Barbarian Memory: The Legacy of Early Medieval History in Early Modern Literature

The Legacy of Early Medieval History in Early Modern Literature

N. Birns

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137364555
• eBook ISBN: 9781137364562
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Literature

An investigation of the use of Late Antique European history by late medieval and Renaissance writers such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Davenant, Trissino, and Corneille. The liminality of the late antique period and the issues of ethnicity and religion it raises makes it very different from that of the classical world in analogous writers.

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Barbarian Memory and the Uncanny Past

Abstract: This chapter argues that barbarian memory—the awareness that the Roman Empire in the West had been invaded and disrupted in the fifth century by peoples such as the Goths and Vandals—is an important theme in late medieval and early modern literature. After recounting examples in Shakespeare of this material ranging from Henry V to Hamlet even to Touchstone’s quip about the Goths in As You Like It, the chapter surveys attitudes toward barbarians throughout Western Europe, from the Sweden of Olaus Rudbeck to the Spain of Miguel de Cervantes. The chapter examines how, even as barbarian memory was solicited to provide a rousing cultural origin, its discourse got booed down in pedantry and obscurity. The chapter concludes by situating barbarian memory as it evokes the uncanny past.DOI

Birns, Nicholas. Barbarian Memory:The Legacy of Early Medieval History in Early Modern Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137364562.

1 The possibility of barbarian memory

This book concerns barbarian memory, the awareness that the transition from the Roman Empire to what came after it brought war, invasion, and the migration of peoples in its wake. In the fourth and fifth centuries, the Roman Empire in the West was disrupted by the presence of non-Roman peoples such as the Goths, Franks, and Vandals. The Goths settled in Italy and, more durably, in Spain, the Franks in what is now France, the Vandals in North Africa. Later, in the waning decades of the sixth century, another barbarian group, the Lombards, occupied northern Italy. The warlike nature and the comparative lack of civilization of the peoples called barbarian remained a part of the memory of Europe. The past does not only reside in the archive; it beckons to the present, allowing later meanings and purposes to infuse its elucidation. Even events of a 1,000 years before can still matter, no matter how obscure, especially if they are not just as lifeless annals but also as parts of a still-conscious awareness.

This sense of not only the past but also the past’s past has the potential to burst out of what Harris calls “period purification.” As Patricia Clare Ingham observes, assertions of “absolute cultural alterity” often run parallel to those of absolute historical alterity in customary formulations of self and other, present and past.¹

Classical scholars, such as Christopher Krebs and Jonas Grethlein, theorize a construction of time as the “plupast” (after the term “pluperfect”), denoting the past as embedded in a given narrative and the aspects of a narrative placed earlier than its own temporal articulation.² Examining the plupast of a text that to its current readers is already in the distant past solicits a complex, striated tension that requires we become aware of multiple temporalities at once. This book focuses on the late medieval and early modern period. It asks, how did the residue of the time when, as the English antiquarian William Camden put it, “there ensued an universall and utter confusion, full of wofull miseries and calamities, what with barbarous nations of the one side making incursions and invasions,” and “the Roman Empire began to decline and decay, and barbarous Nations every way made foule havocke of the provinces all over the Continent,” affect Europe’s sense of its history and identity?³ Focusing on writers as famous as Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare, and as obscure as William Davenant and Gian Giorgio Trissino, we will see how barbarian memory is used both to cordon off Christianity from the classical past and to problematize the self-confidence of Christianity with respect to Islam, whose manifestation in the Mediterranean basin could be a further consequence of instability in the later Roman Empire. We will see how questions of mode, style and nomenclature contingent on awareness of this period of migration, invasion, and war crucially affected how early modern forms defined themselves.

We will most centrally examine the key role played by the Historia Langobardorum of Paul the Deacon, an eighth-century Benedictine monk who wrote his history in Latin under the patronage of Charlemagne, the Frankish king who had conquered the Lombardic realm in which Paul had grown up.⁴ Paul’s text is mined by writers from Chaucer to Corneille over three centuries because it embodied the odd amalgam of disruption and continuity, vulgarity of manners and archival authority, with which barbarian memory is endowed. Most importantly, we will see how early medieval referents associated with barbarian memory often provided the essential index of historical continuity or discontinuity: as if the barbarian past was at once the most vital element to constituting a past and the most embarrassing, inconvenient, difficult to assimilate.⁵

We are used to discussions of the Renaissance’s relationship to the classical world it revived and altered, and of discussions of residual medieval elements in the early modern period. But the classicism discussed is usually a pre-Christian classicism, and the medieval residuum is usually from the most recent part of the medieval period. If, as Anthony Kemp has cogently put it, “Between the fourteenth century and the eighteenth, the Western comprehension of historical time reversed itself, from an image of syncretic unity and an essential sameness of time, to one of dynamic and supersessive change spawning schism after schism,” we would do well to look at confrontations with the past that in tone were more schismatic than syncretic.⁶ This study discusses how the late medieval and early modern periods articulated an intermediate period, that of Western Europe’s conversion to Christianity and the disruption of Roman rule by barbarian settlement. This material is interesting in itself how it sheds light on intellectual history, but the liminal quality of the period—neither medieval nor classical—can serve as ground for speculation on issues of anachronism, temporality, and the epistemology of conceiving the past ruminated upon by recent theoretical and interdisciplinary treatments as in the work of Kathleen Biddick, Nicholas Moschovakis, and Jonathan Gil Harris.⁷ Most likely, previous generations of medieval and Renaissance scholars have resisted any discussion of early medieval influence for fear that their periods, already under suspicion by many as what Valerie Traub has called “the abject other of modernity,” will be contaminated by the minutiae of an even darker age.⁸ In a postmodern or perhaps even post-postmodern era, one assumes now we are ready to fully unleash, interpretively, the intersections of history and temporality already manifest in the texts themselves.

Why should the past of the past matter? We may think we have enough trouble coming to terms with the relationship of the present to the past. How can we know history? Can we ever be independent of tradition? Is the archive a womb or a trap? Why then be further distracted by studying how a past era saw an earlier past one? Even if we do that, why not stick to obvious subjects such as the Renaissance’s view of antiquity? Why examine how Europeans from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century viewed their late antique and early medieval predecessors? If, as Alain Badiou has argued, the very idea of ontological fidelity is a long-term aftermath to an event with no inherent relation to any determinate order, why complicate matters even further by interposing another layer of pastness through which to assess being and event?⁹ Would this not put another roadblock in the path of a process already difficult?

Other twentieth- and twenty-first-century horizons come into this canvas as well: not accidentally, but ineluctably. Walter Goffart, who in works such as 1988’s The Narrators of Barbarian History and after has done more than any other thinker to retheorize this period, puts it eloquently when he says “fantasies of a coherent early Germany” were dealt a blow “by the collapse of the Third German Reich in 1945” and that we now are inclined to see the fourth and fifth centuries—in large part because of Goffart’s subtle and scrupulous work—as a case of “fragmented multiple neighbors faced by Rome.”¹⁰ That we cannot discuss the Germanic and its relationship to the Roman without thinking of only recently made claims for Germanic superiority, that we think of multiculturalism when we see different groups of different national origins interacting, that the very reframing of periods which has made “late antique” and “early modern” into sites for intellectual reflection is a product of the postmodern turn, an indelible part of the story. In unearthing the past of the past, we further delve into and complicate our own sense of the present. Shakespeare’s mention of Merovingian Franks, Chaucer’s allusions to Lombard and Byzantine history, the popping-up of the Goths in debates about rhyme, meter, and poetic decorum are events in our time as well as in the temporalities they embody and represent. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Samuel Daniel, Gian Giorgio Trissino, William Davenant, and Pierre Corneille all thought the early medieval past important enough to deploy prominently in their works. If we can see these references as bringing alive the complexity of history itself, we will have gained a further dimension to these already meaning-rich texts, and to our attempts to understand them.

2 Barbarian Shakespeare

Shakespeare deploys this material at strategic points. Henry V begins with the English court puzzling out the legal reasoning behind the claim of the English kings to the French throne that had fueled the Hundred Years War, of which Henry V’s anticipated invasion of France is but the latest campaign. It is striking that, in Shakespeare’s most iconic play about kingship, the drama begins with a detailed tracing-back of the current contest to obscure, early medieval customs and migrations. The idea of the Salic law—that inheritance could not be through the female—was a tradition more or less invented for the convenience of the people on the French throne:

But this, which they produce from Pharamond,

In terram Salicam mulieres ne succedant,

No woman shall succeed in Salique land:

Which Salique land the French unjustly gloze...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Barbarian Memory and the Uncanny Past
• 2  Chaucer, Gower, and Barbarian History: The Man of Laws Tale and the Prologue to Gowers Confessio Amantis
• 3  Rome, Christianity, and Barbarian Memory in Titus Andronicus
• 4  Rhyme, Barbarism, and Manners from Trissino to Corneille
• Index