyler and Balzaretti summarize their innovative conclusion:

Pursuing the meaning and function of convention has underlined the socially active nature of conventions; that is, that conventions were maintained, not by abstract diplomatic, poetic, or hagiographic traditions, but by people who found the conventions useful in shaping lived experience.… Viewed from this perspective, we see not people unthinkingly reiterating formulas, stock characters and plots, or hagiographical topoi. Rather when narratives are considered contextually, they demonstrate that their producers had a sophisticated grasp of the meaning of convention, which we can only begin to recover by drawing on the skills of both historians and literary scholars. (p. 8)

A number of the chapters explore how medieval authors constructed narratives using documents, chronicles, and hagiography to establish an authoritative version of their institution's history while simultaneously validating contemporary political and social ideologies and hierarchies. An excellent example is Sarah Foot's provocative "Reading Anglo-Saxon Charters: Memory, Record, or Story?" First, Foot summarizes Anglo-Saxon meditations on the function of charters. Anglo-Saxons described how charters performed a mnemonic function to assure future recollection of the transactions through written documentation rather than relying on fallible human memory; in addition, Anglo-Saxons appreciated how charters could be "useful mechanism[s] for helping communities structure a knowledge of their past" (p. 40). Likewise, modern historians have treated charters as factual archives which compile an incontrovertible overview of a community's evolution. However, when Foot probes the statement that "charters are narratives too" (p. 46), she realizes that charters are not as transparent as assumed; instead, she suggests that charter narratives "as stories [were] constructed deliberately and carefully in order to supersede recollection," that is to say that "charters were not written down in case memory should fail, but rather to prevent the wrong memory from triumphing" (pp. 65, 63).

Other contributors interrogate additional medieval genres with similar concerns. Ross Balzaretti examines the spoken discourse of defendants and prosecutors in ninth-century Milanese court records; he argues that even though the spoken narratives created tension between record and story and between fact and fiction, the rhetorical convention of depicting speech evoked a sense of realism that authenticated the court...