Writing Normandy

Stories of Saints and Rulers

Felice Lifshitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367632526
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429639395
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Writing Normandy brings together eighteen articles by historian Felice Lifshitz, some of which are published here for the first time.

The articles examine the various ways in which local and regional narratives about the past were created and revised in Normandy during the central Middle Ages. These narratives are analyzed through a combination of both cultural studies and manuscript studies in order to assess how they functioned, who they benefitted, and the various contexts in which they were transmitted. The essays pay particular attention to the narratives built around venerated saints and secular rulers, and in doing so bring together narratives that have traditionally been discussed separately by scholars.

The book will appeal to scholars and students of cultural history and medieval history, as well as those interested in manuscript studies. (CS1095)

Part I
“Hagiography” and historical representation

1
BEYOND POSITIVISM AND GENRE

“Hagiographical” texts as historical narrative

Historia est quae praeterita narrat,

Prophetia quae futura narrat,

Hagiographa quae aeternae vitae gaudia jubilat.¹

1 Honorius of Autun (fl. ca. 1100), In Psalmos, PL 172.273B. The main outlines of this essay were first presented as a paper before the Sewanee Mediaeval Colloquium on “Saints and Their Cults in the Middle Ages” in April 1993. I thank the audience, the other panelists, and particularly Thomas Heffernan, for the useful discussion which followed the paper, and Magdalena Carrasco, Patrick J. Geary, Cynthia Hahn, Thomas Head, and Thomas F.X. Noble for helpful informal discussions outside the framework of the panels. Funding for the research and preparation of the colloquium paper and for the expanded article was provided by a Faculty Development Mini-Grant from Florida International University. Earlier drafts of the typescript were read and improved by the comments of Dan Cohen, Walter Goffart, and Alan Kahan; my failure at times to follow their excellent advice leaves the fault for more than simple errors of fact squarely at my doorstep. An especially large debt is owed to Benjamin Arnold, whose efforts went well beyond the call of duty.

Over the past century, “hagiographical” materials have been approached from every conceivable perspective.² A critical trend has been to move away from bobbing for data to reconstructing mentalities and, consequently, to move from searching for the original version of each particular saint’s biography to studying all extant versions, each in its particular compositional context. Instead of seeing “legendary accretions” as dross to be sifted and cleared away, scholars have seen transformations in a saint’s character as crucial indicators of many different sorts of changes over time.³

2 For a bibliographically rich survey of the field see Friedrich Lotter, “Methodisches zur Gewinnung historischer Erkenntnisse aus hagiographischen Quellen,” Historische Zeitschrift 229 (1979): 298–356.

3 The seminal works here are Joseph-Claude Poulin, L’idéal de sainteté dans l’Aquitaine carolingienne d’après les sources hagiographiques (750–950) (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1975), and Charles W. Jones, Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari and Manhattan: Biography of a Legend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

Although an archetype-fetish no longer prevails, and professional historians have ceased dismissing re-workings out of hand, the fact that “hagiographical” narratives (both original and revised versions) have frequently been stigmatized as “untrue” can still blind us to their function as historical writing, despite their increasingly enthusiastic rehabilitation as historical sources. In fact, there has even been something of an industry involved specifically in discovering the characteristics which distinguish historical writing, or historiography, from “hagiography,” a scholarly effort which, despite a century of labor, had yet, in 1979, to solve the “problem.”⁴ A similar conundrum concerning definitions has plagued historians of visual, rather than verbal, representation, some of whom have begun to assert the complete impossibility of distinguishing generically among modes of visual representation, for instance between an icon and a pictorial narrative.⁵ This essay, however, will be confined to the problems raised by literary genres.

4 Lotter, “Methodisches,” p. 306. There is also a brief review of the literature on the issue of genre up to approximately the same year in Pierre-André Sigal, “Histoire et hagiographie: les Miracula aux XIe et XIIe siècles,” Annales de Bretagne 87 (1980): 237–257, at 238–240. Whoever examines the century’s worth of literature devoted to generic definition will witness the spectacle of authors painstakingly erecting criteria for the “hagiographical” genre, as distinct from the historiographical genre, only to admit that many “hagiographical” texts do not fit into the category of “hagiography,” which indeed happens with Lotter himself (“Methodisches,” p. 306; also see pp. 312–313 where he admits that translationes are not “hagiographical” but historical). Voss, too, eventually declares that, “in practice,” his two branches of historiography are frequently mixed up (Bernd Reiner Voss, “Berührungen von Hagiographie und Historiographie in der Spätantike,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 4 [1970]: 53–69, at 61). Sigal, after arguing throughout for two distinct genres, ends up admitting that there is a large “hagiographical” component in “historical” works and ultimately concludes that “hagiography” is part of “history” (“Histoire et hagiographie,” pp. 246–248 and 257). Ludwif Zoepf (Das Heiligen-Leben im 10. Jahrhundert [Leipzig: Tuebner, 1908], pp. 34–35) distinguishes within his ideal genre of “hagiography” (from which he has already excluded most texts as perversions of the pure genre) among “biography,” “vita” (biography plus miraculous occurrences), and “legend” (biography with a very large or even dominant supernatural element), then immediately declares that many texts cannot be fitted into the categories and that in any case the modus operandi of the “hagiographer” is identical for all three subgenres. Only a few examples of the points on which the generic projects capsize will be noted here as illustration; the interested reader should consult directly the literature concerning generic definition. The prologues of works that nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians have considered to be historiography follow exactly the same tripartite schema that Zoepf constructed as characteristic of “hagiography:” a description of how the work was commissioned by a superior, though the author at first balked due to consciousness of his limited erudition; a plea to the patron to protect, correct or destroy the work; an assertion that the tale about to be told is true (Zoepf, Das Heiligen-Leben, p. 40; Antonia Gransden, Legends, Traditions and History in Medieval England [London: Hambledon Press, 1992], pp. 125–126; Dudo, De moribus, pp. 115–120). “Both” historiographers and “hagiographers” favored the form of the “virtue catalog” to describe a hero’s main attributes, and ascribed to their heroes identical virtues; Fredegar describes Claudius as “genere Romanus, homo prudens, iocundus in fabolis, strenuus in cunctis, pacienciae deditus, plenitudinem consiliae habundans, litterarum eruditus, fide plenus amiciciam cum omnibus sectans” (Fredegar, Chronicon 4.28, ed. Bruno Krusch [MGH SRM 2; Hanover: Hahn, 1888], p. 132). It has even been conclusively demonstrated (bizarrely enough in the context of arguing that “historiography” and “hagiography” are two separate genres) that the entire thematic complex of a hero’s fama and his virtues as exemplars for imitatio, which is often seen as the hallmark of a “hagiographical” text, was central to the narratives of Xenophon, Polybius, Sallust, Tacitus, and Livy, “historiographers” to a man (Voss, “Berührungen,” pp. 56–63).

5 This was the conclusion of the editors of the proceedings of the 1985 National Gallery of Art conference on Pictorial Narrative in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, eds. Herbert Kessler and Marianna Shreve Simpson (Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, 1985), p. 8.

I will address directly only one of the many definitions of “hagiography” that have been proposed, because this particular definition has been very frequently cited: the oracular definition of Hippolyte Delehaye. Delehaye contends that “hagiography” intends primarily to engender, propagate, strengthen, etc. the cult of a saint.⁶ Yet there are many writings about saints which seem never to have served for any functioning cult, and many in which the dominant motives for composition are unrelated to any kind of liturgical veneration.⁷ Even the many narratives preserved and transmitted in legendaries are frequently bereft of festival dates, indicating the absence of ties to a cult.⁸ Nor can we simply take “cult” in its very broadest, rather than in its specifically liturgical, sense as a general fame or revered reputation; for that would lead us down precisely the same road we are already on, heading toward a broad “genre” of biographies of famous people, people among whom a “saint” cannot be distinguished without a liturgical, rather than a merely fanatical, cult. Furthermore, when tenth-century authors did wish to refer to the liturgy of anthems, responses, readings, and prayers that had developed in connection with the celebrations of saints’ cults, they did not use “hagiographical” words; rather, they called such compositions “historiae.”⁹

6 Hippolyte Delehaye, Les légendes hagiographiques (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1906), pp. xiii and 2. Among the authors discussed in this paper alone, the definition is cited by Zoepf, Das Heiligen-Leben, p. 5; Lotter, “Methodisches,” p. 307; and Baudouin De Gaiffier, “Hagiographie et historiographie: Quelques aspects du problème,” Settimane 17 (1970): 139–166, at 140.

7 Biographies of saints provided communities and institutions with written traditions; they defended the independence of communities and institutions against those who wished to subject them; they defended property rights and territorial endowments; they fueled episcopal rivalries; they conveyed political and theological stances; they propagated an individual author’s or group’s notion of “the holy;” they served, in short, for manifold purposes. See the catalog of functions in Zoepf, Das Heiligen-Leben, pp. 6 and 12–30, and in Benedicta Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982); the latter is essentially an encyclopedic compendium of the uses of “hagiographical” materials, most of which turn out to have very little to do with cults. Episcopal lists likewise had long been assumed to possess primarily cultic or liturgical functions, simply because their historiographic functions were unappreciated; for a corrective, see Jean-Charles Picard, Le souvenir des évêques: sépultures, listes épiscopales et culte des évêques en Italie du Nord des origines au Xe siècle (Rome: École française de Rome, 1988), pp. 520–538.

8 Guy Philippart, Les légendiers latins et autres manuscrits hagiographiques (Turnhout: Brepols, 1977), pp. 24–25.

9 Jones, Saint Nicholas, pp. 112–113; Ritva Jonsson, Historia: Études sur la genèse des offices versifiés (Stockholm: Almqvist et Wiskell, 1968).

If an actual cult is not always a significant part of “hagiographical” writing, then the fact that a narrative hinges upon a saintly hero or heroine becomes a tangential concern, and the glue of the generic label qua “hagiography,” rather than biography/historiography, dissolves. Biography, of saints or of other figures, seems to have been the most popular form of historical narrative in the Middle Ages, just as it is today. The libraries of medieval monasteries were stuffed with biographies, as are the libraries of today’s bibliophiles and history buffs. But these modern collections are not divided into separate genres on the basis of the profession or status of the subject. The hero or heroine may be a politician, a sports figure, or a movie star, and within each realm there will be a number of similarities in their life stories, crucial turning points such as first campaign, dramatic injury, bout with substance abuse, trauma at loss of privacy. Does the presence of such topoi impose a generic differentiation within “biography?”¹⁰

10 To the argument that “hagiographical” materials also include relics, reliquaries, iconographic representations, breviaries, etc., I would respond that, logically, we are therefore also required to erect a genre “politicalia” comprised of biographies of politicians, reports of office-holders to constituents, campaign posters, bumper-stickers, and souvenir sponges.

Such arguments aside, the main problem with Delehaye’s definition of “hagiography” lies elsewhere, a problem which has marred all the definitions of “hagiography” that have been erected, and especially those which seek to distinguish “hagiography” from historiography: the very attempt to discover a single definition that can be universally valid. There can be no simp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of abbreviations
• Preface
• Part I: “Hagiography” and historical representation
• Part II: Historiographic discourse and saintly relics: the archbishops and Rouen
• Part III: Historiographic discourse and saintly relics: beyond Rouen
• 9 The “exodus of holy bodies” reconsidered: the translation of the relics of St. Gildardus of Rouen to Soissons
• Part IV: Dudo of St. Quentin and the Gesta Normannorum
• Part V: Women and gender
• Manuscripts cited
• Index