HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

CHAPTER EIGHTCONTEMPORARY AND ‘EYEWITNESS’ HISTORY 1Peter AinsworthThe present essay attempts to chart the emergence from ca. 1170onwards of several kinds of vernacular historical writing that are distinctive,amongst other things, for being allegedly contemporaneouswith the events that they set out to recount. The authors of theseworks are more often than not ‘eyewitnesses’ of sorts, but as we shalldiscover, use of this term raises a number of awkward questions. Thefocus here will be on historiographical discourse in Anglo-Normanand Old French, initially in verse but eventually also (by the end ofthe twelfth century) in prose.By 1170, Latin historiography still was largely dependent uponthe Augustinian model of the Two Cities, which emphasized theimmutability of the eternal and the good. The past therefore wasviewed primarily in terms of the degree to which it approximatedto, or offered a correlative for, the eternal present of Christian revelation.After a period of several hundred years, during which historywriting in Latin had been largely universal and cumulative inemphasis, with very few writers ever managing to bring their historiesas far as their own generation, we encounter the re-emergenceduring the final quarter of the twelfth century (and especially in theAnglo-Norman regnum), of ‘eyewitness’ historiography also composedin Latin. A short discussion of several instances of the new trend isprefaced by some reflexions on medieval attitudes to eyewitness testimony.This in turn leads into a more detailed exploration of oneof the first extended eyewitness accounts to be written in a dialectof Old French, the Anglo-Norman Chronicle of Jordan Fantosme. Setagainst a cultural and literary backdrop still manifestly influenced bythe chanson de geste and its epic vision of the past, 2 Fantosme’s poem1I am grateful to Dr. Wendy Michallat for her invaluable assistance with thepreparation of both of my essays for this volume.2This backdrop is explored in greater detail in my essay on “Legendary History”,see p. 000 below.