HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor
HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor
CHAPTER SEVENDYNASTIC HISTORYLeah ShopkowTo compose history using the family as the organizing principle hasseemed so natural to scholars that they have hardly questioned theappearance of histories so organized. All human beings are born;many reproduce; all die, and they mostly belong to families whilethey do so. Thus the existence in the High Middle Ages of ‘dynastic’histories—genealogies, family histories, and regnal history organizedaround the lives of individuals—simply has been accepted; 1indeed, some scholars have argued that genealogical thinking was afundamental mode of thought in the Middle Ages. The Bible, withits description of all humanity as descended from Adam, along withmedieval desires to fit all the peoples of the world into this scheme,conditioned this genealogical thinking, and it expressed itself even inhow people viewed language. In other words, genealogy and notionsof descent and generation were in the air. 2 If more of this sort ofhistory was written after 950 than before that date and if after thatdate such histories treat families below the level of royalty, this isbecause of the spread of the technology of writing, in which membersof the elite participated as quasi-literates, using the eyes andknowledge of others. 31It is clear that there are other sorts of history which might be called dynastichistories: most of the works of which the Carolingian rulers were the patrons, officialor unofficial; the Saxon History of Widukind; the Ottonian royal biographies and histories;the histories of Godfrey of Viterbo or even Matthew Paris’s history; in short,any history with a quasi-official character or secular patronage of almost any kind.This article, however, considers only histories whose organizational principle is thereign of a sequence of rulers or the generations of a family.2See Bloch (1986); also Angenendt (1984), whose first heading is “Genealogy asthe ‘Original Form of Understanding the World’.”3On quasi-literacy, see Bäuml (1980). The foundational works on medieval literacyare Stock (1983) and Clanchy (1993), but see some of the modifications tothe notion that writing took over for memory offered in Carruthers (1990).
218 LEAH SHOPKOWAnother explanation for this particular flowering of genealogicalliterature is more temporally and culturally specific and derives fromthe work of Georges Duby, who explained the appearance of narrativehistories organized around the family in the middle of thetenth century as growing from a cultural change in the elite themselves.Around the year 1000, he asserts, they began to identify themselvesas members of a lineage, descended from a common ancestor,as well as holders of a particular patrimony, which they kept intactby limiting succession to male primogeniture. This consciousness ledthem eventually to write down their recollections of their families,which tended to focus on the male lineage, because that was thesource of the property, but which also accommodated those womenwho brought property into the family. 4 In other words, Duby ascribesthis relatively new sort of history to a reconception of the noble family.A number of scholars have accepted this hypothesis, notablyGabrielle Spiegel and R. Howard Bloch. 5 This hypothesis suggeststhat we should expect to see such histories first and most abundantlyin northern France, where noble self-consciousness had the deepestroots (and this is, in fact, where we do see the most highly developeddynastically organized histories).An alternative explanation for the same phenomenon has beenoffered by Patrick Geary, who suggests that this change may derivenot so much from a change in the regard in which elite familiesheld their ancestors as from the loss of knowledge by the elite oftheir ancestors. This loss occurred as the scattered holdings whichcharacterized the Carolingian period were consolidated into holdingssometimes far away from the monasteries that housed the family’sdead and the memories of the family preserved in the monasteries’libri memoriales. 6 As a result, families were forced to secure their ‘memories’in other ways, including the creation of dynastic histories.4See ‘The Structure of Kinship and Nobility: Northern France in the Eleventhand Twelfth Centuries’ and ‘French Genealogical Literature’, in Duby (1980), 134–48,149–57. See also Spiegel (1983).5See, for example, Spiegel (1990), 78 and n. 58; Bloch (1983). Van Caenegem(1973), 72, remarks that “Genealogies are one of the primitive forms of historicalwriting in monarchical and aristocratic societies”, suggesting that the growth of thisform reflects the aristocratic organization of the period. Genicot (1975), 40–42,addresses this issue.6Geary (1994), 48 ff.
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- Page 229 and 230: 220 LEAH SHOPKOWThus, when someone
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CHAPTER SEVENDYNASTIC HISTORYLeah ShopkowTo compose history using the family as the organizing principle hasseemed so natural to scholars that they have hardly questioned theappearance of histories so organized. All human beings are born;many reproduce; all die, and they mostly belong to families whilethey do so. Thus the existence in the High Middle Ages of ‘dynastic’histories—genealogies, family histories, and regnal history organizedaround the lives of individuals—simply has been accepted; 1indeed, some scholars have argued that genealogical thinking was afundamental mode of thought in the Middle Ages. The Bible, withits description of all humanity as descended from Adam, along withmedieval desires to fit all the peoples of the world into this scheme,conditioned this genealogical thinking, and it expressed itself even inhow people viewed language. In other words, genealogy and notionsof descent and generation were in the air. 2 If more of this sort ofhistory was written after 950 than before that date and if after thatdate such histories treat families below the level of royalty, this isbecause of the spread of the technology of writing, in which membersof the elite participated as quasi-literates, using the eyes andknowledge of others. 31It is clear that there are other sorts of history which might be called dynastichistories: most of the works of which the Carolingian rulers were the patrons, officialor unofficial; the Saxon History of Widukind; the Ottonian royal biographies and histories;the histories of Godfrey of Viterbo or even Matthew Paris’s history; in short,any history with a quasi-official character or secular patronage of almost any kind.This article, however, considers only histories whose organizational principle is thereign of a sequence of rulers or the generations of a family.2See Bloch (1986); also Angenendt (1984), whose first heading is “Genealogy asthe ‘Original Form of Understanding the World’.”3On quasi-literacy, see Bäuml (1980). The foundational works on medieval literacyare Stock (1983) and Clanchy (1993), but see some of the modifications tothe notion that writing took over for memory offered in Carruthers (1990).
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