HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

LEGENDARY HISTORY: HISTORIA AND FABULA 395to read and no longer just to listen. Using an idea of H. R. Jauss,Zumthor refuses to consider the historicity of these texts in terms ofveracity as it is understood today; with these authors historical eventsare those which have to be believed: “The opposition real/fictitiousdoes not apply”. 28 In these works, the formal constraints particularto the octosyllabic couplet imply “a certain folding back of the textupon itself, a concentration on the formalist intentions of the writer”: 29From this particular standpoint, the almost contemporaneous Histoiredes Anglais by Gaimar and the Roman de Thèbes, Guillaume de Saint-Pair’s Roman du Mont Saint-Michel and Chrétien de Troyes’ Erec belongto the same ‘genre’. 30So, how are we to distinguish pertinently between historiographyand romance? Contemporary generic designations are of no help tous in this regard. Renaut de Beaujeu, for example, calls his Bel Inconnuboth a ‘roummant’ and an ‘istoire’, and it is clear that both theseterms were, in general, interchangeable. 31 Gaimar describes himselfas a translator, but when referring to his own poem sometimes usesthe word ‘geste’, sometimes ‘vie’, and sometimes ‘estoire’—whilst atthe same time referring to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a ‘chroniche’.Both Wace and Benoît de Sainte-Maure label their works ‘estoires’or ‘gestes’. 32 It could be ventured that certain vernacular accountsof the twelfth century have a relatively stronger narrative and aestheticstructure, a difference which becomes more discernible thecloser one gets to the thirteenth century. This structure is typicallybuilt around a central theme or themes composed of courtly and/orfantastic or merveilleux elements. Accounts which are more markedlyhistoriographical also comprise at least some of these elements, butas Douglas Kelly has pointed out, poems which develop a fictitiousintrigue on the basis of such elements contrive to liberate the textfrom its conventions of pure linearity, closing the story back uponitself and upon its structuring of the marvelous. 33 Paul Zumthor summarizesthis evolution as follows:28Zumthor (1975), 245; my translation.29Zumthor (1975), 244; my translation.30Zumthor (1975), 244; my translation.31Kelly (1974).32Blacker (1994), 2–3; Marichal (1968), 450.33Kelly (1974), 149.