SOURCE: Ward, John O. “The Monastic Historiographical Impulse c. 1000-1260. A Re-Assessment.” In Historia: The Concept and Genres in the Middle Ages, edited by Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen and Päivi Mehtonen, pp. 71-100. Helsinki, Finland: Societas Scientiarum Fennica/Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters, 2000.

[In the following essay, Ward discusses secular influences on monastic historiography.]

THE IMPORTANCE OF MONASTIC HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE PERIOD

Historical studies had deserted the cathedral chapters because, especially around the year 1000, they had found in the monasteries, their “foyer de prédilection”. […] The Benedictine atmosphere was very favourable to the study of history. By contrast, Cluniac spirituality scarcely encouraged it […] It is traditional no note, from the thirteenth century on, the ‘essoufflement’ of monastic historiography.¹

Recent publications in the field of English medieval historiography² and the general interest of the assertions implicit in the above paragraph have prompted the remarks offered in the following paper.³ My aim is to set out current opinion on the subject of the primarily monastic inspiration of medieval historiography and then to suggest some modification of this view of things, based on our growing understanding of the currents of literary humanism during the so-called Twelfth-century Renaissance.⁴ Behind the investigation lies a natural interest in the origins of western historiographical patterns and the lurking phenomenon of the “postmodern”.⁵

In connection with some work carried out recently by myself and John Scott on Manuscript Auxerre Bibliothèque de la Ville 227 (containing the so-called Vézelay Chronicle of the Benedictine monk Hugh of Poitiers), I expressed in the introduction the view that history-writing was peculiarly important to monks. Monasteries, I argued, were

[…] essentially historical institutions whose privileges were rooted in past time, manifested at various points in subsequent times, and destined to ensure their inmates and possibly also the world that benefited from their profession, a future beyond time. […] The fragile status of monks in society [however] could be maintained only by constant conservation and evocation of past charters, acts of donors and precedents establishing privileges. Being “cut off” [as it were] from the world by their profession, monks found it more difficult to maintain social contacts and the day-to-day visibility and respectability that could alone ensure tranquil possession of rights and land in the medieval context. To be sure, the most successful monks and monasteries abandoned the possibility of remote isolation for just such contacts, but even so the tension between the monastic profession and the social basis of power and privilege in the period presented monasteries with an impasse they sought to resolve by an assiduous cultivation of history, and historical authority or precedent.⁶

Three points are relevant here. In the first place, monasticism was a peculiarly time-bound institution more acutely dependent upon the maintenance of sharply accented historiography than other institutions were. One is reminded here of Chris Wickham's point that although the tenth- and eleventh-century Italian lawyers whose sense of time, history and memory he was exploring had plenty of interest in the maintenance of property claims, and although—as he points out, “[h]istorical memory is, in general, functional; the past is remembered in order to legitimate activity in the present”—the sense of history on the part of these lawyers, was nevertheless ill-developed, “the past was not symbolic to [these] lawyers, so it was forgotten”.⁷ The monks were different. The past was essential to them, essential to their present, essential to their hopes for the future and to the the hopes of the society they served.

This has been put well by Elizabeth Freeman:

Another way in which “history” in a broad sense was integral to the monastic day was in the historical or literal approach to exegesis, which all monks knew as the first step of exploring a Biblical passage. There was also the strictly liturgical meaning of the term: “history”, referring to the narrative antiphons and responsories used in the office on a saint's feast. And, of course, the liturgy itself was a cycle of repetition and reverence for the past. We can see then that monastic audiences appreciated the didactic and spiritual relevance of a variety of “histories”, histories that always existed within a strongly devotional context. It is important then that one situates monastic historiography firmly within the monks' continual quest for God through the written and heard word.⁸

“This commitment to temporality and to the events of mundane times”, Freeman adds in a note, “proceeds from the Christian commitment to the Incarnation and Christ's consequent participation in history”.

Secondly, we need to recall that monks could not defend their land titles and claims as directly as could secular powers. That is to say, they could not engage in violence and a programme of aggressive property-acquisition such as that pursued by the Angevin dukes in the eleventh century, and related in a memorable way by R. W. Southern in his celebrated 1953 textbook.⁹ They needed other tools, and historiography was an essential—but by no means the only¹⁰—element in their toolkit. At Saint-Wandrille, for instance, a manuscript “uses history to define the monastery”¹¹ and the example is but one of many that could be cited.¹²

In the third place, we must not forget that the monastery, unlike the society outside the monastic enclosure, was a peculiarly fixed and self-sufficient world. As such, its past and its future were at least as important as, and possibly more important than, its present. For Guenée

[…] the monks have little taste for the saeculum; they are intellectuals of the scriptorium and they put all their effort into reconstructing the past. They do this with the books and archives of their own library or those of neighbouring libraries. Monastic history is bookish history.¹³

Those who laboured in the world outside the monastery, the world of novelty, competition and change, lived in an environment in which the present was far more important than either the past or the future. Such an environment of “fragmentation and divergence”—the phase is Bisson's—‘inhibited the production of finished or ‘official’ works [of history]”.¹⁴ At the least, as Guenée stresses, the secular clerical historiography of the twelfth-century and post-twelfth-century world “had to adapt to the needs of its public, to respond to the tastes of its patrons, to bend to the appetites of fashion”.¹⁵ Today, when those tendencies first brought under literary scrutiny in the twelfth century are now manifested everywhere, we inhabit just such a world: the past and the future are irrelevant—despite the pleas of the environmental activists and those like them. The present is all that matters.

Nowhere was the role to be played by historiography more shrill than among the twelfth-century Cistercians, as Elizabeth Freeman has shown recently,¹⁶ and despite the disclaimers of some.¹⁷ Hugh of Kirkstall's Narratio de fundatione fontanis monasterii in comitatu eboracensi (1205-1226) evinces

[…] a particular Cistercian concern—that historiography should demonstrate the propriety and authority of the Order's genesis and monastic customs in response to the interminable criticisms from black Benedictines.

And, we may add, from the seculars.¹⁸

In other words, we would have difficulty dissenting from Leclercq's 1957 statement that the monks loved history very much. “More than any other writers, they concentrated on it, and sometimes they were almost the only ones to do so”.¹⁹ Galbraith himself advises us

[…] to think of history in the Middle Ages as an occasional by-product of monasticism, written by men striving against the oblivion of time to preserve kinship and continuity with the great, almost mythical days of imperial Rome and the Caesars […] The men who wrote our medieval history […] from the time of Bede till the twelfth century […] were nearly all monks, and if then the circle widened to include some better known names from the ranks of the seculars, men like John of Salisbury and Roger Howden, the greater part of historical writing was still done in the cloister […] The curve [of the history of historiography in the middle ages], in fact, follows the fortunes of monasticism, the chief source and standby of written history for nearly a thousand years.²⁰

It would not be difficult to find echoes of these views in the literature.²¹ Indeed, Ludo J. R. Milis in his Angelic Monks and Earthly Men questions

[…] the extent to which the overwhelmingly monastic origin of primary sources [in general!] can lead us to overemphasise the impact of monasticism, or the degree to which such a view [of the ubiquity of monasticism in medieval society] tends to be further enhanced by the Benedictine historiographical tradition which has been so dominant since the seventeenth century.²²

A final illustration should clinch this matter, if indeed it needs clinching. Antonia Gransden in the 1974 first volume of her Historical Writing in England c. 550 to c. 1307 included as Appendix D a “Chronological index of the principal literary sources for English history to c. 1307”. Down to the year 1216, some 101 sources are listed.²³ Of these a bare 15 are non-monastic. The monastic contribution therefore amounts to 86٪ of the total.²⁴

Nevertheless, the place of the major twelfth-century “secular” historians—William of Tyre, Otto of Freising,²⁵ Henry of Huntingdon for example—and even minor, notarial historians such as Galbert of Bruges,²⁶ or major seculars who strayed occasionally but notoriously into historical writing, such as John of Salisbury,²⁷ prompts a new look into the nature of monastic historiography, and into the ways in which it may be said to differ from “secular” historiography—if indeed it does so differ. Is it true, in fact, that monastic historiography—and in particular Benedictine monastic historiography—is the greatest manifestation of the historical urge in medieval times? And if it is true, is secular historiography a pale imitation, or does it manifest distinct characteristics in its own right? Is the latter, perhaps, the arena for all that is innovative and anticipatory of our own modern emphases?²⁸ Is it the site for what some have called, the “shift from eloquent to erudite historiography”, from “rhetoric” to “scholarship”²⁹ or from “authorship” to “compilation” for example?³⁰ Was historiography something that, like sainthood,³¹ passed from monastic to secular aegis as the middle ages wore on? Restricting myself to northern France, England and to a lesser extent Germany,³² and to the period of the so-called Twelfth-century Renaissance, when the historiographical urge was at its peak,³³ I hope to shake the subject out a little and to provide, if not the reassessment promised in my title, at least a fresh look.

THE NATURE OF MONASTIC HISTORIOGRAPHY

First of all, some cautionary remarks. The distinction between specifically “monastic” and “secular” historiography is not often commented upon.³⁴ Some authors are content to contrast “clerical” and “secular”,³⁵ others never discuss the point because all their examples are, in fact, monastic,³⁶ whilst others admit that the “distinction between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ historians is far from clear”.³⁷ Influences, traditions and habits mingle and cross over, for a start. Thus Henry of Huntingdon, a secular archdeacon, uses all but eight of the 140 chapters of the monk Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica,³⁸ and includes a whole book of hagiographic miracles, citing for most of them the auctoritas firmissima of the same Bede;³⁹ Henry's own insertion of a battle speech into his account of the “Battle of the Standard”, in its turn becomes basic for Ailred of Rievaulx's version of the same battle.⁴⁰ Matthew Paris—says Gransden—may have derived his “practice of summarising people's characters […] from Henry of Huntingdon”, his “use of signs” (for cross-reference) from Ralph Diceto.⁴¹ Hugh of St. Victor was a strong influence for the seculars John of Salisbury and Ralph Diceto.⁴² Both Henry, a secular, and William of Malmesbury, a monk, use a secular author such as Lucan.⁴³ The secular John of Salisbury “continues” a monastic world chronicle (initiated by Sigebert of Gembloux⁴⁴), a monk—William of Malmesbury—writes a history of English bishops (Gesta pontificum—many of whom, of course, are monastic saints and abbots). Interest in such “external” matters as “cities, and urban life” and the administration of the kingdom characterise both the religious and the seculars,⁴⁵ monks did not lead the cloistered life that many expect of them,⁴⁶ some figures straddled both worlds (Nennius, Alcuin, Einhard, Asser, Otto of Freising for example), both monastic and secular historians lay claim to being “compilers” or “excerptors”,⁴⁷ not all world chronicles are monastic,⁴⁸ and some monastic historians (such as Guibert of Nogent) seem so fascinated by and saturated with the ideological world of the milites⁴⁹ as to deny them the possibility of expressing a different world-view or responding to a distinctively non-worldly historiographical impulse. So closely linked, indeed, were the different branches of aristocratic families in our period that it might well be asked whether both monastic and secular clerical historians do not reflect simply the prevailing aristocratic mores of the day.⁵⁰ Other problems are more technical: “when is a monk not a monk” it could be asked, and the answer would be “when he was an Austin canon”⁵¹ or “when he was attached to an English cathedral”.⁵²

Nevertheless, Guenée in the passage cited at the beginning of the present paper has essayed a characterisation of specifically “monastic historiography”:⁵³ from the year 1000 onwards, historical studies moved from the episcopal to the monastic environment, especially the Benedictine monastic environment.⁵⁴ According to Guenée, in the thirteenth century monastic historiography underwent an “essoufflement”, which I take to mean that it “ran out of breath”. Monastic historiography was tied to the activity of the scriptorium. Historians were not “failures”⁵⁵ but “intellectuals of talent and sometimes even competent administrators”. They seem to have been on the whole librarians, guardians of relics and archives, in charge of music and the chant, sacrists or officials of the scriptorium. They were, more than was common, their own scribes.⁵⁶ Their historiography is marked by these features:

1. It is “collective”, that is, it is both compilatory and the product of teamwork. It is the “travail d'atelier”.⁵⁷
2. It is (as already observed) “bookish”. It does not spring from a realistic engagement with the present.⁵⁸
3. It is obsessed with chronology.
4. It is markedly monastic; that is, it is secondary to the liturgical and worshipping functions of the monastery and is written primarily for other monks, particularly monks of the monastery in question: “the aim is to provide texts for monastic lectio”.⁵⁹
5. It is hagiographic in terms of (moral) function, audience and authorship: the penalty for Orderic Vitalis's relative abandonment of the harmony between history and hagiography was the withdrawal of a (monastic) audience.

To the above characterization, we may add from general consensus:

1. “The ‘religious’ historians were far less influenced than the seculars by romance literature and courtly satire”.⁶⁰ Hence the well-known opposition of William of Newburgh and William of Malmesbury to Geoffrey of Monmouth's work.⁶¹

Such a picture is a starting point. That generalisation is risky can be demonstrated by looking at Guenée's view that the Cluniacs did not share their Benedictine brethren's passion for history.⁶² Although Iogna-Prat does raise the question of Ralph Glaber's specifically “Cluniac” historiographical mentality,⁶³ his insightful paper written with E. Ortigues should put beyond question the acute and comprehensive historical sense shared by at least one “Cluniac historian”.⁶⁴ Indeed, while it is probably true that the Cluniacs led the eleventh-century monastic “longing for activity in the world outside the monastery's confines”—to quote Phyllis Jestice—for “greater accommodation to the social realities of the eleventh century”⁶⁵, too strong a contrast between reformist and Benedictine monk in the eleventh century is probably unwise. Jestice herself stresses the variety of monastic situations, and emphasises the continuity between tenth and eleventh-century monastic reform, and ninth-century (Benedictine) Anianian monasticism, against the view of “an embattled Benedictine world, fighting and losing the battle against young monasteries that conformed more closely to the Benedictine Rule than did their predecessors”.⁶⁶ If there was a contrast between the historiography of the two orders, it was perhaps a matter of an emphasis upon originalia, versus a (Benedictine) stress on the evolving traditions of a long past.⁶⁷

Indeed, while some Benedictine historiographical efforts were decidedly bent in favour of specific monastic pasts,⁶⁸ it is a feature insufficiently stressed by Guenée that Benedictine historiography came closest to being an official nation historiography, at least in France (St.Denis), England (William of Malmesbury, St.Albans)⁶⁹ and even Spain (Aragon). This had little to do with the rank or status of the historians themselves, for, as Guenée has pointed out so vividly, medieval historians were not to be found in high places around the land (though Otto of Freising, Suger of St.Denis, William of Tyre and perhaps the Genoese communal historian Caffaro di Rustico [c. 1080-1166⁷⁰] are interesting exceptions) but in the monastic scriptoria, the offices of functionaries and administrators, in the libraries of the antiquaries.⁷¹ Nor can it be ascribed to the mere existence of Graeco-Roman historiographical exempla—as Leclercq argues⁷²—or to the passion monks could easily develop for the savour of classicising Latin as the major language of discourse,⁷³ or even to “the conservative tendency which is congenital, so to speak, in monasticism” (Leclercq again⁷⁴). In some cases it is due to an identification between the identity of a monastery and that of the crown itself (Suger and St.Denis), in others to the fact that the monastery was a stable environment from which an intelligent observer with lots of time could look out and imagine a theme of importance much as Gibbon was to do centuries later (though with a pronounced antiquarian slant) and even if the consequence was the loss of a specific monastic audience (Orderic Vitalis). It is important to note that in this respect the monasteries with the most stable roots and traditions were the most blessed (by and large these were Benedictine⁷⁵) and they contrast markedly with secular historiography which, as we have said, had to bend with the local whims of patrons.⁷⁶ If the patron was grand enough, of course, then the sense of the past might well be grand, as is the case with Otto of Freising, whose historiographical interests seem to have been stimulated by his education at Paris, his powerful connections with royal families and the court, the travel opportunities these provided, and by his tenure of the bishopric of Freising, rather than by his position as a Cistercian abbot. His historiographical efforts all considerably postdate his appointment as bishop.

In other cases monasteries could not escape the whirlpools of secular life and this circumstance alone generated intense historiographical activity, for reasons already alluded to. John Scott has discussed⁷⁷ how the responses of Anglo-Saxon monks to the challenge of Norman disdain for their traditions, language and heroes “was a literary recreation of [their way of life] in the form of Saints' lives, cartularies and histories”.⁷⁸ In some cases, as with the Book of Llandaff, it seems that monastic zeal passed over into “elaborate forgery”,⁷⁹ and, at Glastonbury itself, competition for the pilgrim trade, rivalry with competing orders (the Cistercians), or with bishops, and other factors affecting finances, pressured the monks down the same path.⁸⁰ Similar circumstances and textual relicts can be observed among the Abingdon monks, at Westminster, among the monks at Battle Abbey,⁸¹ at Bury St.Edmunds, Canterbury, Ely and elsewhere.⁸² Carefully constructed foundation chronicles, cartularies recording real and invented privileges and endowments, real or forged records establishing immunity from diocesan control, are all found in a variety of manuscripts which record in detail the shrill pretensions of the threatened monks.⁸³

MS Auxerre 227—containing, amongst other things, the Vézelay Chronicle—displays some characteristic features of monastic historiography as defined by Guenée. The so-called “Major Chronicle” itself was commissioned by someone in high places (the abbot⁸⁴) and represented a thorough-going attempt to use relicts of the past (the cartulary) to defend the present position of the monastery in the world around it. This present position was no mere local situation: it was specifically identified by the chronicler with right order in the world, with the pristine liberty of the church.⁸⁵ Vézelay was undoubtedly a microcosm of the universe for its leading monks.⁸⁶ The whole assemblage of documents found today in MS Auxerre 227 illustrates well Guenée's description of monastic historiography: it was the product of teamwork, the annals placed at the front of the volume display the monastic obsession with chro-nology,⁸⁷ and the violently polemical tone of much of the “Major Chronicle” suggests that concern for the present which Guenée sees as not uncharacteristic of the monastic view of history.⁸⁸

With this latter characteristic, however, we are beginning to move away from the mainstream of Benedictine historiographical interests (as Guenée himself indicates⁸⁹), and another feature of the Vézelay ensemble takes us even further from the alleged monastic stamp. Guenée asserts that the historiography of the courts and great secular patronage networks displayed a passion for “l'épopée” (epic), for which monastic historians had only mistrust and contempt.⁹⁰ Now the so-called “Brief History of the Counts of Nevers” which was included in the Auxerre manuscript for reasons that cannot be gone into here, is certainly dependent upon incidents and traditions handed down by way of epic or chansons; indeed, the flavour of such episodes is dominant in the short account included in the manuscript.⁹¹ What is more, there are curious points of similarity between episodes in this account told in connection with Augier, bishop of Autun 875-893 (at the time a deacon) and King Charles the Bald (840-877), and anecdotes William of Malmesbury included in his Gesta Regum but told in connection with the Emperor Henry III, his sister (a nun) and “clericus quidam curialis”.⁹² Similarly, the Chronicon Novaliciense, written around the early 1050's by the monks expelled from Novalesa by the Arabs, has been described by Wickham as “a fascinating ragbag of a text, full of folktales about kings and monks, including an epitome of (and extracts from) the Latin heroic poem Waltharius”.⁹³ Such interests are not surprising when one considers the role played by monasteries in the recording and diffusion of written copies of famous epics such as the Chanson de Roland.⁹⁴

What are we to make of this monastic interest in the secular epic or chanson? In some senses it is merely a result of the common mentality that clerical and lay aristocrats shared in the medieval period, in others it is a matter of the somewhat indiscriminate approach that monastic historiographers displayed towards the task of the “universal chronicle”. When they were not dealing with matters relating to their own tradition and houses,⁹⁵ monastic historians seem to have eschewed the stronger thematic sense that characterised many of the secular chronicles.

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF THE ARCHDEACONS

Perhaps there is more to it than this, and further perspectives of value to our topic may derive from a consideration of the major challenge to monastic historiography in the period under consideration: the historiography of the archdeacons. If, as Guenée remarks,⁹⁶ “History” deserted the cathedral chapters for the monasteries from c. 1000 a.d. on, we must nevertheless note that the cathedral chapters, in the persons of their major archdeacons, certainly seem to have fought back, at least in the twelfth century. Although there were plenty of seculars dabbling in history-writing who were not archdeacons,⁹⁷ a surprising number were: Geoffrey of Monmouth,⁹⁸ Peter of Blois,⁹⁹ Ralph Diceto,¹⁰⁰ Gerald of Wales,¹⁰¹ and Walter Map,¹⁰² to name the most prominent. Despite the fact that some very fine intellectuals—such as Thierry of Chartres—were archdeacons, we are all familiar with the unlikelihood of an archdeacon reaching salvation;¹⁰³ less dramatically, the archidiaconate “was evidently the halfway position par excellence between clerical and secular status”.¹⁰⁴ Indeed, these “semisecular” clerks were part of what Otter calls ‘a relatively new phenomenon’. According to Otter, they

[…] found themselves from the start in an uncomfortably ambivalent position: clerics, not milites, highly educated yet inferior in formal status to most seculars, they were the victims of envy and sometimes of their own moral misgivings about their distinctly worldly occupations. The new class of curiales, especially at the court of Henry II […] attracted much attention and acerbic comment, especially from those of noble birth fearing that their status in the king's familia might be undermined by people of humbler birth rising to high office by virtue of their talent and training.¹⁰⁵

Despite the classic stand-offs between monks and archdeacons (such as the monastic reaction to Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain¹⁰⁶), one wonders whether such “marginality” was really a distinguishing feature of the “semisecular clerks” such as the archdeacons any more than it was for monks such a Guibert of Nogent¹⁰⁷ or even William of Malmesbury, for whom Thomson has outlined the crisis of conscience that accompanied over-indulgence in books and history-writing.¹⁰⁸ Indeed, as we shall see in a moment, these two monastic historians are closely linked to a feature that may be detected also in the archdeacons, “a pre-occupation which became increasingly widespread and increasingly intense in the next two centuries”: an interest in the occult and the irrational.¹⁰⁹

When we survey the historical writing of these archdeacons, we are impressed by its variety, innovative form and the way it mingles with a much broader literary profile in general. Yet, in areas where archidiaconal historiographical interests overlap, so to speak, with monastic historiographical interests, how do the two compare? Do they emerge as distinct in any way and do any distinctive features relate to any differences that might be expected from their different intellectual and social environments? A specific comparison may help here.

WILLIAM OF MALMESBURY AND HENRY OF HUNTINGDON

We are indeed fortunate that two writers, the one, William of Malmesbury, author of the Deeds of the [Kings of the] English and a notable example of monastic historiography, indeed, “the most commanding figure in the period”,¹¹⁰ and the other, Henry of Huntingdon, “poet, littérateur and historian, author of a History of the English which was to become one of the standard works in the field”, an archdeacon whose “voice is a highly significant one”,¹¹¹ both chose to write comparable national¹¹² histories at about the same time,¹¹³ and without much apparent knowledge of or interest in each other's activities.¹¹⁴ William was a monk par excellence; that is, he was never anything else, and Henry was by common consensus “no monk”:¹¹⁵ he was a married man of good Anglo-Norman landed family, himself an archdeacon, his father an archdeacon, and other members of his family archdeacons (although Henry's father had at one time been a monk of Fécamp, if one who, as almoner, would have had plenty to do with the laity).¹¹⁶ If two men could be expected to reflect peculiarly monastic and peculiarly secular-clerical historiographical outlooks, it is these two.

Both men were highly literate¹¹⁷ and comparison between them could range over many topics and, perhaps, lead to an inconclusive result. I have chosen to perform—in a rough and impressionistic manner¹¹⁸—on their histories what T. F. Carney has called a “content analysis”.¹¹⁹ That is, I have devised a number of topics which seem to constitute the range of matters dealt with by each writer and attempted to measure, in a very approximate manner, how much space within each chronicle has been devoted to each topic. My analysis attempts to cover all topics dealt with and all the space available. Such an approach is not designed to deal with stylistic or rhetorical comparisons, such as the differing use of poetry and confected speeches, or the mastery of the Latin periodic sentence as a mode of narrative complication. These aspects, though intriguing and potentially indicative, must be left aside at the moment.¹²⁰ Briefly, the results of my content comparison are as follows.¹²¹

Henry's thematic guides are intrinsic rather than extrinsic: he allocates less space to prefatory material, which is consonant with the stronger monastic emphasis upon edification,¹²² and the greater interest he displays in the material of history itself is indicative.¹²³ This fits in with his more pronounced emphasis upon the pagani and Vikings (as “plagues”¹²⁴) and the general opinion that Henry has a much tighter and more meaningful pattern or structure for his material than William,¹²⁵ whose approach is less structured and more a matter of “patching up all the gaps”.¹²⁶ It also links up with what Gransden says of two other archdeacons, Gerald of Wales and Walter Map: both were products of the Twelfth-century Renaissance and “they used history mainly to provide ammunition for their arguments”; they displayed “a heightened perception of reality”.¹²⁷ Of Ralph Diceto, also an archdeacon, Gransden says: “Ralph wanted to make wide sweeps of history comprehensive to the reader”.¹²⁸

Henry has more interest in the kind of background descriptions that characterised classical historiography.¹²⁹ For both historians the deeds of kings and rulers dominate, excessively so in William's case.¹³⁰ Both allocate substantial space to ecclesiastical affairs (the second highest category of allocation), though Henry is appreciably less concerned with the church than William.¹³¹ If we contrast topics 6 and 10, we find that whilst Henry is more interested in the grand sweep of Biblical and imperial history, he is better focussed than William in terms of the inclusion of continental material.¹³² This impression is supported, too, by a comparison of the amount of space allocated to crusading history; William is far more interested in this, presumably because of its greater edificatory value, or even because of its potential as a field for heroic historical narrative as such, and in the grand classical manner.¹³³

HISTORIOGRAPHY AND THE OCCULT: FROM “REFERENTIALITY” TO “FICTIONALITY”

One of the most interesting discrepancies concerns the absence of the category “occult, non-hagiographic miracles, marvels and wonders” in Henry and the nearly 5٪ of space allocated to it in William.¹³⁴ Whilst this is consonant with Moore's discussion of Guibert of Nogent, who is found “to anticipate a credulity which became more evident after his time”,¹³⁵ it is also strangely anticipatory of a tendency to be found among the secular clergy, particularly Walter Map (whose De nugis is full of such tales) and Gervase of Tilbury, a secular clerk who wrote his Otia imperialia c. 1214-1218 as a member of the German court of Otto IV: the third divisio of the Otia is devoted to mirabilia of this sort.¹³⁶ It is odd to find two self-confessed failures (Guibert and Walter Map¹³⁷) linked here with a monk who, while not successful in terms of worldly or ecclesiastical power, was at least not in his own eyes a failure (William of Malmesbury), all three displaying an emphasis contrary to that of an archdeacon-historian (Henry of Huntingdon). Is there a pattern here?

At first sight William's interest in wonders and the occult and Henry's relative disinterest may simply reflect a conventional opposition between monastic and secular historians. What for the secular, less insulated and protected from the real world by the ecclesiastical institution and rather keener to contrast the ideal with the real than the monk, we may nowadays place under “moral themes” (Category 13 in the Appendix to the present paper), for the monk himself, we may place under exemplary tales (Category 12). Ghost stories, marvels and edificatory diabolical tales have indeed always been a staple of monastic histories, right down to the time of William of Newburgh, an Austin canon with Cistercian connections¹³⁸ and the early thirteenth-century Cistercian abbot Ralph, chronicler at Coggeshall in Essex. Ralph's supernatural excursions are particularly celebrated.¹³⁹ He was particularly well connected and much in the world.¹⁴⁰ One of his informants was Gervase himself, one of those “semisecular clerks” who seemed to have connected the court with the monastery.¹⁴¹

Walter Map was a moralist like Henry of Huntingdon, a cleric with a message—particularly for the royal court and its inmates,¹⁴² and like Henry an historian—according to some at least,¹⁴³ although one who had little time for the religious orders.¹⁴⁴ Otter calls him an “ironist”—along with fellow archdeacons Geoffrey of Monmouth and Gerald of Wales. She situates all three as writers of Latin near what she calls the “metaphoric” or “least referential”, or “fictional” end of a constituted scale of writing, a position marked by “a complete lack of […] a truth claim, or [by] thorough subversion of such a truth claim”. At the far end of this scale, beyond the archdeacons, she locates the creative vernacular literature of the second half of the twelfth century, whilst at the opposite end, which she calls referential, asserting “a truth claim that depends on outside time and space”, she places the monks—William of Malmesbury and William of Newburgh in particular.¹⁴⁵

To adapt Otter's categorisations to the theme of the present paper, we may set up a scale of movement from “referentiality” to “fictionality”, placing the monks at one end, then the secular historians such as Henry of Huntingdon, then the archdeacons such as Walter Map, and finally, if we wish, the creative literary writers in the vernacular.¹⁴⁶ Thus, we may assert that Walter Map, far more explicitly than, say, Guibert of Nogent, has withdrawn the occultic and the supernatural from its historiographical context, and placed it in the freer context of literary narrative. Moving back towards the “referential”, we find that Henry of Huntingdon has been able to impose a much more rigorous moralist, critical and thematic structure on his “referential” material, which excludes the fictional, than the monks, who display an uncritical, universalist inclusiveness and are prevented from indulging in literary narrative creativity by the constraints of their monastic and historiographical professions. A similar contrast may be set up between, say, the monastic attempt at a history of the local counts in MS Auxerre 227 (fols. 18-19v)¹⁴⁷ and a secular history of the local counts such as the Historia Comitum Ghisnensium of Lambertus Ardensis (c. 1194¹⁴⁸). The seculars thus clarify the referentiality of history and allow the archdeacons to remove the fictional to a more properly literary context (though Geoffrey of Monmouth was to cause a minor furore by not properly distinguishing between the fictional and the newly referential¹⁴⁹). The monks are constrained to continue with what Wickham has called their “fascinating ragbag of a text”.

CONCLUSION

Shopkow locates the origins of critical historical methodology in the tension thus set up between the archdeacons and the monks,¹⁵⁰ and Guenée likewise locates the new, critical, notion of “compilation” which he thinks marks historiography's transition from the eloquence and “belles-lettres” that is so characteristic a feature of the Twelfth-century Renaissance, to “le serieux et la solidité d'une science” that is so characteristic a feature of thirteenth-century (monastic?¹⁵¹) historiography (and, we may add, of “modernity”), in the prologue to Henry of Huntingdon's Historia Anglorum.¹⁵² In the wider view,¹⁵³ however, we may attribute the archdeacons' “splitting off” of the occultic from its historiographical context to the new uncertainty in which they found themselves. Located in that wing of the church most exposed to the vagaries of lay society and least insulated against change and competition, history began by being scrubbed up for a new polemical or didactic purpose (Henry of Huntingdon) and was finally abandoned as being too dependent upon stabilities and certainties that were no longer perceived to be present, for the new world of the courtier. The sermo-oriented structure of the string of essays (De nugis curialium) or the travelogue (Gerald of Wales), for example,¹⁵⁴ proved more amenable to the novel demands of the emerging age and social environment.

From our own modern point of view then, it can be asserted that the monastic historiographic project remains the bedrock ancestry of our own profession. Nevertheless, our own view of the separation of fiction and history—essential to our profession—may owe something to the witting or unwitting clarifications and clearances effected by the archdeacons and the class of “semisecular” clerks generally, one of whose chief figures, as we see it nowadays, Walter Map, “exemplifies [to finish with another line from Otter's book¹⁵⁵] but also reflects on the detached, ironic, disenchanted intellectual stance that he sees as characteristic of modernitas”.

In a recent publication, Päivi Mehtonen has set out for us the “clearances” effected in the twelfth century schools between “fiction” and “history”.¹⁵⁶ The categories of fabula, historia, and argumentum derive originally from the domain of poetics¹⁵⁷ but over time were appropriated by the rhetorical treatises.¹⁵⁸ In the twelfth century they resumed something like their original status. Mehtonen, indeed, speaks of “the ‘rebirth’ of the Latin poetics of fiction” in the twelfth century, of “an increasing tolerance of the overtly fictional modes of narration within the realm of poesis”, and comments “that as the twelfth-century interest in ars poetica grew, there was more intellectual space for more positive views of even the extreme forms of fiction”; she cites Nykrog to the effect that “[t]he twelfth century is often credited with being a transformative period regarding the divorce of fiction from reality in the literature of the middle ages”.¹⁵⁹ It is perhaps no accident, then, that the twelfth-century archdeacons, whose links with the schools were perhaps stronger than those of the monks, should have had a sharper sense of the boundaries between the fictional and the historical, and the appropriate genres for each, than the monks of the day.¹⁶⁰

So too, it might be ventured in conclusion, is history yielding in our own day of postmodernitas to fictionality, as cultural studies, semiotics and discourse theory become the chosen form of the modern academics, exposed, like the semisecular clerks of the later twelfth century, to the new demands of a competitive, iconoclastic newly secular age which is rapidly trashing the security blankets and canons of the past.¹⁶¹ This surrender to the parameters of cultural studies, it should be noted, is accompanied nowdays by a measurement of the (Australian) humanist academics' “performance” no longer in terms of their contribution to humanist goals and modes of operating, but in terms of the “grant moneys” they raise. How ironic, then, that their twelfth-century monastic forebears should have been “assessed in large part on their ability to maintain and increase their abbeys' [property] holdings”,¹⁶² not on their contribution to the religious goals of monasticism.

APPENDIX

CONTENT ANALYSIS OF WILLIAM OF MALMESBURY'S GESTA REGUM AND HENRY OF HUNTINGDON'S HISTORIA ANGLORUM

(Each topic is followed by an approximate estimate of the percentage of space allocated in William's chronicle, followed by the amount of space allocated in Henry's, according to the translations by J. A Giles [1847, the translation by Mynors-Thomson-Winterbottom not being available when the analysis was conducted], and Diana Greenway [1996]. The percentages do not necessarily add up to exactly 100% in each case, because of the approximation necessary in the method of working.)

Topic	William	Henry
1. Prologue; prefatory material	2.53٪	0.99٪
2. Background descriptions or “digressions”, of a geographical, historical, ethnographical sort.	0٪	2.35٪
3. Deeds of kings, rulers (including Julius Caesar, Roman emperors especially those relevant to English history, some queens and their daughters).	42٪	37.45٪
4. History of tribes or peoples.	0٪	1.36٪
5. History of the Church and churchmen, including in William's case, saints and monasteries, letters of churchmen, much continental material and female ecclesiastical learning.	26.45٪	20.12٪
6. Continental secular history, including the Normans; mainly (in William's case) French and Norman (while still separate from England), Charlemagne and his successors.	7.06٪	0.96٪
7. The pagani; Vikings, and (for William) Danish and Norwegian rulers.	2٪	8.16٪
8. Gesta dominarum, i.e. aristocratic women.	0.31٪	0.74٪
9. Crusading matters.	12.77٪	3.28٪
10. Biblical, OT history, Hellenistic, Roman history, Persian, medieval imperial history to Conrad III (7/3/1138).	1.72٪	6.18٪
11. Historia Brittonum, Arthurian material.	0.09٪	3.21٪
12. Occult, non-hagiographic miracles, marvels and wonders.	4.78٪	0٪
13. Moralising themes.	0.046٪	15.2٪

Notes

1. Guenée 1980, pp. 46-48; trans. John O. Ward.

2. Greenway (ed. and trans.) 1996; Mynors, Thomson and Winterbottom (eds. and trans.), volumes I-II, 1998-1999. I am very grateful indeed to Professors Thomson and Winterbottom for a gift of these two volumes which enabled me to use them before it would have been possible otherwise to do so.

3. Originally written for abbreviated oral delivery at the 1998 Leeds International Medieval Congress.

4. For a comment on the topicality of this phenomenon see John O. Ward, “Rhetoric, Truth, and Literacy in the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century” in Oral and Written Communication. Historical Approaches. Ed. R. L. Enos. (Written Communication Annual: an International Survey of Research and Theory, vol. 4.) Newbury Park: Sage Publications 1990, pp. 126-157. Recent work has stimulated interest in the subject: Gerald Bond, The Loving Subject. Desire, Eloquence, and Power in Romanesque France. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1995; C. Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of Angels. Cathedral Schools and Social Ideals in Medieval Europe 950-1200. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1994; R. W. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe I. Oxford: Blackwell 1995. I am currently working on a number of projects connected with our current interpretation of the significance of the Twelfth-century Renaissance: “Alan of Lille and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance”, together with an interpretative essay on and a cultural history of the period.

5. Ward 1997.

6. Scott and Ward (Hugh of Poitiers) 1992, p. 60.

7. Wickham 1985, pp. 66-68.

8. “Ailred of Rievaulx's De bello standardii. Cistercian Historiography and the Creation of Community Memories”, revision of paper printed as “Aelred of Rievaulx's De Bello Standardii and Medieval and Modern Textual Controls”. In Deviance: textual control. New Perspectives in Medieval Studies. Eds. Megan Cassidy, Helen Hickey and Meagan Street. Melbourne: University of Melbourne Department of History 1997, pp. 78-102, and kindly shown to me in draft form.

9. Southern 1953, pp. 80ff. B. S. Bachrach in a number of important studies has updated and extended the topic. See especially his Fulk Nerra, Neo-Roman Consul 987-1040. A Political Biography of the Angevin Count. Berkeley, California: University of California Press 1993.

10. Shopkow 1997, p. 257. Cf. a paper by myself, “Parchment and Power in Abbey and Cathedral. Chartres, Sherborne and Vézelay c. 1000-1175”. In Negotiating Secular and Ecclesiastical Power. Western Europe in the Central Middle Ages. Eds. Arnoud-Jan A. Bijsterveld, H. B. Teunis and Andrew Wareham (Selected proceedings from the 1997 Leeds International Medieval Congress; International Medieval Research 6). Turnhout: Brepols 1999, pp. 149-165 (the correct reference in n. 20 is “F. Avril, Huygens 1976”).

11. Shopkow 1997, p. 253.

12. Cf. my paper “Memorializing Dispute Resolution in the Twelfth-Century. Annal, History and Chronicle at Vézelay”, to appear in The Medieval Chronicle. Proceedings of the First International Conference on the Medieval Chronicle, Utrecht 13-16 July 1996. Ed. Erik Kooper. Amsterdam: Rodopi 1999.

13. Guenée 1980, p. 51.

14. Bisson 1990, p. 308.

15. Guenée 1980, p. 61.

16. “How Can We Read Medieval Historical Writing? Layers of Potential Meanings in the Foundation History of Fountains Abbey”, paper in draft 1997 and kindly shown to me. See also Freeman's papers already cited (note 8) and Bouchard 1988, p. 218: “The Cistercians of the first sixty or seventy years of the twelfth century rewrote their history several times, to meet new needs within their order”. Twelfth-century Cistercian historiographical interests also revolved in particular around biographical history, for example, of Bernard of Clairvaux himself and of Malachy of Armagh. See B. W. O'Dwyer, “St. Bernard as an Historian. The ‘Life of St. Malachy of Armagh’”. Journal of Religious History 10:2 (1978), pp. 128-141.

17. Guenée 1980, pp. 47-48.

18. Walter Map, De nugis curialium. Courtiers' Trifles. Ed. and trans. by M. R. James, revised by C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1983, pp. 73-115, distinctio i, cc. 24, 25; Knowles 1940/1962, ch. 39.

19. Leclercq 1957/1993, p. 155. See also Leclercq 1970, pp. 57-86 and Lettinck 1984, pp. 53-54 on the historiographical “milieu bénédictin”.

20. Galbraith 1951, pp. 8, 10, 12.

21. For example, the many works on the great St.Albans and Bury St.Edmunds schools of history in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Also Shopkow (1997, pp. 259-260) writes: “History was generally composed and read in the monastery […] it was difficult to write history anywhere but a monastery […] most histories continued to be written in monasteries […]”.

22. Milis 1992, p. vii.

23. I have included the Bayeux Tapestry, which Gransden (1974) omits, because it does contain a minor literary chronicle of events.

24. For other indications of the role of monastic historiography see Lobrichon 1992, p. 95; P. J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance. Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1994, p. 179; Bisson 1990 (though note the role of bishops, pp. 286, 295, 303-304 and judges and legal figures, p. 291 f.); Otter 1996, p. 2: “In twelfth-century England, the vast majority of all historiographic activity emerges from the monasteries”; Ray 1996, p. 639: “The cloister was the great institutional sponsor of historical writing and reading”.

25. Otto's status as a “secular” may be questioned in view of his short period (1133-1137) as a Cistercian.

26. Hugh of Vézelay seems also to have been a notary (Scott and Ward 1992, p. 9) but his monastic background may well explain the certainty and clarity of his historical vision, compared with the relative bewilderment of Galbert: J. B. Ross (trans.), The Murder of Charles the Good, Count of Flanders by Galbert of Bruges. New York: Columbia University Press 1960, p. 72.

27. See the essays by R. Ray and J. O. Ward in Breisach 1985.

28. For our “postmodern” emphases see Ward 1997.

29. Gransden (1990, p. 60) citing Guenée, “L'histoire entre l'éloquence et la science. Quelques remarques sur le prologue de Guillaume de Malmesbury à ses Gesta Regum Anglorum”. Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. Paris: Boccard 1982 and “Les premiers pas de l'histoire de l'historiographie en occident au XIIe siécle”. Ibid. 1983; also Guenée 1980, p. 68: “C'est dans les scriptoria monastiques […] que l'érudition moderne a forgé ses exigences”. With Guenée's view “that in the course of the twelfth century the dominance of rhetoric over historiography declined [in favour of] scholarship” (Gransden 1990, pp. 80-81) we may compare the exactly similar phenomenon noted for the period c. 1500 by Robert Black “The new laws of history”. Renaissance Studies 1:1 (1987), pp. 126-156. On this latter development see now Peter Godman's stirring From Poliziano to Machiavelli. Florentine Humanism in the High Renaissance. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1998, p. 200.

30. See Guenée 1985, pp. 119-135.

31. Caroly Erickson, The Medieval Vision. Essays in History and Perception. New York: Oxford University Press 1976, pp. 62-63.

32. Outside these areas the historiographic urge was often confined and limited. See Wickham 1985 and Wickham 1992, pp. 188-189; Bisson 1990, pp. 281, 307-308.

33. Ward 1985, p. 103; Ray 1996, p. 645: “In general the twelfth century was the great age of medieval historiography […]”; Gransden 1990, p. 60; Galbraith 1951, pp. 11, 29, 33 et passim. Galbraith (1951, p. 25) points out that much of the impetus for the twelfth-century interest in historiography was the need to defend claims, property, rights and privileges in a changing world. Hence, “the twelfth century was the hey-day of forgery”. See too B. H. Rosenwein, T. Head and S. Farmer, “Monks and their enemies: a comparative approach”. Speculum 66:4 (1991), pp. 764-796 for much of interest including the addressing of “problems of lost intimacy and brotherhood through works of history” (p. 794).

34. For example, Sverre Bagge, in his excellent analysis of Otto of Freising's ideas and narrative (“Ideas and Narrative in Otto of Freising's Gesta Frederici”. Journal of Medieval History 22:4 [1996], pp. 345-377) is not concerned with the problem.

35. Cf. W. J. Brandt, The Shape of Medieval History. Studies in Modes of Perception. New York: Schocken 1973 (1966), pp. 68, 150 and n., who thinks William of Malmesbury to be “atypical”!

36. For example Stephen G. Nichols, Romanesque Signs. Early Medieval Narrative and Iconography. New Haven: Yale University Press 1983, whose index does not contain any variant of the word(s) ‘monk’ or ‘monastic’.

37. Gransden 1974, p. 248.

38. Greenway 1996, p. 107.

39. Greenway 1996 (edition) IX, pp. 622ff.

40. Freeman, “Ailred of Rievaulx” (draft, see note 8), p. 4.

41. Gransden 1974, pp. 363-364.

42. Gransden 1990, pp. 69, 80.

43. Greenway 1996, p. 105.

44. Gransden 1990, p. 71. On Sigebert, Benedictine monk of Gembloux, see Hay 1977, pp. 46-49.

45. Gransden 1974, pp. 251, 220, 222, 226, 230, 233, 245, 266, 276-277. On Matthew Paris's criticism of “the state” however, see ibid., pp. 367-372.

46. Otter 1996, p. 126.

47. Elizabeth Freeman, “A Twelfth-Century Reformulation of Insular History. Narrative Techniques and contemptus mundi in Henry of Huntingdon's Historia Anglorum” (unpublished draft), p. 12; Guenée 1980, pp. 49-51.

48. See Wickham 1992, p. 183 n. 25 for Bishop Sicard of Cremona's exceptional “World Chronicle”.

49. Moore 1985, p. 115.

50. Shopkow (1997, p. 246), for example, considers “quasi-official” Norman historiography “commissioned by or for the duke and written either at court or at a monastery with strong ties to the dukes”.

51. Gransden (1974) groups the work of these with those of the religious orders.

52. Julia Barrow, “How the Twelfth-Century Monks of Worcester Perceived Their Past”. In Magdalino 1992, pp. 54, 57. See Knowles 1940/1962, pp. 65, 129.

53. Guenée 1980, pp. 46-55.

54. For the Cistercian environment see the writings of Freeman and Leclercq 1957/1993, p. 156 (“The Cistercian Order was not to be outdone in this connection” [i. e. “History”]). For Cluny see Iogna-Prat and Ortigues 1985, pp. 537-572.

55. As Galbraith (1951, pp. 10-11) and Moore (1985, pp. 113-115, in the case of Guibert of Nogent) maintain!

56. Guenée 1983, p. 451 and Shopkow 1997, p. 248, both citing the study by Monique-Cécile Garand.

57. Manuscript Auxerre 227 is a good example of this sort of work: Scott and Ward 1992.

58. Many monastic historians, of course, were closely linked with the oral world outside their monastery. Simeon of Durham, Ralph of Coggeshall (Gransden 1974, p. 324), Matthew Paris (Gransden 1974, ch. 16; Richard Vaughan, Matthew Paris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1958/1979, pp. 11-18) among others easily come to mind here.

59. Guenée (1980, p. 52) points out that Bede himself was a very “part-time” historian.

60. Gransden 1974, p. 248.

61. Gransden 1974, pp. 263-265; Gransden 1990, p. 80; Galbraith 1951, p. 27; Guenée 1980, p. 63. A “commemorative” function for monastic historiography was also developed by Jennifer Paxton in her paper “Commemoration as Exemplum. The Liber Benefactorum of Ramsey Abbey” (Leeds International Medieval Congress 1998).

62. Guenée 1980, p. 47.

63. Iogna-Prat 1998, p. 61.

64. The phrase is that of P. E. Dutton, “Raoul Glaber's De divina quaternitate. An Unnoticed Reading of Eriugena's Translation of the Ambigua of Maximus the Confessor”. Mediaeval Studies 42 (1980), p. 431. The early pages of Dutton's paper are a useful addition to Iogna-Prat and Ortigues's essay (1998). See also the inclusion of a paper by Brent Hardy entitled “Cluniac History as Eschatology in the Writings of Raoul Glaber”, in a session on “Cluny: new research” at the Leeds International Medieval Congress 1998.

65. Jestice 1997, p. 7.

66. Jestice 1997, pp. 8, 17, 19 (“Pressures placed upon monasteries differed from area to area”).

67. See Guenée (1980, p. 51) on Ranulf Higden and Gransden (1974, ch. 16) on Matthew Paris.

68. Galbraith 1951, pp. 18, 25, 30, 32; also Scott and Ward 1992. William of Malmesbury's Gesta Pontificum deals with many individual monastic pasts, not least his own Malmesbury (De Gestis Pontificum Anglorum libri quinque. Ed. N. E. S. A. Hamilton. London: Rolls Series 1870, index s.v. pp. 544-547). See Hay 1977, ch. 4.

69. Galbraith 1951, pp. 29, 31-33; Gransden 1974, p. 320; James P. Carley, “William Rishanger's Chronicles and History Writing at St.Albans”. In A Distinct Voice. Medieval Studies in Honor of Leonard E. Boyle, O. P. Eds. Jacqueline Brown and W. P. Stoneman. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press 1997, pp. 71-102; Spiegel 1997, chs 7, 8, 9; Suger, The Deeds of Louis the Fat. Trans. with introduction and notes by Richard Cusimano and John Moorhead. Washington, D. C.: Catholic University of America 1992; Bisson 1990, pp. 299, 306.

70. Wickham 1992, pp. 173ff.; R. D. Face, “Secular History in Twelfth-Century Italy: Caffaro of Genoa”. Journal of Medieval History 6 (1980), pp. 169-184.

71. Guenée 1980, p. 73; Gransden 1974, p. 367 and Gransden 1990, p. 63; Wickham 1992, p. 182; Galbraith 1951, pp. 8, 10-11; Bisson 1990, p. 282.

72. Leclercq 1957/1993, p. 156.

73. Galbraith 1951, pp. 2, 8-9, 17; Thomson 1997, p. 131; Greenway 1996, pp. 105ff., 112ff.

74. Leclercq 1957/1993, p. 156.

75. Though Otto of Freising is a notable exception: Wickham 1992, pp. 182-183.

76. See Spiegel 1993.

77. Scott 1981 (William of Malmesbury), pp. 3-14.

78. Cf. R. W. Southern, “Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing 4. The Sense of the Past”. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, ser. 5, vol. 23 (1973), pp. 246ff. and a recent Melbourne doctoral thesis: “The Anglo-Saxon Saints' Lives” by Marjorie Mitchell (Constant Mews's student on hagiographical activity under Lanfranc), submitted May 1997.

79. Scott 1981 (William of Malmesbury), p. 12.

80. Scott 1981 (William of Malmesbury), pp. 27ff.

81. Eleanor Searle, “Battle Abbey and Exemption. The Forged Charters”. English Historical Review 83: 328 (1968), pp. 449-480.

82. Scott 1981 (William of Malmesbury), ch. 4. According to Jennifer Paxton (“Commemoration as exemplum. The Liber Benefactorum of Ramsey Abbey”, Leeds International Medieval Congress 1998), Ramsey's charter records are included in a narrative, resulting in a combination chronicle/cartulary designed as a response to division within the abbey under Abbot Walter 1133-1160 and intended to ensure that such division did not recur.

83. See also Otter 1996, pp. 2-3; Lettinck 1984, p. 54; Lobrichon 1992, pp. 93-94, 102 (and R. I. Moore in the same volume pp. 310, 316, 319, 323) for further insights into monastic-episcopal quarrels and the monastic need to defend their land titles and claims in the eleventh century.

84. Scott and Ward 1992, pp. 151-152.

85. Scott and Ward 1992, pp. 131-134, 154-159.

86. Gransden 1974, p. 373: “A kingdom therefore was a macrocosm of a monastery, and, conversely, a monastery was a microcosm of a kingdom”.

87. Guenée 1980, pp. 49 and 51f.

88. See Guenée's (1980, p. 51) remarks on Sigebert of Gembloux as “un écrivain engagé” and on William of Malmesbury's Historia Novella. Note also Lettinck 1984, p. 77: “Ils [Benedictine historians] ont été des historiens engagés qui nous ont transmis une image vivante de leur temps”. This aspect of the monastic interest in history is to some extent in conflict with the “bookish” quality of monastic historiography mentioned above.

89. Guenée 1980, p. 51 “plus représentatif […]”.

90. Guenée 1980, p. 63.

91. Scott and Ward 1992, pp. 92-96 and see Lot “La Chanson de Landri”, Lespinasse and Mirot as cited in Scott and Ward 1992, pp. 386-387. See too the comments of Spiegel 1983, p. 51 (reprinted in Spiegel 1997, p. 108): “genealogy enabled chroniclers to organize their narratives as a succession of gestes performed by the successive representatives of one or more lignages […]”.

92. William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, ii. 190.2, pp. 340-341 (William of Malmesbury's Chronicle of the Kings of England from the Earliest Period to the Reign of King Stephen. Trans. by J. A. Giles. London: Bohn 1847, II.12, p. 209). These stories have a Carolingian origin (see Giles p. 209n. and Charlemagne's Courtier. The Complete Einhard. Ed. and trans. by P. E. Dutton. Readings in Medieval Civilizations and Cultures II. Peterborough, Ontario, Canada: Broadview 1998, p. xxxvi) and are fully documented in Thomson and Winterbottom 1999 (edition), Gesta Regum, vol. 2, pp. 183-184, but without reference to the Vézelay example.

93. Wickham 1985, p. 61. The chronicle has been superbly edited by Gian Carlo Alessio (Cronaca di Novalesa Turin: Einaudi 1982), to whom I am very grateful for the gift of a copy. See pp. 73-110 for the story of “Vualtharius”, formerly, the chronicler alleges (p. 72), a monk “in hoc monasterio prisco”. For the Waltharius see J. O. Ward, “After Rome. Medieval Epic”. In Roman Epic. Ed. A. J. Boyle. London: Routledge 1993, pp. 261-293.

94. M. Bloch, Feudal Society. Trans. by L. A. Manyon. London: Routledge 1961, p. 95. Cf. too Cluniac interest in the Liber Sancti Jacobi: William Melczer, The Pilgrim's Guide to Santiago de Compostela. New York: Italica 1993, pp. 28-35.

95. Gransden 1974, pp. 247, 372-374.

96. Guenée 1980, p. 46. Cf. however Guenée (1983, p. 453) for the new twelfth-century secular and notarial historians and Shopkow (1997, pp. 257-258) who considers Otto of Freising to have been “one of the few educated in the schools who wrote history. The history required in the schools was biblical—that need was met by the Scholastic History of Peter Comestor”.

97. Gaimar (Elizabeth Freeman, “Geffrei Gaimar, Vernacular Historiography, and the Assertion of Authority”. Studies in Philology 93:2 [1996], pp. 188-206), Wace, Jordan of Fantosme, Benoît de St.Maure, Amboise (Gransden 1974, p. 240), Galbert of Bruges, William of Poitiers, William of Tyre, the later Otto of Freising, Landulf and Arnulf at Milan (Wickham 1985, pp. 61-62 and Wickham 1992, p. 181) and many others. These are all, of course, exceptions to the rule-of-thumb mentioned by Guenée 1980, p. 46.

98. Otter 1996, p. 3.

99. R. W. Southern, Medieval Humanism and Other Studies. Oxford: Blackwell 1970, p. 112; for Peter as an “historian” see R. W. Southern, “Peter of Blois and the Third Crusade”. In Mayr-Harting and Moore 1985, p. 217.

100. Gransden 1974, p. 230.

101. Galbraith 1951, pp. 27ff.; Otter 1996, pp. 3, 155 and ch. 4 generally.

102. Included amongst the historians by Otter 1996 (compare her title with pp. 9-10, and ch. 3 pp. 111-112) and Gransden 1974, pp. 242ff.

103. Galbraith 1951, p. 27.

104. Otter 1996, p. 125.

105. Otter 1996, pp. 126, 127.

106. Gransden 1974, pp. 263-265.

107. Moore 1985, pp. 114-115.

108. Thomson 1987, pp. 12, 27-31.

109. See Moore (1985, p. 107) for Guibert as one who “in this sense foreshadows a preoccupation which became increasingly widespread and increasingly intense in the next two centuries”.

110. Galbraith 1951, p. 6.

111. Gillingham 1995, p. 76.

112. That is, not on a particular topic such as the history of an ecclesiastical institution or figure or an event related to an ecclesiastical institution etc.

113. Henry slightly later than William: Greenway 1996 (edition), pp. lxvi ff.; Gillingham 1995, p. 78.

114. See discussion in Greenway 1996 (edition), pp. lxxxv ff.

115. Gillingam 1995, p. 77, citing Partner.

116. Greenway 1996 (edition), pp. xxiii-xxviii, xl-liii.

117. Thomson 1987; Greenway 1996 (edition), p. xxxix.

118. Based on a page count of topics using the translation of William by Giles and that of Henry by Greenway. See Appendix.

119. Carney 1968, pp. 5, 8 and especially 15.

120. M. Winterbottom, “The Gesta Regum of William of Malmesbury”. Journal of Medieval Latin 5 (1995), pp. 158-173, especially p. 173: “indeed, William's use of rhetoric is a wide open subject”. See Ward 1977 (the reference in n. 45 should be Cicero De Legibus 1.2) and 1985; Greenway 1996.

121. See appendix for details.

122. Guibert's interest in edification reduces his “history” to sermon materials: Moore 1985, pp. 113-117.

123. Appendix § 1.

124. Appendix § 7; cf. Greenway 1996 (edition), p. lix.

125. Freeman, “A Twelfth-Century Reformulation of Insular History” (draft); Greenway 1996, p. 113.

126. interruptam temporum seriem sarcire: Otter 1996, p. 96.

127. Gransden 1974, p. 221; cf. in general also Gransden 1990, pp. 70, 76-79.

128. Gransden 1974, p. 235.

129. Appendix § 2, 4; Greenway's annotations make clear Henry's debts here.

130. Appendix § 3.

131. Appendix §5.

132. Note that in Appendix § 5 William includes more continent material than Henry.

133. Ward 1977; Thomson 1997.

134. William seems to have been concerned about his predilection for such stories. In his Gesta Pontificum (ed. Hamilton 1870, p. 259) he has deleted from an earlier draft a salacious reference linking Gerard Archbishop of York with maleficium, libido and astrology: “William stigmatized Archbishop Gerard of York (d. 1108) for reading Julius Firmicus (a censure he later suppressed); yet there is an extract from the Mathesis in William's own Polyhistor (p. 104)”; Thomson and Winterbottom 1999 (edition), Gesta Regum, vol. 2, p. 153. See V. I. J. Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1991, pp. 8-9. There is little assistance in Thomson and Winterbottom (1999 [edition], Gesta Regum, vol. 2) on William and the occult. See p.196, for example, for the “Witch of Berkeley” story. The reference at Gesta Regum 204.7 (Mynors, Thomson and Winterbottom 1998 [edition], vol. 1, p. 378 “Gregorii Dialogum”) to Henry of Huntingdon (Greenway 1996 [edition], pp. 696-697) as an instance of Gregory the Great's Dialogues being “common in later miracle stories” is slightly misleading for our present purposes in that Henry uses Gregory in connection with Christian miracles and indicates that the reference is a departure from his normal “cautious and carefully researched” manner (“Quod miraculum huic opere cauto et exquisito non interposuissem, nisi quia sanctus papa Gregorius […]”). For William and the occult see Peters 1978, pp. 28-33. According to Sverre Bagge (“Medieval Historiography and the Understanding of Politics”, Leeds International Medieval Congress 1998), in the chronicle of Thietmar prior of the convent of Walbech and later bishop of Merseburg (1009 onwards) we find a mixture of divine intervention, ghosts, and dreams with very little obvious connection between the different episodes (ed. by R. Holtzmann, M. G. H. Scriptores Rer. Germanicarum. N. S. IX 1935). The same apparatus, deployed in the service of his abbey's struggles, is found in the work of Otloh of St.Emmeram. According to Ellen Joyce (“Edification, Visions and memoria in the Work of Otloh of St.Emmeram”, Leeds International Medieval Congress 1998), Otloh's visions are the first cousin of hagiographic literature. Clearly the mixed pattern found in William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum was of long standing in both monastic and episcopal/cathedral historiography prior to the twelfth century.

135. Moore 1985, p. 108.

136. Peters 1978, pp. 53-54; Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages. The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society. Trans. T. L. Fagan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1998, pp. 81-92 (and for Orderic Vitalis ch. 5, pp. 93ff., for the Cistercians pp. 126 ff.); C. W. Bynum, “Metamorphosis, or Gerald and the Werewolf”. Speculum 73:4 (1998), p. 1003: “Thus we find in the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries an Ovidian sense of mutability as power and possibility, a fascination with marvels in which species boundaries are crossed, and a theological interpretation of magic and miracle that emphasises the reality of transformation”. On the “fashionable” nature of our current historiographical interest in medieval attitudes towards the marvellous, see the somewhat deflating paper of Paul Freedman and Gabrielle Spiegel (1998).

137. Moore 1985, pp. 115-116 on Guibert; for Walter Map I have a paper in hand entitled “Walter Map and the Supernatural. An Aspect of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance and the Rise of a New Intelligentsia” which attempts to set this aspect of Walter forth.

138. Gransden 1974, p. 268.

139. Gransden 1974, pp. 328, 330-331; W. L. Wakefield and A. P. Evans (eds.), Heresies of the High Middle Ages. Selected sources translated and annotated. New York: Columbia University Press 1969, pp. 251-254; Peters 1978, pp. 35-39. See also for other monastic ghost stories Rosenwein et al. in Speculum 1991, p. 794.

140. Gransden 1974, pp. 322ff.

141. Peters (1978, p. 155) considers the occult to have been the particular province of courtly interests.

142. Otter 1996, pp. 125-127.

143. Otter 1996, p. 112; Guenée, “Temps de l'histoire et temps de la mémoire au moyen âge”. Bulletin de la Société de l'histoire de France (1976-1977, Paris 1978), p. 35: “Gautier Map était un brillant conteur, dont les mots et les histoires firent les délices de la cour d'Henri II Plantagenet […]”. In Guenée 1980, pp. 61-62, 82 Walter is mentioned for his views on history and modernity.

144. Otter 1996, p. 121.

145. Otter 1996, pp. 19, 160-161.

146. Although, as Shopkow (1997, pp. 267ff.) indicates, many vernacular works operated simply to transpose into the vernacular area Latin originals.

147. Scott and Ward 1992, pp. 92-96.

148. MGH, Scriptorum 24, pp. 550ff.

149. Compare in this respect Geoffrey's composition of his History of the Kings of Britain with Tolkien's creation of his own “vast epic”: Christopher Frayling, Strange Landscape. A Journey Through the Middle Ages. Penguin BBC Books 1996, p. 25.

150. Shopkow 1997, pp. 271-275.

151. The puzzle for the theme of the present essay is the fact that although Guenée locates “compilation” first in the work of a secular (Henry of Huntingdon), he next finds it in a mélange of historians, some of whom are definitely monks (Richard le Poitevin, Gervase of Canterbury, Matthew Paris, Robert de Torigny for example), whilst others are Dominicans (Vincent of Beauvais, Bernard Gui for example). The presence amongst these monks and dominicans of a thirteenth-century cathedral canon (of St. Martin of Tours. Guenée 1980, pp. 157-158; Guenée 1985, pp. 128, 132) copying into the work of a predecessor, Robert d'Auxerre, whatever he felt might swell his account of the archbishops of the town, suggests that Guenée sees no useful distinction between ‘monastic’ and “secular” in the march towards “scientific history” that he is chronicling.

152. Guenée 1985, pp. 121, 133-135. Similarly, Gabrielle Spiegel (1983, pp. 45, 51) is happy to speak generally of a medieval historiographical tendency towards “legend, fiction, and fable', towards the organisation on the part of medieval chroniclers of ‘their narratives as a succession of gestes” even though much of her focus is upon seculars working in a minor courtly environment (see Spiegel 1993, for example pp. 225-228).

153. C. N. L. Brooke, “Heresy and Religious Sentiment 1000-1250.” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 41 (1968), pp. 115-131; Moore 1985 and The Formation of a Persecuting Society. Oxford: Blackwell 1987; Peters 1978, ch. 2.

154. Cf. Otter 1996, chs 3 and 4.

155. Otter 1996, p. 125.

156. Mehtonen 1996.

157. Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhetoric. A Foundation for Literary Study. Trans. Matthew T. Bliss et al., eds. D. E. Orton and D. Anderson. Leiden: Brill 1998, p. 138.

158. For example the Rhetorica ad Herennium 1.8.13.

159. Mehtonen 1996, pp. 45, 48, 87, 106-107. Per Nykrog (“The Rise of Literary Fiction”. In Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century. Eds. R. L. Benson and G. Constable. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1982, p. 611) writes: “Strangeness and unheard-of-ness became the focus of interest [among the vernacular successors to the writers of the 1170's], more than concise analysis”. This is a characteristic that used to inhabit the monastic chronicle in earlier days. It is also worth noting that “humanism” has always been associated with a tendency to differentiate between “recent” or “eye-witness” events (“annals”, “commentaries”), and the remoter past proper (“history”; see Mehtonen 1996, pp. 70, 73 [n. 19] and Gary Ianziti, “Humanism's new science: the history of the future”. I Tatti Studies. Essays in the Renaissance 4 [1991], pp. 59-88). The “historical writings” of Gerald of Wales reflect a tendency amongst the seculars to see a distinction between contemporary description and remoter history, but it is by no means consistent, as the examples of John of Salisbury (Historia pontificalis) and Galbert of Bruges indicate.

160. “History as an art form”, according to Roger Ray (1996, pp. 645-646) ultimately lost out as “the institutional bulwark of Latin historiography, the Benedictine monasteries, lost social prestige”, for the new audiences (the mendicants and the universities) were not friendly to the genre. For the ultimate broadening of audience for history beyond that of the monks and the schools to the courts and towns in the later middle ages, however, see Shopkow 1997, pp. 263-275; Spiegel 1993; Hay 1977, ch. 4. Indeed, in the perspective of time, the “historiographical revolution” of the seculars or archdeacons in the twelfth century was but one eddy amongst many in the ebb and flow of historiography as an untaught and socially ambiguous mode of self-referencing and self-identification.

161. See Freedman and Spiegel 1998.

162. Bouchard 1988, p. 228.

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