Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics, 23, Band 23) - Softcover

Spiegel, Gabrielle M. M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520089359 ISBN 13: 9780520089358

Verlag: University of California Press, 1995

Inhaltsangabe

In a poststructuralist study of thirteenth-century French historical texts, Gabrielle Spiegel investigates the reasons for the rise of French vernacular prose historiography at this particular time. She argues that the vernacular prose histories that have until now been regarded as royalist were actually products of the aristocracy, reflecting its anxiety as it faced social and economic change and political threats from the monarchy.

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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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"Reading Spiegel's book is like seeing the scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle of history and literature suddenly assembled in a dazzling new image, a picture that could not have been made without the master piece, the manuscript that Professor Spiegel was the first person in almost 800 years to read and interpret. Her effort is a tour de force of no mean proportion."—Stephen G. Nichols Jr., author of Romanesque Signs

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"Reading Spiegel's book is like seeing the scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle of history and literature suddenly assembled in a dazzling new image, a picture that could not have been made without the master piece, the manuscript that Professor Spiegel was the first person in almost 800 years to read and interpret. Her effort is a tour de force of no mean proportion."Stephen G. Nichols Jr., author of Romanesque Signs

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Romancing the Past

The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century FranceBy Gabrielle M. Spiegel

University of California Press

Copyright © 1995 Gabrielle M. Spiegel
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520089358
Introduction

"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

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1995
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520089359
• ISBN 13: 9780520089358
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 440
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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