Project 4. The Construction of the Past

One cultural activity will receive particular attention, i.e. the representation and construction of the past. No doubt, the local past was to a great extent made relevant and interpreted through religious ceremony, displays, works of art, oral storytelling and debate etc. These 'texts' and contexts are by and large lost to us, although some attempts at reconstruction may still be rewarding. Most of what we know has come down to us via the written record - stretching from brief notices to ambitious works of historiography. Not only do the written sources reflect some of the other contexts; the written discourse itself also transformed the entire discourse on the past (cf. 1 above).

The study of medieval historiography started in the 19th century, mainly in Germany, as part of the background study of the narrative sources necessary to arrive at valid conclusions about historical events, notably by uncovering their bias ('Quellenkunde'). From the beginning of the 20th century, this led to a greater interest in the texts themselves and their political and theological ideas and to analyses of genre and literary models. This tradition remains indispensable for the study of medieval historiography, but has partly been surpassed by more recent developments (see themes 2-3).

Further, only a small part of the enormous amount of historical writings preserved from most parts of medieval Europe has been studied from this point of view. Most of the texts earlier than around 1200 have been edited and used, but have only to a limited extent been analysed as historiography. A large part of the material later than 1200 and particularly from the last centuries of the Middle Ages is still not edited, and very little scholarly treatment of it exists. Historiographical texts are mostly of a later date in the periphery than the centre, most of them dating from the 13th century and later. Although less numerous, they are nevertheless substantial and have so far not received the attention they deserve. Most of the texts are in Latin, which makes it easy to do comparative research on Scandinavian and Eastern European historiography even for non-specialists on the history and languages of the latter region.

In recent decades a good number of substantial studies of individual historiographical works from the periphery have appeared (e.g. Friis-Jensen 1987; Bagge 1991, 1996a). Significant progress has also been made within the broader study of medieval historiography (e.g. Guenée 1980; Spiegel 1990, 1993; Kersken 1995; Goetz 1999; Bagge 1997c, 2001; Mortensen 1994, 1995, 2000a). These foundations are important for setting off in a comparative direction and for linking analysis of the historical discourse to the subject of cultural exchange between periphery and centre.

When the cultures of the northern and eastern European periphery took to writing (roughly during the period c. 1000-1300), they were given the opportunity to make a lasting record of more or less recent local events. But they were also given in one stroke - by the very act of being schooled in Latin letters - a much more extensive past, i.e. the biblical and Roman past as it had emerged in Late Antiquity and was presented to the High Middle Ages as a 'patristic package' through the fundamental textual transmission of the Carolingian age (investigated in the European Science Foundation project The Transformation of the Roman World, in which Mortensen took part). The dynamics of this simultaneous encounter, with both writing and a prestigious written tradition, have not been explored in a satisfactory way. It gave a variety of results which need to be studied comparatively.

One question, which forms the first theme of the project and has been in international focus recently (e.g. Wunderli 1994), concerns 'national identity', i.e. tracing the origin of a particular people back to a mythic past which brings the people in question into the mainstream of universal history. Most important in this respect is the attempt to link one's own people to the Romans and find parallels between its history and that of the Romans. The tendency seems to be that the peoples in the periphery try to get closer to the Roman model than those in the centre.

However, cultural identity is not only articulated chronologically through mythical foundation and rhetorical elaboration of a distant pedigree. It is also signalled linguistically (through choice of literary language, vernacular or Latin, cf. 1 above), through ethnographical, religious (i.a. hagiographical) and geographical delimitations of 'our people' (Mundal 1998b, cf. Projects 2, 3 above). In Denmark, Sweden and Poland, Latin letters established themselves profoundly, and the historical discourse was directly influenced by contemporary (and ancient) Latin literature. By contrast, the majority of historical works in Norway and Iceland were in Old Norse, although a Latin historiographical tradition also existed. The Old Norse historiographical literature, the sagas, has been considered one of the most original products of the local culture. Much remains to be done, however, before we have a full understanding of the relationship between the various traditions within the periphery and between the latter and the centre (Bagge 1997b).

This leads over to our second theme, the historiographical texts as literature. Questions concerning genre, rhetoric, composition, classical models, etc. are not new, but this approach has recently got a new impetus through 'the linguistic turn' in studies of modern historical writing (White 1973, 1987; Ankersmit 1983, 1995, Topolski 1997). Various levels of the referentiality claim, strategies of emplotment, the persuasive power of metaphors, the play on fiction and much more are explored in such discourse analyses. They are extremely fruitful for medieval historiography, especially for the 12th and 13th centuries which are our main concern, because this was a flourishing period for both Latin and vernacular historical writing and a new play on fiction and a tension between Latin authority and vernacular writing came into being (Green 1994; Mortensen 1997; Spiegel 1993, 1997). Such questions have to some extent been approached successfully in studies of individual texts, but again the comparative method has not been employed in any systematic way. Here a comparison between northern and eastern Europe could probably lead to interesting conclusions about cultural exchange: Did German historiography play the role one would expect as a point of departure in both areas, or was it neglected in favour of northern French cultural dominance? Furthermore, the literary aspect of historiography also includes questions related to the production, preservation, and circulation of handwritten books (above, Project 1)

The third theme concerns the relationship between, historiography, political culture, and state formation (cf. 3 above). To what extent can historical writings be used to trace the evolution from early medieval 'personal politics' and 'face-to-face society' to a more centralised and bureaucratic society; and to what extent are they determined by ecclesiastical ideology or influence from the Bible or Classical historiography and rhetoric? Ernst Robert Curtius's work on the Classical tradition (1948) goes far in the direction of emphasising the common Latin culture of the Middle Ages, largely independent of time and place and concrete circumstances. William Brandt's rigid distinction between a clerical and an aristocratic 'mode of perception' (Brandt 1966), although from a completely different point of view, results in a somewhat similar stressing of the common and a priori aspects of the texts. By contrast, a number of recent works seek to understand the texts in the light of actual norms and ways of behaviour in contemporary society (e.g. Miller 1990; Bagge 1991, 1996b, 2000, 2002; Althoff 1996, 1997). Another 'contextual' approach is represented by Gabrielle Spiegel's attempt to understand early 13th century French historiography not as the reflection of actual norms and patterns of behaviour but as a subtle strategy in favour of particular solutions to controversial issues at the time, in accordance with recent theories on the linguistic aspects of power (Spiegel 1993, cf. Wuthnow 1989). Literary and rhetorical analyses are clearly needed in order to understand medieval historiography, but should not be isolated from the contextual study of politics and society.

A fourth theme is the relationship between secular and ecclesiastical culture for which historiography forms an important source. William Brandt's distinction between a clerical and an aristocratic 'mode of perception' (Brandt 1966) is no doubt too rigid, but there are clear differences in our texts between the understanding of history as the history of salvation on the one hand, and as the celebration of war heroes and clever politicians on the other. Old Norse historiography is often regarded as a particularly clear example of the latter approach, but parallels are to be found in the rest of Europe, particularly in the Later Middle Ages. Tracing these different attitudes in various parts of the periphery will contribute to understanding the tension between religious and secular culture within Western Christendom.

The field of historiography is thus the focus of widely different approaches to medieval textual culture and its link to society, besides offering great opportunities for a new understanding of the relationship between centre and periphery and of the cultural variety of the periphery itself.