HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

LEGENDARY HISTORY: HISTORIA AND FABULA 415including two very different witnesses of the Fourth Crusade, Robertde Clari and Geoffroi de Villehardouin, 93 it is hardly surprising tonote a gradual extension of its use to new versions of texts originallycomposed in verse, such as the ‘rewrite’ of the romance Fouke le FitzWaryn, in which one can still see the ‘joins’ of the verses, newly sewntogether in a continuous prose form. 94 We also should remember therather obvious fact that by the thirteenth century, Latin prose hadprovided for a very long time the formal vehicle for Holy Scripture. 95This may account, in part, for the increasingly confident role thatit was to play from ca. 1215 to 1220 in the great vernacular Arthurianprose cycles of Tristan, Lancelot, and, especially, the Grail. Basedas they were on the interweaving of often complex and lengthyintrigues, the prose romances of the first half of the thirteenth centuryneeded a medium that was at once versatile, malleable, and tingedwith at least some of the prestige of Scripture. By the end of theMiddle Ages, prose had become the normal mode of narration, without,as yet, totally excluding verse as a vehicle for historiography. 96ConclusionThe works examined in this essay have in common the desire totransmit a heritage, preserve a record, edify their readers, and articulateaspects of their own world to their contemporaries, by recourseto narratives ostensibly dealing with a partly or wholly legendarypast. In all of them, and throughout the period considered, there isan intriguing tension between what Dominique Boutet calls Histoireand histoire, between historia and fabula. 97 What we would recognizetoday as written history only begins to emerge, gradually and tentatively,from the chroniques of the later Middle Ages, influenced to93Discussed in my essay ‘Contemporary and “Eyewitness” History’ in this volume.94Damian-Grint (1999), 177; Fouke Le Fitz Waryn, ed. J. Hathaway, P. Ricketts,C. Robson and A. Wiltshire, Anglo-Norman Texts Society, vols. 26–28 (Oxford,1975).95Zink (1992), 187.96Again, see ‘Contemporary and “Eyewitness” History’ for a discussion of verseand prose historiography in the fourteenth century.97Boutet (1999), 3, n. 2, and esp. p. 24 for a discussion of the issues involved(remote, referential History serving in both the roman d’antiquité and chanson de gesteas a platform [support] for fiction allowing contemporary society to explore andreflect upon its own immediate present).