An Empire of Memory (3 page)

This divide endures.14 In 2003, Federica Monteleone framed her discussion of

Charlemagne’s legendary journey to the Holy Land as a dual evolutionary process,

essentially following Gaston Paris’s nearly 150-year-old theoretical structure. One

path of Monteleone’s investigation led to Charlemagne’s sanctification as he

became an archetypal crusader in the service of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, while

the other led towards the creation of an idealized knightly figure in the Old French

Voyage de Charlemagne.15 Certainly, Monteleone’s work is filled with valuable

insights into various aspects of the Charlemagne legend before 1165 but because

she compartmentalizes her sources, she fails to address how or why the legend was

so intriguing, to so many people, at so many times, in so many places. She sees little

connection between contemporary images of Charlemagne in Latin and vernacular

sources. She leaps from one text to the other, offering an implicit evolutionary

model that moves towards the Old French Voyage, but does not fully explain how

one step led to the next or even why the legend was going there. She doesn’t explain

how ideas could travel.

Medieval topics, and especially ones like the study of the Charlemagne legend,

scream out for interdisciplinary approaches.16 Monteleone took a multidisciplinary

de Charlemagne au retour de Roncevaux’, Société des Sciences, Lettres, et Arts de Bayonne, 135 (1979), 53–60; Elizabeth A. R. Brown and Michael W. Cothren, ‘The Twelfth-Century Crusading Window of

the Abbey of Saint-Denis: Praeteritorum enim recordatio futurorum est exhibitio’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtald Institutes, 49 (1986), 1–40; Amy G. Remensnyder, Remembering Kings Past: Monastic Foundation

Legends in Medieval Southern France (Ithaca, NY, 1995); Rolf Grosse, ‘Reliques du Christ et foires de Saint-Denis au XIe siècle’, Revue d’histoire de l’église de France, 87 (2001), 357–75; and Daniel F. Callahan, ‘Al-Hakim, Charlemagne, and the Destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem in the

Writings of Ademar of Chabannes’, in Legend of Charlemagne, 41–57.

14 Seen perhaps most famously in Wolfgang Braunfels and Percy Ernst Schramm (eds.), Karl der

Grosse: Lebenswerk und Nachleben, 5 vols. (Düsseldorf, 1965–8). Here, historians of the Charlemagne

legend write on Latin sources, while literary critics write on the vernacular. Neither reference the

other’s work. See also Bernd Bastert (ed.), Karl der Grosse in den europäischen Literaturen des

Mittelalters: Konstruktion eines Mythos (Tübingen, 2004); and Max Kerner, Karl der Grosse:

Entschleierung eines Mythos (Cologne, 2001).

15 Federica Monteleone, Il viaggio di Carlo Magno in Terra Santa: Un’esperienza di pellegrinaggio

nella tradizione europea occidentale (Fasano, 2003), 11–12. The Old French Voyage likely dates to the

second half of the 12th cent. See Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne, tr. Glyn S. Burgess (Edinburgh, 1998).

Two recent dissertations, soon to become books, do much to remedy this lack of interdisciplinary

approaches. See Anne Austin Latowsky, ‘Imaginative Possession: Charlemagne and the East from

Einhard to the Voyage of Charlemagne’ (Ph.D. diss., Romance Languages and Literature, University of

Washington, 2004); and Jace Stuckey, ‘Charlemagne: The Making of an Image, 1100–1300’ (Ph.D.

diss., History, University of Florida, 2006).

16 The chronicle of Pseudo-Turpin, a 12th-cent. Latin prose account of Charlemagne and Roland’s

expedition into Spain, is one text that has served as a point of common interdisciplinary ground. For

more on Pseudo-Turpin, see André de Mandach, Naissance et développement de la Chanson de Geste en

Europe: La Geste de Charlemagne et de Roland, 6 vols. (Geneva, 1961); Matthias Tischler, ‘Tatmensch

oder Heidenapostel: Die Bilder Karls des Grossen bei Einhart und im Pseudo-Turpin’, in Klaus

Herbers (ed.), Jakobus und Karl der Grosse: Von Einhards Karlsvita zum Pseudo-Turpin (Tübingen,

Introduction: Looking for Charlemagne

5

approach, standing different types of texts next to one another without substantially

examining their interdependence. Interdisciplinarity, however, means pushing

sources up against and into one another, crossing traditional scholarly boundaries,

and using the resources of various disciplines to attack a specific problem. In the

case of the Charlemagne legend, interdisciplinarity means being sensitive to the fact

that each instance of the Charlemagne legend––be it charter, chronicle, or stained-

glass––was tethered to both the local conditions generating the source and to more

general themes discernible in disparate texts. Understanding general themes across

texts helps the reader see when a cigar is more than a cigar. Deep contextualization

will warn us when it might, in fact, just be a cigar.

Take, for example, the tension between memory and history, and fact and

fiction. From 1920 until 2004, the New York Yankees had won twenty-six

World Series to the Boston Red Sox’s zero. Given these numbers, the two teams

did not seem worthy of comparison, but Red Sox fans spoke incessantly about their

rivalry with the Yankees. Yankee fans almost never spoke in such terms. Why? Red

Sox fans thought of the teams’ shared past as a history. They wanted to problematize

the teams’ relationship, keeping an active dynamic alive between them by suggest-

ing that their team could overturn the current paradigm. In effect, they always

believed that ‘this could be the Red Sox’s year’ (as it indeed was in 2004). On the

other hand, the Yankees–Red Sox competition belonged to Yankees fans’ memory.

They knew, approved of, and felt an immediate connection to their team’s chain of

victories stretching back over eighty years. Their denigration of the teams’ status as

‘rivals’ attempted to suppress any alternative to that narrative.17

Although this brief analogy grossly stereotypes the two types of fans, it does I

think help demonstrate that the terms ‘history’ and ‘memory’ are not oppositional,

but are rather two modes of discourse constantly locked in a struggle over the

meaning of the past. Memory implies continuity and stability, while history

recognizes discontinuity and difference.18 Despite the enormous contributions of

Hayden White, Mary Carruthers was one of the first to throw open this field of

research for the Middle Ages by translating general historiographical observations

into a concrete analysis of medieval memorial practice.19 Although she focuses on

the late Middle Ages, Carruthers did deal with late antiquity and the early Middle

Ages by tracing the mnemonic system to the point when it became much more

formalized in the universities. More importantly, Carruthers showed how the pre-

modern process of memorization revealed a prevailing understanding of how people

2003), 1–37; and now William J. Purkis, Crusading Spirituality in the Holy Land and Iberia, c. 1095–

c. 1187 (Woodbridge, 2008), 150–65.

17 See the (somewhat) similar case-studies in Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of

Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley, Calif., 1993); and Ruth Morse, Truth and

Convention in the Middle Ages: Rhetoric, Representation, and Reality (Cambridge, 1991), 233–6.

18 Hayden White, ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’, in The Content of the

Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987), 20; and Keith Michael

Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1990), 56.

19 Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge,

1990). See also Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago, 1966). Yates, however, virtually skips

the Middle Ages, jumping from antiquity to the Friars.

6

Introduction: Looking for Charlemagne

dealt with the past. The Middle Ages placed little emphasis on the objective

reconstruction of past events. Instead, recollection was an interpretive act, a

selective process that chose what was thought to be valuable and worthy of

remembrance. Hence, remembering allowed one to impart new meaning to events

or texts.20

Scholars have begun to use these insights into the memorial process to say

something not just about how individuals remembered, but how communities

did as well. How individuals remembered shaped the texts they produced and the

stories they told, which both in turn shaped how a community perceived the past.

But this was a two-way street. Communities shaped how they remembered the past

just as much as the past gave order and meaning to a group’s collective experience.21

Some medieval communities seem to have been well aware of this dynamic and

sought to manipulate the meaning of the past by presenting either artificial

continuity or radical discontinuity in the timeline.22 For example, if medieval

monasteries found a version of the past to be unsuited to their current political,

social, or religious needs, they might simply recast it by rewriting or forging some

sources, or destroying others. As Gabrielle Spiegel so eloquently summarized, the

‘past [became] a repository of . . . dreams and desires, both because it [could] offer

up a consoling image of what once was and is no longer, and because it [contained]

the elements by which to reopen the contest, to offer an alternative vision to a now

unpalatable present’.23

The implications of this conception are staggering. If, as seems to be the case,

almost every medieval source participated to a greater or lesser degree in this

dialectical struggle between memory and history, we should profoundly rethink

how we understand our sources; especially those that take subjects in the past but

20 Events too were read as texts, always pregnant with meaning and needful of interpretation.

Carruthers, Book of Memory, 25, 89, 168–9; Janet Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in

the Reconstruction of the Past (Cambridge, 1992), 285–93; Dominic Janes, ‘The World and its Past as

Christian Allegory in the Early Middle Ages’, in Uses of the Past, 110–13; and Hans-Werner Goetz,

‘The Concept of Time in the Historiography of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, in Gerd Althoff,

Johannes Fried, and Patrick J. Geary (eds.), Medieval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory,

Historiography (Cambridge, 2002), 160–4.

21 Although not often explicitly mentioned much in these studies of communities and memorial

culture, Brian Stock’s ‘textual community’ seems to lurk just behind them. Brian Stock, The

Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth

Centuries (Princeton, 1983), esp. 88–240. See also James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory

(Oxford, 1992), esp. pp. x–xii, 200–2.

22 This modern approach to the sources owes much to the work of Michel Foucault on the primacy

of power as a motivational factor; e.g. see Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tr.

Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977).

23 Spiegel, Past as Text, 211–12. On monasteries, see esp. Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance:

Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium (Princeton, 1994), 6, 119–65; also Amy

G. Remensnyder, ‘Topographies of Memory: Center and Periphery in High Medieval France’, in Gerd

Althoff, Johannes Fried, and Patrick J. Geary (eds.), Medieval Concepts of the Past: Ritual, Memory,

Historiography (Cambridge, 2002), 193–214. On this dynamic regarding the Holocaust, see Hayden

White, ‘Commentary’, History of the Human Sciences, 9 (1996), 123–38; and idem, ‘Historical

Emplotment and the Problem of Truth in Historical Representation’, in Figural Realism: Studies in the

Mimesis Effect (Baltimore, 1999), 27–42.

Introduction: Looking for Charlemagne

7

which modern scholars often consider to be ‘fiction’.24 For instance, modern

scholars sometimes puzzle about how to deal with hagiography, especially since

these texts demonstrate a problematic relationship to (the modern understanding

of) truth similar to that found in vernacular epic or romance. But a better

understanding of the tensions between memory and history, and fact and fiction,

during the Middle Ages shows that this problem is a straw man––a problem of our

own creation that dates to the nineteenth-century philological, social scientific

tendency towards classification. The Middle Ages did not define its terms as we

do now, nor did it classify by genre in the same way we do.25 When we categorize

these texts, we separate when we should be lumping. Cutting early medieval texts

up by genre seems to imply that the subjects of these texts, to some degree, did not

inhabit the same intellectual ‘space’ for their audiences. In other words, the deeds of

Charlemagne as recorded in a chronicle were thought to have been conceptualized

as somehow necessarily different from the deeds found in the Vita of his contem-

porary, St William of Gellone, or those found in the Oxford Chanson de Roland.

We should be uncomfortable arguing this point.

Evidence abounds that medieval readers and writers made no such distinction

between types of texts. Early Anglo-Saxon hagiographies, annals, and chronicles

dealt with the tension between memory and history in quite similar ways. Hugh of

Fleury (d. c.1118), his contemporary Albert of Aachen, and Hariulf of Saint-