HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

DYNASTIC HISTORY 219However, dynastic history of any kind is, in fact, rare in relationto other kinds of history. Léopold Genicot, one of the few scholarsto address a portion of dynastic historical literature at large, in speakingabout genealogies has noted that, “Genealogies are spread throughouta long period of time and a broad space and they are nevernumerous for a period and country”. 7 There are, of course, problemsof survival. Genicot notes that because genealogies are smalland often exist only in one copy, they are easy to miss in the manuscripts;the same factors would lead to the disappearance of manyof such texts. 8 They also can be missed because of misleading titlesin catalogues or tables of contents. But this would be true of manyhistorical texts in general, so that we may not be talking aboutdifferent rates of survival at all. The lengthier dynastic histories areeven more rare and more limited in the places in which they arose:Normandy, Anjou, the royal court of France, but only an unpredictablescattering in other places. So the central problem is that ifdynastic histories are a crucial expression of family pride, why arethere not more of them?Dynastic HistoryThe term dynastic history is a modern one with no medieval counterpart;the category brings together works that, in all likelihood,medieval people would have seen as related, because they were allhistorical in nature, but would not have been considered the sametype. 9 The question of whether medieval writers recognized genre atall in the modern sense is a vexed one, which I will not solve here.However, they did think in terms of models for writing works ofvarious types, and I have found the notion of the ‘horizon of expectations’helpful in understanding how the use of such models mighthave created some uniformity in written materials. 107Genicot (1975), 35; for dynastic history as a category, see also van Houts(1995), 33–42.8Genicot (1975), 33, 26–27.9German scholars have used this term particularly frequently; see, for example,Johanek (1992).10See Shopkow (1997), 24, for the application of the notion of the ‘horizon ofexpectations’ (originally drawn from Jauss [1982]) to history; the conventional thinkingof medieval writers on issues such as truth has been explored in Morse (1991).