HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

LATER MEDIEVAL INSTITUTIONAL HISTORY 279The monastic chronicle recorded the authentic monastic life, relatingthe miracles performed by patron saints, and the religious habitsand deeds of past generations of monks and abbots, who needed tobe commemorated through meditation and prayer. This aspect explainswhy monastic chronicles frequently incorporate necrologies (libri mortuum)and consuetudines, and sometimes grew out of them. Throughoutthe medieval period, many monastic chronicles (as well as those concerningchurches) have remained anonymous: a sign that not theindividual but the community was important. 4During periods of religious reform, in the tenth-early eleventh century(Cluny) and again in the twelfth century (Citeaux and Prémontré),monastics consciously used the writing of history to depict their ownreformed monastic community over against older ones, and as ameans to strengthen the reform ideal among their own members.No wonder that monastic chronicles abound in ages of monasticreform. Among these are famous ones, such as the Gesta abbatum ofCluny, the Gesta abbatum Gemblacensium of Sigebert of Gembloux, andthe series of monastic chronicles of Monte Cassino, which eventuallyfound their more or less definite reworking by Petrus Diaconusafter 1138. 5The Gesta abbatum were institutional histories shaped as serial biographiesof the community’s first abbots: the dominant authority figures,who bore responsibility for the community as a whole and often determinedits success. These biographies were modelled on saints’ lives,and could serve comparable liturgical, edifying and commemorativepurposes. This complicates the distinction between monastic historiographyand monastic hagiography. The earliest event in a monasticchronicle usually is a miracle of the founder-saint or a comparablemiracle worker. Saints’ lives and legendaries written in a monasticsetting as well as monastic annals and chronicles frequently tell acomparable history of the places where saints lived, founded monasteries,performed their miracles, and where their relics were kept. 64Houts (1995), 30–31 (also for more information concerning the authorship ofmonastic chronicles in male and female settings). On the relationship between monastichistory and practices of commemoration, see in particular Oexle (1995), 9–78.5Richter (1972); Goetz (1988), 455–88; Goetz (1989), 135–53; Waha (1977),989–1036; Hofmann (1973), 59–162; Schmale (1985), 137–38.6Houts (1995), 15 and 29, mentions for instance the Inventio et miracula sanctiVulfranni, produced in Saint-Wandrille in Normandy (ca. 1053–54), which “is asmuch a chronicle of the refoundation and growth of the monastery as it is anaccount of the discovery of the body of St. Vulfran”. See also Houts (1989), 233–51.