Understanding Medieval Primary Sources

Using Historical Sources to Discover Medieval Europe

Joel T. Rosenthal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415780735
• eBook ISBN: 9781317796305
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Teaching History
• Index: History

Medieval society created many kinds of records and written material which differ considerably, giving us such sources as last wills, sermons, manorial accounts, or royal biographies. Primary sources are an exciting way for students to engage with the past and draw their own ideas about life in the medieval period.

Understanding Medieval Primary Sources is a collection of essays that will introduce students to the key primary sources that are essential to studying medieval Europe. The sources are divided into two categories: the first part treats some of the many generic sources that have been preserved, such as wills, letters, royal and secular narratives and sermons. Chapter by chapter each expert author illustrates how they can be used to reveal details about medieval history. The second part focuses on areas of historical research that can only be fully discovered by using a combination of primary sources, covering fields such as maritime history, urban history, women's history and medical history.

Understanding Medieval Primary Sources will be an invaluable resource for any student embarking on medieval historical research.

1 Royal and secular biography

Ralph A. Griffiths

Biography may not have been a term familiar before the seventeenth century, but fascination with the lives, deeds and histories of notable men and women – their vitae, gestae and historiae – was common in classical and medieval times. Plutarch, Suetonius, Tacitus and Cicero, and their lives of distinguished Greeks and Romans, were models for later ages, while the lives of saintly figures, both men and women, were at the heart of the Christian faith. Secular lives – especially of medieval emperors, kings and princes – were composed to impress and inspire, and were usually written within a generation or so of the subject's death. In those instances where authors were closely acquainted with their subjects or wrote with a hint of autobiography, their biographies seem especially vivid and to speak with greater conviction to modern historians. In Latin and Greek Europe, secular biographies became more common from the ninth century onwards. The difference between secular biography and the writing of history in the Middle Ages was inevitably blurred because most of these biographies were of notable rulers. The emergence of principalities and states, and the periodic resurgence of learning, encouraged the writing of collected histories of rulers' reigns (if not their lives). In the later Middle Ages, the renewed humanist emphasis on the individual who merited praise or whose example deserved to be emulated – or occasionally avoided – reasserted the importance of rhetorical writing and the use of Greek and Roman models.

Biographical writing varied greatly, depending on its purpose and the identity and motives of the writers: hagiography, commemoration and celebration, the writers' characters, knowledge and abilities, and the changing political and cultural circumstances in which they wrote, all are features that adjusted the nature of biographies from time to time. Some were blatant propaganda, while others were designed to entertain. In time, the writing of biography migrated from monasteries and churches to royal courts and scholars' studies, and vernacular languages were often favoured, while the context of individual combat and campaigning shifted towards political behaviour and more peaceful arts.

Many secular medieval biographies survive, and to judge by the manuscript copies in circulation they were popular reading and listening; others are known only indirectly or are fragmentary, while yet others may have been intended for a small courtly circle. Not all secular biographies that survive have been published in modern editions, still less in English translations, but their comparative study beckons.

Plutarch the Greek (c.ad 46–c.120), the most notable ancient biographer, composed a collection of short ‘Parallel Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans’ whose characters and careers should inspire future generations; these lives certainly inspired later writers and continued to be a quarry for Shakespeare. The Roman Seutonius's ‘Lives of the Caesars’ (c.ad 120), though mainly descriptive and anecdotal, was even more influential on later writers, among them the Carolingian Einhard (c.770–840), through whom the rhetorical tradition passed into the medieval genre of royal biography.

Plutarch and Seutonius wrote what amounted to collected biographies of great men. In later centuries, authors also focused on notable kings and princes, and on Rome's successor kingdoms and principalities, while Christian hagiography concentrated on individual saints' lives. The revival of classical learning in the ninth century included the art of rhetoric and the writing of lives of secular rulers. The monk Einhard at the court of the Emperor Charlemagne is a beacon in the history of biography. His ‘Life of Charlemagne’ (c.830) took Suetonius as its model, rather than (but not in opposition to) the lives of Christian saints. No comparable life of a secular ruler which sought to convey an impression of its subject rather than a catalogue of his deeds had been written for centuries. For this reason it has been termed ‘the greatest monument of secular biography of the Latin Middle Ages’. It proved to be of enduring popularity and today about eighty manuscripts of the life are known. As an author, Einhard set a pattern: an educated monk, poet and letter-writer who lived at Charlemagne's cultivated court and observed the emperor at close quarters: ‘I was aware that no one could write about these things more truthfully than me, since I myself was present and personally witnessed them, as they say, with my own eyes’.¹

Einhard vividly recalled Charlemagne's commanding presence and sought ‘to speak of the character of his mind, his supreme steadfastness in good times and bad, and those things that belong to his spiritual and domestic life’.² Thus, he provided not only a portrait of Charlemagne – his early life and accession, his personal life, marriages and family, his visit to Rome and coronation there in ad 800, and his death, and last will and testament – but also judgements on his wars and relations with the North men and the Moors beyond his empire as well as the Saxons within: ‘the king's greatness of spirit and steadfast determination – both in bad times and good – could not be conquered by [the Saxons’] fickleness or worn down by the task he had set himself’. In war the lessons for Charlemagne's successors were patent: ‘Thus it was not his nature to give up in bad times or to be seduced by the false flattery of success in good times’.³ Equal stress was laid on the emperor's determination to advance learning and the arts of peace: ‘He avidly pursued the liberal arts and greatly honoured those teachers whom he deeply respected’. Yet Einhard was also aware of the personal limitations on Charlemagne in law-giving and encouraging learning: ‘He also attempted to learn how to write and for this reason, used to place wax-tablets and notebooks under the pillows on his bed, so that, if he had any free time, he might accustom his hand to forming letters. But his effort came too late in life and achieved little success.’⁴

After Charlemagne's death, Einhard served his son and successor, Louis the Pious, for whom it is probable that the life was written, to celebrate the great emperor, legitimize Louis's rule of the Frankish empire, and to provide an exemplar of rulership. Its attractiveness lay in its brevity and ‘powerful simplicity’, its lightness of touch, and in the Ciceronian style which Einhard strove to emulate in order to praise a famous ruler, though inevitably it was selective in content and rarely criticized the emperor.

In the following two centuries, no secular person ‘had a biographer who wrote of him in purely secular terms’. Those biographies that were written – of rulers in various parts of northern Europe, including Matilda, queen of Henry I of Germany, and Margaret, queen of Malcolm III of Scotland – generally saw their subjects in hagiographic terms and their political activities as of secondary importance. It is true that those who wrote lives of later Carolingian rulers sought to emulate Einhard, but they had few of his qualities and less of his range, and their biographies hardly breathed life into their subjects. Theganus (died c.848), a Frankish clerk of noble birth, composed a biography of Charlemagne's son, Louis the Pious; he used Einhard's biography as a model, but his work was more annalistic, and conventional in its description of Louis. Ermeldus Nigellus (died before 835), wrote a Latin historical poem ‘In Honor of Louis, the Most Christian Caesar Augustus’ to curry favour and he too used classical models for his individual portraits. Notker Balbus (‘the Stammerer’, c.840–912), a talented writer who was a monk at St Gall, wrote of Charlemagne's deeds; although he knew Einhard's work, he relied mainly on oral tradition and popular anecdotes in seeking to portray a wise and just emperor, an exemplar among rulers.

In Anglo-Saxon England, the writing of biography was a weaker tradition. Indeed, the three most noteworthy surviving biographies of kings – of Alfred, Cnut the Dane and Edward the Confessor – were probably written by, respectively, a Welshman and two Flemings. The first biography of an English monarch was Asser's life of Alfred. It certainly drew on the example of Einhard but was equally dependent on hagiographical tradition and Anglo-Saxon annals. As a result, it offers a more idealized, romanticized and stilted portrait than Einhard's. But at least Asser, a Welshman who was summoned to be bishop of Sherborne (Dorset), frequented Alfred's court, knew the king personally, and included some autobiographical details: ‘At about this time I … was summoned by the king from the remote, westernmost parts of Wales … When I had been warmly welcomed by him, and we engaged in discussion, he asked me earnestly to commit myself to his service and to become a member of his household …’.⁵

Asser's life was written c.893 during Alfred's lifetime, and may have been composed at the king's request for the Welsh who had submitted to him; hence its extravagant dedication ‘to my esteemed and most holy lord, Alfred ruler of all the Christians of the island of Britain, king of the Angles and Saxons’.⁶ Its purpose was to celebrate the king's educational achievements, his just government and his military and naval campaigns against the Vikings. Scholarly arguments about its authenticity have been resolved decisively in its favour as a late ninth-century account, and its stories of Alfred's adversities seem authentic (though the tale of ‘the cakes’ is much later). Alfred emerges as a humane, Christian ruler, a law-giver committed to advancing learning among his subjects:

[Alfred] used to affirm, with repeated complaints and sighing from the depths of his heart, that among all the difficulties and burdens of his present life this had become the greatest: namely, that at the time when he was of the right age and had the leisure and the capacity for learning, he did not have the teachers. For when he was older, and more incessantly preoccupied by day and night with – or rather harassed by – all kinds of illnesses unknown to the physicians of this island, as well as by the cares (both domestic and foreign) of the royal office, and also by the incursions of the Vikings by land and sea, he had the teachers and scribes to some small extent, but he was unable to study.⁷

Asser did not complete his biography and it never achieved the popularity of Einhard's life of Charlemagne. Its admiring assessment of Alfred is interestingly couched in a naval metaphor:

Yet once he had taken over the helm of his kingdom, he alone, sustained by divine assistance, struggled like an excellent pilot to guide his ship laden with much wealth to the desired and safe haven of his homeland, even though all his sailors were virtually exhausted; similarly, he did not allow it to waver or wander from course, even though the course lay through the many seething whirlpools of the present life. For by gently instructing, cajoling, urging, commanding, and (in the end, when his patience was exhausted) by sharply chastising those who were disobedient and by despising popular stupidity and stubbornness in every way, he carefully and cleverly exploited and converted his bishops and earldormen and nobles, and his thegns most dear to him, and reeves as well, … to his own will and to the general advantage of the whole realm.⁸

The lives of Cnut and the Confessor were written, unusually, in praise of their respective queens as well as for circulation at court. Each offered an idealized portrait that lauded the Christian hero-king as an example to others. In Richard Southern's view, these two authors ‘most brilliantly imposed on recalcitra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Royal and secular biography
• 2 Vernacular chronicles and narrative sources of history in medieval England
• 3 The medieval sermon: text, performance and insight
• 4 Wills as primary sources
• 5 Letters and letter collections
• 6 Writing military history from narrative sources: Norman battlefield tactics, c. 1000
• 7 Historians and inquisitors: testimonies from the early inquisitions into heretical depravity
• 8 Coronation rituals and related materials
• 9 The sources for manorial and rural history
• 10 Sources for medieval maritime history
• 11 Sources for medieval urban history
• 12 Sources for the study of public health in the medieval city
• 13 Medieval women's history: sources and issues
• 14 Sources for representative institutions
• 15 Images and objects as sources for medieval history
• 16 Medieval archaeology
• Index