HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

46 JOAQUÍN MARTÍNEZ PIZARROritual functions. 8 Royal charisma, the fortuna or felicitas ordinarilyattributed to divine grace in medieval sources, is in fact always themanifestation of a sacral Germanic Königsheil traceable to the presenceof a pagan divinity in the ruler’s genealogy. 9 Demonstrationsof such archaic survivals are impossible to disprove precisely becausethe evidence offered, often with much philological and antiquarianerudition, is uncommonly flimsy. An analogy of form is sufficient fora well-attested Christian and Latin source to be set aside in favorof a pagan Germanic one, which is automatically assumed to be theone that really counts. 10The ancient Germans retrieved from the origines in the name ofcontinuity are a peculiar lot, occupied exclusively with cultic activitiesand the preservation of sacred lineages (Geblütsheiligkeit). It is notpossible, of course, to isolate historical scholarship from the illusionsof its own epoch, but the barbarian ancestors thus exhumed aremore reminiscent of early twentieth-century creations, of the irrationalistheroes of Ernst Jünger and Gottfried Benn, caught in theSpenglerian dialectic of culture and civilization, than of the shrewdpoliticians and able careerists documented by Ammianus, Procopius,and the ethnic histories themselves. 11The chief objection to Kontinuitätstheorie as an approach to the ethnichistories is that, because of its exclusive interest in a few passagesthat can be used to establish the persistence of a native cultureunder the forms of Latin Christianity, it dismisses any study of theseworks as wholes and as products of late antiquity and the earlyMiddle Ages, periods in which the writing of history was always alsoa literary undertaking, and when literature was never “mere literature”but could be expected to serve political, social, or religiouspurposes. This rejection of literature reaches back at least as far asthe denunciation of Eduard Norden’s 1920 study of the topoi in theGermania. 12 Literature, like Latinity and Christianity, is held to be8Höfler (1938).9E.g., Beumann (1950), 236–42; Bosl (1962), esp. 92. Contra Picard (1991).10Beumann (1950), 253–54, provides an excellent illustration of this kind ofreasoning.11Cf. for instance Stroheker (1955) and (1961), 9–53.12Cf. von See (1981), 31–37. The pedigree of this prejudice is remarkable andawakens echoes remote from—but not unconnected with—the realm of academic