As François Bougard puts it crisply in the conclusion to this volume, this is a book about memory and communities, not the memory of communities (341). This takes us to the heart of the exciting work done by this volume: rather than take memory and community as givens, the authors explore what it takes to be (and become) a community, to have (and create) a social memory, the relationship between these two processes, what memory can do for a community and vice versa, and how this memory looks from outside a group as well as from within. What this means is that this wide-ranging and well-produced volume defies simple summary. Régine Le Jan and Laurence Leleu frame this volume, in their concise and helpful introduction, around the question as to whether there are communities without memory (23), and we can concur with Bougard’s answer, that, from an historian’s perspective, there are not (346). But, at least from this reviewer’s perspective, this should not be the take-away of the volume: instead, individually and collectively, these contributions demonstrate the sheer messiness and continual instability of communities and their memories, and the varied work that all sorts of medieval sources could and did do to try, more or less successfully, to construct and reshape, in tandem, communities and memories. What emerges are twists and turns of memory and community formation and deformation that resist classification or simple explanation but instead can only be understood within their specific contexts and sources.
The volume (in French with the exception of one contribution in English) consists of sixteen essays arranged in three sections: 1. “Between individual, family and communal memory” (Entre mémoire individuelle, familiale et communautaire); 2. “To write one’s history, construct and reconstruct one’s memory, to build community” (Écrire son histoire, construire et reconstruire sa mémoire, faire communauté); 3. “Local communities between lay and ecclesiastical memory” (Communautés locales entre mémoire laïque et ecclésiastique). Geographically, the contributions extend to the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, and Scandinavia, although most contributions address sites in modern-day France and Germany; and historiographically, the volume is largely framed in terms of memory studies within French and German scholarship of the last half-century. The contributions derive from a conference held in 2018, meaning that in some cases readers will need to turn to authors’ more recent publications for their most up-to-date thinking on the material discussed.
The communities studied here are, for the most part, as Le Jan and Leleu make clear on the opening page of the volume, “little groups (petits groupes),” as opposed to “peoples, ecclesia, regna” (14). Herein lies one of the great strengths of the volume: that it addresses community on a smaller scale, including attention to individuals and families, and productively explores how communities are more than the sum of their parts. A compelling example in this regard is given by Lucie Malbos in her study of the eleventh-century Scandinavian runestones of a certain Jarlabanke, which, in contrast to other similarly commemorative examples from the same period, refer only to himself. Rather than interpret these merely in terms of an overinflated ego, Malbos convincingly shows how the meaning of Jarlabanke’s runestones takes shape from a larger corpus of runestones erected by his family. Together these constructed memories, etched into the local landscape, centered around this family but also involved the local community. On a similar scale, we find an attentiveness to the role of women, both as agents and subjects of memory. Adrien Bayard queries why, in the late eleventh century, the female monastic community of Blesle (in south-central France) chose to emphasize that its foundress was the late-ninth-century countess Ermengard, and Tiziana Lazzari similarly asks why in the mid-eleventh century Santa Giulia, a female monastic community in Brescia (in northern Italy), focused on the Lombard queen Ansa and her daughter Anselperga. Their answers are quite different: while Bayard argues Ermengard’s local political importance was central to understanding her subsequent mobilization by the Blesle community, Lazzari argues that Santa Giulia’s choice was grounded in Ansa’s royal identity.
Admirable too is the general thrust of the volume that, rather than taking a restrictive approach to identifying a text with one specific community, invites consideration of the multiple, at times overlapping, communities implicated or addressed by a text. Hincmar of Rheims’s Vita Remigii, so Andreas Öffner argues, at once aimed to shape memories related to the local community, the Christian community of Rheims, a loosely defined Frankish community, and the royal court in whose eyes Hincmar wished to defend himself as a skilled advisor. And outside voices could also be formative in shaping a communal identity, as Esther Dehoux shows in her engrossing exploration of two twelfth-century mortuary scrolls, for Bruno, founder of the Carthusian Order, and Vital, founder of the Savigny Order, both of which acquired notes and comments from clerics as they travelled to other institutions after the death of the individuals in question. In this case the comparison between the two rolls allows Dehoux to show how the initial commemorative texts, the journeys made by the scrolls, and the comments added to the rolls all together constructed distinctly different profiles for these two communities.
As the title of the third section indicates, the volume strives to include lay communities among its “little groups,” although perhaps not unsurprisingly, the predominant conclusion of the early medieval contributions to this section (Fernand Peloux on rural communities in Merovingian hagiography related to dioceses in the ecclesiastical province of Bourges; Charles Mériaux, who addresses the place of the local community of Winteshoven in an impressive late-tenth-century diploma that describes the life of St. Landoald; Igor Santos Salazar on the social memory of North Iberian rural communities as reflected through recopied documents) is the challenge of hearing these voices, let along extrapolating to questions of collective belonging due to the nature of the sources involved. The perspective is markedly different in the case of the later-eleventh-century statutes of the “Charité” of Valenciennes (spelling out the rules of the draper’s guild), examination of which allows Nicolas Ruffini-Ronzani to consider how this community was tied together by more than professional solidarity.
As my comments have already hinted at, even more so than the communities addressed, the stars of this volume are the sources discussed (as texts and as artifacts). These are a salutary reminder that, despite all that is lost, medievalists have a wealth of idiosyncratic sources, and that the lens of communities and memories is applicable everywhere. Throughout, the authors foreground how interpretations of communities and memories cannot be divorced from the genres and materiality of the sources in which they are found. The differing relationship to time and memory of the heroic communities in Beowulf and Gododdin, so Alban Gautier argues, derives from the differing genre of these poems. The choice by the monks of Saint-Vaast (in Arras) to write a universal chronicle (rather than the more expected Gesta abbatum) speaks, so Klaus Krönert suggests, to their ambitions. Genealogies are explored in various contributions as involving delicate operations on multiple levels, whether they are to strengthen a family identity and suppress alternate memories (Emmanuelle Santinelli-Foltz on the chronicle of Gislebert of Mons and Jean-François Nieus on Lambert’s History of the Counts of Guînes and the Lords of Ardres) or, as the study by Émilie Kurdziel on a fascinating text known as the Historia custodum aretinorum argues, to separate out a community, distinct from the cathedral’s canons, as responsible for the dispersal of the church’s revenues. Documentary sources too receive attention throughout the volume. Claire de Cazanove Hannecart explores how a twelfth-century cartulary from the Werden monastery (in Saxony) drew both on an older, ninth-century cartulary, but also went back to additional documents in the archives in order to refashion the memories of the community.
A highlight of the volume is Thomas Granier’s study of the centrality of the accounts of St. Benedict, his disciple St. Maurus, and Benedict’s sister, St. Scholastica, in Gregory the Great’s Dialogues, for eighth- to twelfth-century scholars at the monastery of Montecassino (in southern Italy). Granier demonstrates how the monks treated Gregory’s text with reverence and (or perhaps as a result) rewrote, imitated, and otherwise put the text to new uses, such as in a short notice added to a manuscript that localizes the miracles of St. Benedict in the monastery. Thereby the Dialogues served not only as a narrative of the monastery’s origins but “expressed the whole spiritual horizon, atemporal and eternal of the community” (184). As with the essays throughout the volume, this analysis provides insight into the dynamics of memory and, even more so, it demonstrates how the lens of memory continues to open up new perspectives on medieval peoples and their communities.