HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

DYNASTIC HISTORY 229mean to suggest that noble families were not aware of themselves,did not attempt to enhance their status with literary works, or, mostcrucially, did not know or pass on stories about their past. What Ido mean to say is that writing down accounts of the past organizedaround the descent of the family does not seem to have been a primarymeans for most families of creating family identity.One possible reason for the paucity of such histories is that substantialresources were needed to produce even the most meager historicaltext. Learned people had to be deployed to record the text,particularly when Latin was the standard language of history. Whilein theory a Latin work might be composed to facilitate the comprehensionof the unlearned or might be orally translated, in practice,the consumption of such works at the court, when they wereintended for the court at all, seems to have been limited to the Latinliterati at the court. 60 All of this expense was incurred for an audiencethat was potentially smaller than the numbers who might bereached by a purely verbal and “traditional” recitation of family stories.If the purpose of the family history was to create cohesion andto advertise that cohesion and the family’s importance to other families,there might be more effective means to do this—perhaps patronizinga monastery, creating a family necropolis, keeping a splendidcourt, going to tournaments, and employing those who might advertiseone’s patronage to a wider clerical audience—at least until theincreasing use of the vernacular made it possible for a work to beread easily by or to lay people, in other words, until there was alay, literate culture. 61 The Grandes chroniques de France seem to standat the beginning of this process. In short, the costs of producing afamily history might outweigh the benefits.Even in the case that a family chose to commission a history, theresultant history would not necessarily be organized around the livesof family members. Rosamund McKitterick has argued that theCarolingians invented annals as a support to the status and ambitionof their dynasty, but the form focuses the attention on the controland organization and time and its passage rather than on descent. 62To organize a history around one’s family was to emphasize familyconnections or, in the case of the Carolingians, lack of them. To60Johanek (1992), 203–04.61See Johanek (1992), 195–96, for his comments on Viala, Naissance de l’écrivain.62McKitterick (1997), 115–17, 127 ff.