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Gabrielle M. Spiegel is Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-Denis (1978).

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Romancing the Past

University of California Press

"Lost causes," C. Vann Woodward once remarked, "especially those that foster lingering loyalties and nostalgic memories, are among the most prolific breeders of historiography . . . particularly so if the survivors deem the cause in some measure retrievable."1 The search for a usable past, capable of redeeming a cause that has been lost, in ideological if not actual political terms, becomes a compelling task for those who feel the need to mask the failure of their enterprise, to dissimulate the malaise that accompanies a fall from social grace, a decline in political authority, and a sense of the irrelevance of values that had guided comportment and identified the once-prestigious possessors of power and authority as central players in the social game. To fail, and to fail in a contest that discloses the possible historical obsolescence of the principles, beliefs, and prerogatives that had served to define the social and political status of those deeply committed to the lost cause, makes recourse to the past an essential element in the drive to recuperate a sense of social worth. It is here that ideological assertion comes into play, arguing for the continuing relevance of the values that the past enshrines; for the inherent rightness of the social order that had governed political life; for the importance of restoring to their former authority the rules of the social game that had acknowledged the perduring justice of the declining class's hegemony.

Ideology seeks to revive lost dreams of glory, to vindicate motives, and to mantle the discomfort that the contemplation of unwanted and adverse historical change germinates. Because failure is rooted in historical transformations, it is the past that becomes the repository of those dreams and desires, both because it can offer up a consoling image of what once was and is no longer, and because it contains within

it the elements by which to reopen the contest and offer an alternative vision to a now unpalatable present. Historical writing is a powerful vehicle for the expression of ideological assertion, for it is able to address the historical issues so crucially at stake and to lend to ideology the authority and prestige of the past, all the while dissimulating its status as ideology under the guise of a mere accounting of "what was."

This book examines the use of the past by the French aristocracy in the thirteenth century, as it developed in the patronage of a novel form of historical writing, the Old French prose chronicle. The underlying argument of the book is that both history and prose performed critical social functions in the life of the French aristocracy, which sought to embed its ideology in history and thereby endow that ideology with the prestige and imprescriptible character that the past was able to confer in medieval society. At the same time, by adopting prose as the language of history, chroniclers created a novel vernacular historiographic discourse, one that attempted to ground historical truth in a new system of authentication based on' prose as a language of "truth," hence uniquely appropriate for the articulation and dissemination of historical knowledge.

One of my concerns in this book is with what might be called the social function of prose. I argue that the rise of literary prose represents far more than a simple fact of literary history, whereby prose composition gradually took its place alongside composition in verse. Old French prose historiography was, rather, the product of a specific historical moment and situation that endowed prose with a particular value for those who patronized, produced, and consumed works written in that discursive register. Global assertions about the literary trajectory and significance of prose tend to assume that its appearance is a natural, if not inevitable, part of any culture's literary history, an assumption that remains undemonstrated and probably unwarranted. To be sure, most literary languages eventually develop prose narratives, but the exact timing, location, and generic embodiment that give rise to prose composition are not necessarily the result of "natural" linguistic progress. It is my belief that the conditions under which prose narratives originate are as various as the cultures that produce them. In some cultures and at some times prose may represent a natural evolution of literary language, while in other places and periods it is socially generated by precise cultural needs and possesses ideological functions and meanings. For this reason, I do not attempt to consider

the development of Old French vernacular prose in a comparative perspective, since my methodological goal is to demonstrate the advantages of situating historico-literary texts and developments in a local environment of social and political networks that, I believe, account for their specific form and function. References to other areas could never attain the particularity and density of this treatment and would, at best, constitute passing allusions to complex phenomena.

In France, the turn to prose as the preferred medium of historical writing occurred in service to an ideological initiative on the part of a threatened elite to authenticate its claim to historical legitimacy. At the same time, it worked to distinguish the vernacular chronicle, in both style and oral and fictional sources, from earlier Old French literary forms, namely epic and romance, against which vernacular historiography constructed its generic identity.

The "romancing of the past" represented by the rise of vernacular prose historiography, thus, has meaning on several levels. In its most ordinary and straightforward sense, the project entailed the translation of Latin histories into the rapidly developing language of Old French prose, a raise en roman that made available for the first time the historical legacy of both French and classical civilizations to lay-men hitherto barred from access to it by their ignorance of Latin. On a more profound level, the "romancing of the past" in vernacular historiography also addressed sentiments of loss and decline that plagued the French aristocracy in the opening decades of the thirteenth century, as the rise of a newly powerful monarchy threatened its traditional autonomy and sought to limit its exercise of traditional political and military roles. From this perspective, the rise of vernacular prose historiography entailed the quest for a lost world of aristocratic potency, one that could be discovered in the past and made, it was possible to hope, a patent for a revised present in which the adverse historical changes suffered by the French aristocracy might be reversed and overcome.

Some historians might argue that the situation of the French nobility in the opening decades of the thirteenth century was notb or not yetb sufficiently serious to suppose that French nobles felt themselves in need of ideological solace and support. Or that, in any case, whatever degree of decline in power the French nobility experienced during these decades, it proved both resourceful and resurgent in reestablishing its prestige in later ages. While it is certainly true that French nobles weathered worse challenges than those facing them in

this period, the question is perhaps not exclusively one of "fact" (did French aristocrats really decline?) but includes their perceptions of their situation as well (did they feel themselves to be suffering a loss of power and autonomy? did they know they would be resurgent?). All the evidence, not least the vernacular histories themselves, points to a sense of rupture with the past, a perception of loss of status and function that scholars such as R. Howard Bloch, Georges Duby, Jean Flori, Erich KC6hler, Jacques Le Goff, Eugene Vance, and others have long seen as the matrix out of which chivalric ideology and courtly literature in general emerge. The question is, at base, more psychological than social, and our understanding of the social psychology of the aristocracy depends to a high degree on our reading of its characteristic literature.

When I began the research for this book, I expected that I would be tracing the spread of royal ideology as it slowly but progressively diffused downward to the aristocracy via translations and original compositions in Old French. I hoped to be able to chart the geographical and chronological pathways through which royal ideology extended its influence. However, upon close reading, the texts themselves did not seem to me to confirm the generally held view that they were royalist in orientation. Furthermore, when I investigated the social background and political activities of the patrons of vernacular historical texts, I discovered that these patrons belonged for the most part to the anti-royalist party in Flanders. Given this fact, the notion that the texts they patronized were pro-royalist rapidly became untenable. This point is critical. Every identifiable patron except one belongs to the English (i.e., anti-Capetian) party in Flanders in the turbulent years of war initiated in the 1180s by the Flemish count Philippe of Alsace and culminating with the battle of Bouvines in 1214.

The highly restricted geographical scope of the patronage phenomenon provides the key to what is fundamentally at issue in this body of texts. In other words, I am not making an argument about the French aristocracy as a wholeb for whom, indeed, assertions of decline, impoverishment, and loss of political and/or military autonomy would not be credibleb but only about a small group of patrons, whose disastrous social and political histories during the periods when they patronized vernacular prose histories is traced in full in chapter 1. It seems to me incontrovertible that they , if not all French aristocrats, suffered from the anxieties and sentiments of decline as described. For these nobles, I contend, the patronage and consumption of vernacular historiography represented a search for ethical and ideo-

logical legitimacy that was displaced to the realm of culture, taking the form of a re-created past that could correct the deficiencies of a problematic present.

In tracing the rise of vernacular prose historiography, then, it is useful to bear in mind Raymond Williams's dictum that ideology has always to be produced : "Social orders and cultural orders must be seen as being actively made: actively and continuously, or they may quite quickly break down."2 Moreover, as Le Goff reminds us, "times of marked social change are ideal for observing the relationship between material and imaginary realities."3 The early thirteenth century, in Le Goff's opinion, was precisely such a time, when the attempt to reconfigure the world of imagination in order to comprehend and come to terms with social transformations can be seen in a variety of literatures, both didactic and fictional.

It hardly needs saying that such literary figurations of social realities are scarcely straightforward or "innocent." As Vance compellingly argues, even the most putatively "objective" literary work, one that aims at reproducing the "world as it exists," is inevitably embroiled in the ideologies that "must prevail in the minds of both artist and audience if the system of communication is to remain intact."4 Indeed, he insists, we should be most on guard in the presence of medieval literature when it pretends to denote the world "literally."5 Historiography, as the medieval genre par excellence devoted to a "realistic" representation of the social and political world, is at the same time a genre thoroughly saturated with ideological goals. Especially in the Middle Ages, historical writing, precisely to the degree that it claimed to be free of imaginative elaboration, served as a vehicle of ideological elaboration. The prescriptive authority of the past made it a privileged locus for working through the ideological implications of social changes in the present and the repository of contemporary concerns and desires. As a locus of value, a revised past held out for contemporaries the promise of a perfectible present.

Yet, in the end, the Franco-Flemish aristocracy's effort to redeem the present by means of a revitalized past was doomed to failure, for neither past nor present could really address, much less turn back, the long-term historical transformations that were coming to culmination in medieval French society during the reign of Philip Augustus (1179-1223). Ultimately, vernacular chroniclers, in recreating the aristocracy's lost worlds, merely provided a verbal substitute for a social past irretrievably lost; their histories both mask and mark the historical rupture effected by the rise of monarchical authority at the expense of

aristocratic autonomy and prestige, which forms the critical historical context in which Old French prose historiography developed.

This study of the rise of vernacular prose historiography assumes that the texts to be considered, although the product of clerical writers, nonetheless represent the aspirations and anxieties of the French aristocracy responsible, by its patronage, for their creation. Although the majority of authors who wrote histories in Old French in the period under consideration remain anonymous, what little we know of them indicates that they were mainly secular clerics attached to noble households. In the small world in which vernacular prose historiography first arises, it is the patron, rather than an eventual public, who can be credited with determining the aims and forms of the chronicle. To the extent that this is so, the Old French prose chronicle does not express a collective image of the community's social past, but instead forms a partisan record intended to serve the interests of a particular social group, inscribing a partisan and ideologically motivated assertion of the aristocracy's place and prestige in medieval society.

A word needs to be said about the relation of these vernacular texts to the Latin sources, whether ancient or medieval, that they translated. That some of the characteristics and transformations occurring within vernacular prose historiography were also true of contemporary Latin historical writing does not detract from the story I am trying to tell. My concern here is primarily with the patrons and audiences for whom prose histories were composed, and with the ways in which such histories addressed underlying issues of aristocratic experience in thirteenth-century France. Since the audiences for Old French histories were effectively denied access to Latin sources by virtue of their linguistic incompetence, they remained ignorant of the developments in Latin historical writing that may have paralleled those in the vernacular. In a more positive sense, the significant change from the point of view of those for whom vernacular history was destined lies in the internal development of vernacular literature as such, which began to offer its audiences novel material couched in new literary modes. This book will deal with the inner progression of vernacular prose history in its earliest stages, as it first emerged by distinguishing itself, sharply and self-consciously, from earlier genres of vernacular literature such as epic and romance (to which, nonetheless, its debt remains clear); and then as it gradually created subject matters and forms of expression proper to it alone, thereby achieving generic autonomy.

But, as I hope will become clear, it is my firm conviction that the rise of vernacular historiography must be seen within the context of

Old French literature and not solelyb as has been customaryb in relation to the Latin sources that served as the bases of the first works. When relevant and telling, the vernacular texts discussed here are juxtaposed to the Latin texts they either translate or employ. My principal concern, however, is not with that sort of Quellengeschichte . Instead, I wish to present these writings as they would have been apprehended by a French audience in the thirteenth century, an audience untutored in Latin and unaware of the sometimes crude, sometimes subtle, reworking of the Latin works from which the narratives they were hearing derived. Only when the changes effected by vernacular translators are particularly revelatory of authorial intentions are they noted in my discussion. If, as was sometimes the case, the vernacular version represents a fairly straightforward or literal translation and adaptation of a Latin text, I remain interested primarily in the image of the past that the vernacular history presented, whatever its ultimate point of origin. It is, moreover, my governing assumption that even literal translations are the product of conscious intentions and that if the Old French texts replicate the substance of Latin texts, it is because the translators believed those Latin works to offer adequate expressions of their own historiographical goals. The instances of revisions to Latin sources, not to mention the wholesale deformation of existing material and the insertion of supplementary sources, are in any case so numerous and pervasive that to assume anything less would do an injustice to the intelligence and purpose with which the creators of Old French prose historiography worked.

Anyone familiar with the development of Old French historiography will notice one notable omission in my selection of texts: the Crusading chronicles by Villehardouin, Robert de Clari, and Henri de Valenciennes. Like the works I have chosen to discuss, these chronicles are among the earliest works of prose history, emanate from the same northern French region that gives us so many of the first vernacular prose histories, and discuss the crusading activities of the same group of northern and Flemish lords among whom the patronage of vernacular historiography was so marked. Hence, they would seem likely candidates for inclusion in a study of this sort. My reasons for omitting them are twofold. First, the chronicles of the Crusade are well known and much written about, in contrast to the works analyzed here, which, with the exception of the Faits des Romains and Jean de Thuin's Hystore de Jules CC)sar , have never been the object of interpretive studyb this despite the existence of a large body of secondary literature on the manuscript traditions of various works, and in the case of the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle , the publication of almost

all variant versions. Second and more important, my concern in this work is to investigate the place and function of vernacular prose historiography in the life of the French aristocracy, as it attempted to deal with the consequences of rapid and far-reaching social changes taking place in France. Although equally works of prose, the chronicles of the Crusade direct their narratives to an account of deeds performed in distant lands and of an almost exclusively military character. They therefore seemed to me less promising material for my principal interests than texts more closely focused on France, its past history, and contemporary conflicts.

Because my overarching purpose is to demonstrate the ways in which vernacular historiography encodes the historical experiences of contemporaries, albeit via a displacement to the past, my study of the chronicles is preceded by a detailed discussion of the social and political situation of France at the beginning of the thirteenth century. I have not been content merely to invoke secular changes, such as the decline of the aristocracy, the nobility's growing economic impoverishment, and so forth, but have tried to describe with relative exactness the historical experiences of a small group of known patrons for the texts in question. Chapter 1, therefore, sets forth in a traditional historical mode an account of the economic, political, military, and dynastic events that shaped the experiences of those for whom vernacular chronicles were composed. Succeeding chapters are devoted to close readings of the texts that form the object of this study. Thus, in chapter 1 and periodically thereafter, I speak in the historian's voice. For the remainder of the book, I adopt the language of literary criticism. The result is notable shifts in tone, style, and methods as the book moves between historical and literary sections, that is, from context to text and text to context.

To a large extent, the contrast in voice and analytical approach between the historical discussion of chapter 1 and the literary discussions of the following chapters was unavoidable, given my commitment to examining both texts and their contexts in ways appropriate to each. The difficulty in treating both historical context and literary text in a single works stems, I believe, from a series of unrecognized incommensurabilities between the objects, tasks, and goals facing historians and literary scholars. Literary text and historical context are not the same thing. Whereas the text is an objective given, an existing artifact (in its material existence, if not in its constitution as a specifically "literary" work), the object of historical study must be constructed by the historian before its meaning can begin to be disen-

gaged. As a consequence, the historian of texts is a "writer" in his or her function of composing the historical narrative, but a "reader" of the already materially extant text. The task facing the one is broadly constructive, the other broadly deconstructive, and it is not hard to understand why few literary critics or historians of texts have given equal attention to both undertakings.

My book does attempt to do both history and literature. Like any work located on the margins of two fields, it straddles the gap between them and, inevitably, treats each with less thoroughness and complexity than a book more narrowly trained on one or the other. But historiography itself has always fallen between these two stools. The defects of the genre offer at the same time its opportunities. I hope this book will demonstrate in a small way the benefits of a more interdisciplinary and complex analysis of textual production in the Middle Ages than has hitherto been undertaken.

My focus in this book is on what might be called the social logic of the texts, in the dual sense of their relation to their site of articulationb the social space they occupy, both as products of a particular social world and as agents at work in that worldb and to their discursive character as articulated "logos," that is, as literary artifacts composed of language and thus requiring literary (formal) analysis. The critical stance I employ begins with the premise, already well stated by Mikhail Bakhtin, that "form and content in discourse are one, once we understand that verbal discourse is a social phenomenonb social throughout its entire range and in each and every of its factors, from the sound image to the furthest reaches of abstract meaning."6 I therefore assume that particular instances of language use or textuality incorporate social as well as linguistic structures and that the aesthetic character of a work is intimately relatedb either positively or negativelyb to the social character of the environment from which it emerges. Inextricably associated within these histories is a wide range of social and discursive practices, of material and linguistic realities that are interwoven into the fabric of the text, whose analysis as a determinate historical artifact in turn grants us access to the past.

My emphasis on the text's social site stems from my belief that the power and meaning of any given set of representations derive in large part from the social context in which they are elaborated. In that sense, the meaning of a particular text is essentially relational, not stable or inherent in the text itself; it emerges only when the text is situated within a local environment of social and political networks that it seeks to shape and that are being organized around it. Even if

we accept the poststructuralist argument that language constitutes the social world of meaning, it remains equally true that "language itself acquires meaning and authority only within specific social and historical settings. While linguistic differences structure society, social differences structure language."7 Texts, as material embodiments of situated language use, reflect in their very materiality the inseparability of material and discursive practices and the need to preserve a sense of their mutual implication and interdependence in the production of meaning.

At work in molding a literary text is a host of unstated desires, beliefs, understandings, and interests that arise from pressures that are social as well as literary and that impress themselves upon the work, sometimes consciously, sometimes not. All texts occupy determinate social spaces, both as products of the social world of authors and as textual agents at work in that world, with which they entertain often complex and contestatory relations. Texts both mirror and generate social realities, are constituted by and constitute social and discursive formations, which they may sustain, resist, contest, or seek to transform depending on the individual case. It is this kind of relational reading of text and context, of overt and suppressed meaning, of implied and articulated purposes, together with the variety of literary and discursive modes in which they are given voice, that I have attempted to offer here and which I believe we need to pursue if we are to achieve a genuinely historical understanding of textual production.

It is important to stress the possibly "negative" relation of a text to its context, for it reminds us that, however powerfully the social experiences of the French aristocracy shaped the goals and methods of vernacular historiography, the resulting texts in no way transparently reflect those experiences. On the contrary, like all literary works, these histories are the site of multiple, often contradictory historical realities that may be either present or absent in the works and in both capacities are constitutive of their form and inscribed meaning. Indeed, rather than incorporating and reflecting current social and political realities, I would argue that the rise of prose historiography in thirteenth-century France sought to deny and mask the consequences of recent transformations in the political power and social status of the aristocracy that patronized it. It is precisely this attempt to mantle adverse historical change beneath the calm and deproblematized surface of prose narrative that alerts us to the social function of prose historiography in thirteenth-century France, even as it seeks to disavow the very changes from which it is born.

Excerpted from Romancing the Pastby Gabrielle M. Spiegel Copyright © 1995 by Gabrielle M. Spiegel. Excerpted by permission.
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