History Books in the Anglo-Norman World Conference
This conference brought together scholars from a range of disciplinary perspectives to explore the manuscripts in which history was recorded in the Anglo-Norman world. The papers examined the creation, transmission and reception of some well-known and lesser-known histories.
Stephen Church (University of East Anglia), King John’s Books.
The paper was entitled ‘John’s Books’ and examined the contents of a writ of quittance that was issued by the Chamber Clerk, Richard Marsh, to the abbot of Reading and his sacrist who had delivered to King John a series of books that the king had ordered to be brought to him. These books have been variously described by previous authorities as ‘scholastic texts’ or a ‘selected theological library, but they have done so without seriously considering the contents of the books concerned. Church showed that the texts were gathered together for a specific purpose, which was to enable the king and his advisers to assess the impact of the withdrawal of the sacraments from John’s subjects. Hugh of St-Victor’s On the Sacraments of the Faith and Peter Lombard’s Sentences were the key theological textbooks of the age on the sacraments. But John went further than consulting the textbooks. He also demanded copies of the authoritative texts on which the authors had based their own judgements about the sacraments. These works: Augustine of Hippo’s City of God, his Exposition on the Psalms, and his Letters; and Origen’s Treatise on the Hexateuch were the foundation stones of twelfth-century thinking on the sacraments, so these, too, were consulted. Church showed that at King John’s court there was in March 1208 a corpus of sophisticated works which would have enabled the king and his advisers to properly assess the impact of the Interdict.
Kathryn Gerry (Memphis College of Art), Artists, Abbots and Saints: Visual and Material Approaches to Cult at St Albans Abbey in the Long Twelfth Century.
Although the twelfth-century reliquary of St Alban has long since disappeared, the records of the abbey provide us with tantalizing glimpses not only of the rich appearance of this work of art, but also of the reasons for both its construction and the many ensuing delays in that construction. Reading between the lines of this account, a complex picture emerges of abbatial patronage and its ramifications, showing us the immediate consequences that decisions might have for the abbots themselves, as well as the ways in which those decisions would be interpreted and used by later historians of the monastery. Through the lens of the Gesta Abbatum Monasterii Sancti Albani, the main medieval textual record for the abbey, this essay assesses abbatial patronage of the visual arts at St Albans Abbey during the reign of the first three Norman abbots, Paul, Richard, and Geoffrey, at a time when the foundations were laid for the notable artistic output of this institution throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. As a monastery that had managed to retain – if not increase – its wealth and prestige in the transition between the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman periods, St Albans provides us with a rich record of artistic and architectural production. Also noteworthy, during the period in question, the monastic community was seeking to establish cult activity for several potential saints in addition to their patron saint, enabling us to consider how different cult-related projects were handled within a single institution as they sought to deal with the physical remains of the abbey’s past.
Jane Gilbert (University College London), Translating History: British Library, Royal MS 20 A ii.
London BL MS Royal 20 A ii is dedicated mainly to Pierre de Langtoft's Chronicle, copied in the early fourteenth century. This multilingual text is of interest in its own right for its treatment of the British past and of Edward I's Scottish and French wars, but this manuscript added to it over the remainder of the fourteenth century two pictorial cycles of quite different styles and a variety of French, Anglo-Norman and English texts, including an extract from the prose Lancelot and another from the Queste del saint Graal.
This essay interrogates the combination of texts and pictures, and examines what notions of insular history would have presented themselves to readers at different stages of the manuscript's production. Informed by the findings of the AHRC-funded Medieval Francophone Literary Culture Outside France, this essay is especially interested in the freight borne by writing in French, by its translation into different languages and different media, and by the resistance to such translation.
Anne Lawrence-Mathers (University of Reading), Computus, Chronology and the Calculation of Time in English Twelfth-Century Chronicles.
This paper examined the growing concern amongst computists and historians in the late 11th and early 12th centuries as they grappled with what turned out to be an insoluble problem. The issue was that the data provided by the gospels as to the dating of the first Easter was, as Bede had already suggested, impossible to match with the information included in the Easter Tables of Dionysius Exiguus, upon which the Church calendar and the dating of major festivals were based. Several scholars attempted to find solutions to the problem, and one of the most influential was that propounded by Marianus Scotus, a computist and chronologer who wrote in Mainz in the late eleventh century. Marianus' work was brought to England by another skilled computist, Robert, bishop of Hereford, who believed so strongly in Marianus' solution to this 'scandal' that he compiled a forceful exposition of its key points. This was known and studied in several English centres; yet, apart from John of Worcester, no chronicler in England or Normandy adopted Marianus' redating of the Christian era, and the problem was left to computists.
Diarmuid O Riain (University of Vienna), Marginally Wrong: The Canterbury Tale Behind the Confusion of Two Irish Saints in Marsh’s Library MS Z 3.1.5.
Laura Pani (University of Udine), Paul the Deacon’s Historia Langobardum in Anglo-Norman England.
Approximately 115 codices or fragments of Paul the Deacon’s Historia Langobardorum are currently known, dating from the early 9th century to the end of the Middle Ages.
According to the only complete edition of the text, that was published in 1878 for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, the most numerous family of witnesses, tagged with letter D, includes nearly 20 manuscripts or fragments, whose majority date to the 11th and 12th centuries and come from France – in particular from Normandy – and from England.
In my paper I discuss a group of these manuscripts which originated in – or come from – Benedictine abbeys of Norman England. They are in strict textual relationships among themselves and with codices from Norman-French abbeys. It is therefore possible to highlight entire sequences of antigraphs and apographs, and clarify the ways and times in which the Historia Langobardorum spread in England after the Norman Conquest.
Finally, since most of these manuscripts do not contain only Paul the Deacon’s work, but also other historical or not-historical (e.g. the Physiologus in ms. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud. Misc. 247) texts, I try some considerations on the interest of Norman ecclesiastical houses towards the Historia Langobardorum.
Benjamin Pohl (Ghent University/University of Bristol), An Illustrated Chronicle from Early Eleventh-Century Normandy: Dudo of St. Quentin’s Historia Normannorum.
A version of this paper has been published in Anglo-Norman Studies (2015).
Charlie Rozier (Durham University), Durham Cathedral Priory and its Library of History, c.1090-c.1130.
A wide selection of manuscripts housing historical narratives, shorter chronicles, annals and Lives of saints alongside dateable book-list evidence, combines to suggest that monastic scholars at the cathedral priory of Durham built up a complex corpus of historiographical resources in the Anglo-Norman period. Although noted by modern scholars (Offler, 1958; Dumville, 1987; Rollason, 1998) the precise causes of this historiographical turn remain open to further exploration.
This paper aims to explore some of the reasons why the first generation of monastic scholars acquired history books at Durham, c.1090 and c.1130. It consists of the following sections:
- Reconstructing Durham’s corpus of history books c.1090-1130, using manuscript and book-list evidence.
- Commentary on the development of Durham’s historical studies in this period:
- 2.1: What aspects of the past were of interest?
- 2.2: What were the forms of history-writing? (e.g.: annals, Latin narratives, hagiography, etc.)
- Two case-studies on uses of the past for at Durham:
- 3.1: Local and institutional history: promoting the cult of St Cuthbert.
- 3.2: History, computus and the study of time.
Gleb Schmidt (University College, Saint Petersburg), The Circulation of Manuscripts Containing Excerptum Roberti Herefordensis de Chronica Mariani Scotti in the Anglo-Norman World.
This essay considers the circulation of manuscripts containing Excerptum Roberti Herefordensis de Chronica Mariani Scotti of Robert, bishop of Hereford (1079–1095). This treatise is an abstract of Marianus Scottus’ chronological theory. The great popularity of Irish monk’s work has made Excerptum Roberti widespread amongst the intellectuals of the mid twelfth century. There are nine known manuscripts preserving Excerptum Robert. Eight of them are kept in the libraries of the United Kingdom, one is stored in National Library of Russia in Saint-Petersburg. The aim of this essay is to reveal the connections between the codices. The analysis of all copies leads to the conclusion that the tradition of Excerptum Roberti is divided into two branches. The first includes the manuscripts in which copy of Bishop Robert’s writing contains well-known fragment about Domesday survey; the other group lacks this passage. The mention of Domesday book could appear for the first time in the copy created in Worcester, where the work by Robert was transmitted owing to the friendship of Robert of Hereford and Wulfstan of Worcester. The manuscript from Saint-Petersburg is one of particular interest. It was written after 1131 in Normandy. Seemingly, the appearance of this manuscript is connected with the activity of Orderic Vitalis and his contacts with William of Malmesbury, who knew the treatise of Robert as well and created his own collection of texts on chronology. Thus, the paper sheds new light on the circulation of historical works and calendar treatises in mid-twelfth-century England.
Diarmuid Scully (University College Cork), The Vision of History in a Manuscript of Gerald of Wales’ Topographia Hibernica and Expugnatio Hibernica (National Library of Ireland, MS 700).
MS 700, NLI, Dublin (c 1200) contains the illuminated texts of Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hibernica and Expugnatio Hibernica, separated by a map depicting Britain, Ireland, their adjacent islands and continental Europe. Gerald was a leading advocate of the late twelfth-century English conquest and colonisation of Ireland, in which his extended family played a central role. This paper argues that MS 700, viewed in totality, presents a highly politicised and powerful vision of Irish and archipelagic history, inspired by its makers’ engagement with Gerald’s texts. The paper suggests that MS 700’s marginal illustrations of Ireland’s wonders, barbarous inhabitants and their conquerors, along with the map, support Gerald’s vision of a providential English imperium bringing civilisation and true Christianity to Ireland. For Gerald and MS 700, this English imperium was inherited from the ancient Britons and Rome and was destined to rule the entire British-Irish archipelago.
Laura Slater (University of York), Picturing the Past in Matthew Paris’ Vie de Seint Auban.
This paper first explores visual anachronism in one of the most important illustrated Anglo-Norman histories in Trinity College Library. Matthew Paris’ Vie de Seint Auban (Dublin, Trinity College MS 177) starts in an era of apostolic and missionary early Christianity, and ends with an imagined ‘golden age’ of English kingship exemplified by King Offa. Yet it looks broadly the same throughout: Roman tyrants sit enthroned in Anglo-Norman palaces, while early Christian martyrs stand before mounted knights dressed in chainmail.
I consider how and why Matthew presented the past in this ‘present-day’ form, and the contemporary concerns to which his history responded: issues such as the crusade and Islamic threats to Christendom, the education of aristocratic young and the careers of noble widows within their families. Discussing MS 177’s images of St Genevieve, I then suggest that Matthew used this section of his historical narrative to promote the custom of formal vows of chastity by secular widows. He sought to present a moral exemplum of great intended relevance to his network of female readers, stressing the role played by the saint’s parents and Genevieve’s continued career in the secular world.
Michael Staunton (University College Dublin), Did the Purpose of English History Change During the Twelfth Century?
Most medieval historians said that they wrote to teach their readers and listeners edifying lessons, to lead them towards good examples and away from bad. Modern scholars have also paid much attention to how medieval historiography could serve the needs of certain interests, whether religious houses, dynasties or individuals. This essay suggests that these two imperatives – the didactic, and the socio-political – lost much of their relevance to historical writing in England over the course of the twelfth century. By examining contemporary writers’ reflections on the purpose of history, and how such statements matched their actual approaches to history, it is argued that a change in the kind of people who wrote history, along with changes to the nature of political power, resulted in a different kind of history. At the end of the twelfth century historians were motivated by quite different factors than those that prevailed at the start of the century, motivations much closer to those of modern historians than is often recognised.
Jaakko Tahkokallio (King’s College London), The Twelfth-Century Audience of William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon and Geoffrey of Monmouth in the Light of the Codicological Evidence.
Caoimhe Whelan (Trinity College Dublin), A New Version of an Old Story: Reading the Past in Late Medieval Ireland.
The Expugnatio Hibernica (the Invasion of Ireland) written by Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century is a historical text which presents readers with a biased, authoritative version of the twelfth-century Norman invasion of Ireland from a distinctively colonial perspective. The extant medieval manuscripts of this text in Latin, English and Irish which can be localised to Ireland attest to the importance of this narrative as the most important source for the early history of the colony. Continued copying and translation of this text in the late medieval and early modern period underlines the continued importance of Giraldus’s account, demonstrating the interest in the past with specific focus on the history of the colony in Ireland and its connection to England.
This paper attempted to explain the continued interest in Giraldus’s twelfth-century text in the late middle ages and explored some late renditions of the translation and transformation of the history undertaken in medieval Ireland, a colonial sphere situated at the periphery of the English world. Providing a close examination of some of the manuscripts of this corpus and paying attention to reader marginalia and geographic situation, it offers important evidence for revealing how the past was read in the histories disseminated in late medieval colonial Ireland.
Andrea Worm (University of Graz), England’s Place Within Salvation History in a Thirteenth-Century Copy of Peter of Poitiers’ Compendium historiae (British Library, Cotton MS Faustina B VII).
The twelfth century saw an unparalleled systematisation of knowledge, characterised by an increasing use of visual concepts. The rise of a genealogical and diagrammatic mode for the visualisation of complex information also affected the way in which history was represented. Peter of Poitiers (c. 1130–1205) was first in conceiving history in diagrammatic form in his Compendium Historiae in Genealogia Christi. In its original form, the Compendium Historiae was designed as a survey of biblical history, but soon the historical lines were expanded into the history of the present day.
An English early thirteenth-century manuscript in London (British Library, Cotton Faustina B VII) is of extraordinary importance for the genre of genealogically structured history diagrams. It is datable to 1213, surely before 1215, and provides a survey of universal history from the creation of man to the time the manuscript was made. This manuscript offers a very specifically English view on salvation history in how it situates English history within the greater context of the history of salvation. The way that is done is as unusual as it is complex, and one of the questions raised by this manuscript and the way it visualises the past is why we observe this particular mode of self-fashioning at this point in time, the early thirteenth century.
Mark Zumbuhl, TCD 515 as a Textbook – Highlighting History in Post-Conquest Wales.
The final Plantagenet conquest of Wales in the 13th Century was the spur to a phase of Welsh historical book production. Several of these manuscripts compiled World, Trojan and British histories and genealogies to provide an overview of the 'Welsh Story' from ancient times right down to the new period of domination by England. In these books we can see a process of reaction to and accommodation with new political realities. TCD 515 is one such manuscript; and though not as comprehensive or sophisticated as similar works such as Exeter Cathedral Library 3514 it still provides a very interesting take on British history. This paper considers the historical context of the production of these manuscripts and then goes on to consider in more detail how readers of the late 13th and early 14th centuries used this book: what the varied glossing tells us about reader’s interests; and the particular sections which have been highlighted by manicles drawn by at least two users of the book. We see that the production of these compilations was not merely an antiquarian exercise but a dynamic and ongoing process, and that 515 was read and used by readers with differing historical, linguistic and literary interests.