Since communities are the repository of memory for their members and history was more directly the expression of a community in the middle ages than it is today, Leah Shopkow has selected for study the histories produced in a particular community--the county of Normandy--at a formative period in its social, political and cultural development. Members of the Norman community shared a belief that their Viking origins were important in creating their unique identity. Although for 150 of 200 years covered in the book, Normandy and England were linked and shared a ruler, strong cultural rapprochement lasted for only a short period and the two remained politically separate. After 1204, when Normandy was absorbed into the kingdom of France, it was still a geographic, religious and ethno-regional community, but its political heart had been torn out. Writing history in 11th and 12th century Normandy was different from elsewhere because Normandy's community was so coherent, but in some ways Norman historians struggled with the same questions and arrived at similar solutions as their contemporaries in other parts of Europe.
Given that the geographical area of Normandy is so small, it is perhaps not hyperbolic to describe the output of its historians between 1000 and the late 12th century as "a burst of historical writing", with six substantial Latin histories and several minor pieces. Of the six major writers, five wrote or continued histories of Normandy's rulers (Dudo of Saint- Quentin, William of Jumieges, William of Poitiers, Orderic Vitalis, Stephen of Rouen) while two placed the story of Normandy's past against the backdrop of universal history (Orderic and Robert of Torigny). Four were members of powerful monastic communities--William of Jumieges was a monk of the abbey of Jumieges, Orderic a monk of Saint-Evroul, Robert of Torigny a monk of Bec and later abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel and Stephen of Rouen also a monk of Bec (who actually spent much of his life at the priory of Notre-Dame-du-Pre, a ducal foundation near Rouen). The other two were seculars--Dudo a canon of Saint-Quentin in Vermandois, outside Normandy, but for a time a member of the Norman ducal entourage, and William of Poitiers, another non-Norman, the archdeacon of Lisieux in Normandy.
Drawing on a monograph by Hayden White ( Metahistory; The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Baltimore, 1973), who discerns four possible emplotments for history--comedy, tragedy, satire and romance--Shopkow sees 11th-century Norman histories as essentially comedic adventures, in which Normans triumphed at home and abroad, while those from the 12th century were more pessimistic, touched by tragedy, depicting Norman glory as threatened or eclipsed.
In Dudo's narrative Norman history is a triumphant progression. He creates a powerful founding myth in the Trojan descent of the Normans, and traces their conversion from paganism to Christianity. In this story the lives of the rulers of Normandy culminate in the reign of Richard, the ideal ruler, whom he describes as the embodiment of the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount.
William of Jumieges, writing at a time when Norman political institutions were becoming more formalized, continues the theme of the lives of the dukes, but tells a story not of religious but of political triumph, emphasizing the legitimacy of the ducal succession and thus justifying the Conquest of England, the apogee of Norman glory.
Like his predecessors, William of Poitiers saw Norman history as comedy. His portrait of the virtuous Conqueror was much influenced both by classical models and by Augustinian theory of a Christian ruler's moral responsibility. Shopkow did not have the benefit of Marjorie Chibnall's recent edition of the Gesta Guillelmi (Oxford Medieval Texts 1998); possibly if she had she might have modified her interpretation of the incompleteness of the book, which Chibnall regards as accidental rather than evasive.
In contrast to the optimistic moralism of William of Poitiers, Orderic Vitalis has a dark moral view of human history. He depicts Norman history as a process of rise and fall, in which cycles of well-being were followed by tragic and painful periods of decline, a pattern in which the Normans seemingly could not escape the consequences of their arrogance and unwillingness to learn from others.
In assessing Robert of Torigny, Shopkow runs into more problems than with her other Norman writers. Partly this is because she regards the original part of his chronicle as beginning in 1100, whereas in fact he continues to be heavily dependent on verbatim quotations from Henry of Huntingdon down to 1147. Partly it is because Robert's scissors-and-paste technique makes him genuinely difficult to classify. But Shopkow's discussion of this rather neglected historian is valuable, pointing up the international context in which he saw Norman history and the element of nostalgia in his work. Perhaps this book will inspire a young scholar to embark on the new edition and commentary that Robert's chronicle so badly needs.
Stephen of Rouen's, "Draco normannicus", entirely in verse, belongs to another genre of historical writing and sits rather uneasily in company with the other historians whose work is discussed in this book. He was closer to the fabulous, his theme growing out of the Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Nor did he attempt serious history, but had a polemical purpose, exhorting Henry II to abandon reconciliation with Louis VII and adhere to the imperial position in the papal schism of 1159, even using history to argue for a conquest of France and urging the king-duke to take a new opportunity for Norman glory. His work exhibits strong vein of nostalgia for the glorious Norman past. (Incidentally, Shopkow translates "draco" as "dragon", but does not explore the resonances of the double meaning, as "draco" also means "standard" or "banner".)
A better-known verse history, the "Carmen de Hastingae Proelio", is excluded from consideration by Shopkow on the grounds that "it seems to be a 12th-century English text, rather than an 11th-century French one" (p. 230 n. 55). On this question the balance of opinion is probably against Shopkow, but the jury is still out. The forthcoming edition by Frank Barlow for Oxford Medieval Texts is eagerly awaited.
In an interesting chapter on "Truth", Shopkow uncovers several strands in medieval notions of historical veracity and rightly stresses that there was no uniform method of ensuring history's truth. But she perhaps underestimates the formulaic element in her authors' disclaimers and statements of intent and pays too much attention to their opposition of "truth" and "rhetoric". This area has been mapped by Ruth Morse, Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages: Rhetoric, Representation and Reality (Cambridge 1991), which does not appear in the Shopkow's bibliography.
The long chapter on "The Purpose of History" is the heart of the book, pulsing with ideas on the functions of historical writing in the central middle ages. A period of rapid political, social and religious change creates "social dramas" (a term borrowed from social anthropology) in which individuals or groups are conscious of a disruption of traditions that threatens their place within a group or society. History written in such circumstances can mediate, naturalize and explain experience, either as it is or as it ought to be. The 11th-century Norman histories are eloquent testimonials to Norman anxieties, with their emphasis on the legitimacy of ducal power and their justifying of war and conquest. In the same way, English histories written after the Conquest were a way of resolving some of the tensions of cultural conflict. Another genre of historical writing consisted of works that were intended to be adjuncts to legal or quasi-legal controversies and were aimed at advancing very specific arguments about property (including rights and relics), in the course of which they were likely to introduce texts of charters. The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis was a meeting-ground between the pragmatic style--the local, charter-oriented history--and the more abstract--the universal history, fuelled on characterizations and moral lessons. In common with many contemporaries Orderic felt convinced that the history of the more remote periods of the past must have been committed to writing in texts since lost. Shopkow reflects on the way in which the fashion for rediscovery of texts and relics in the 12th century was a result of the perceived discontinuities of history.
One of the more mysterious aspects of Latin histories is the question of readership. If history satisfied so many social needs, why did these texts reach so few? From the manuscript evidence, the works of William of Poitiers, Orderic Vitalis and Stephen of Rouen hardly circulated at all. Even the manuscripts of the more widely disseminated texts--Dudo of Saint-Quentin, William of Jumieges and Robert of Torigny-- suggest they were little used, and even though they contained stories that would seem to have been attractive to the secular nobility, there no evidence of their readership beyond monastic houses.
In a final chapter, on "The Propagation of Historical Writing in Medieval Europe", Shopkow offers some answers to this puzzle. The chief reason for history's failure to penetrate was the incompatibility between the laity, which was the audience that had the most use for history, and the Latin language in which history was presented. In the monasteries the theological use of histories was limited, and hagiographies, rather than chronicles, were more readily adopted for use in lectio and meditatio. History had a quasi-public place in court culture, where it could be read by only a few, and a private place in ecclesiastical culture, where it was more readily accessible but where it was apparently not much more commonly read.
It was not until later that changes would come about that would give history an audience. The French vernacular was used increasingly as a literary language from the beginning of the 13th century, both for original histories and for translations of Latin works. History was not to be part of the scholastic curriculum until the 19th century, and consequently there was no disciplined body of practice. But humanist training, which revived the habit of framing questions and answers about society historically, had an important part to play in fostering the reading and writing of Latin history in the later medieval period.
Leah Shopkow is to be congratulated on giving us an absorbing, thoughtful and thought-provoking study, which deserves a wide and enthusiastic reception.