New Introduction to the Faces of Time
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
New Introduction to The Faces of Time It has been twenty-five years sinceThe Faces of Time: Portrayal of the Past in Old French and Latin Historical Narrative of the Anglo-Norman Regnum, went to press in 1994, and so many editions, and translations, and studies on individual medieval historians, and modern/postmodern theories of histor- ical writing, as well as general studies of twelfth-century historical writing (including culture and political climate) have appeared in those intervening years that it would be impossible to acknowledge, let alone address, all of them here: the past twenty-five years have witnessed a veritable explosion of writing on historiography more broadly as well as, more particularly, on the historiography of twelfth-century England and the Anglo-Angevin kingdom.1 Given that recent abundance, my aim in this new Introduction is not to attempt to cover all that has been published from 1993/1994 to the present (for Geoffrey of Monmouth alone, for instance, any list can only scratch the surface), but to point to those approaches and studies that I believe will be most useful to students and scholars, and that will perhaps show how new orientations in historiography might today influence my thinking—and I shall also take the opportunity to address some of the is- sues and queries raised by reviewers of the original 1994 study. Although press requirements have precluded the publication of a completely new edition, I am very grateful to the University of Texas Press for giving me this opportunity to make limited emendations to the text of the original edition, and especially to Sharon Casteel, Digital Publishing Manager at the Press, for her care and generosity in entering the changes into the e-book. The Press has also provided on its website a link to this new Introduction so that it can be accessed by readers of both the paper- back of the 1994 version (now available in print-on-demand), as well as in the corrected electronic version. Let me point out, however, that this new Introduction is not intended to replace the original Introduction, but instead to supplement it. Thus, I shall not repeat here all the details of the original: readers should expect to consult that original, including the notes, to understand the orientation of the 1994 study, and to see this present In- troduction as a way of acknowledging what, twenty-five years later, I would now like to update or clarify in my arguments in light of recent discoveries and discussions (a number of which are referenced in the notes here). I would also like to express my debt of gratitude to the eight review- ers from the mid-to-late 1990s for their candor and suggestions, as well as 1 On the problematic nature of the term “Anglo-Angevin kingdom” (and similar terms), see John Gillingham, The Angevin Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 2nd ed.), pp. 1-5. 2 most recently to Glyn S. Burgess who has very thoughtfully and thoroughly weighed my translation changes, to Ian Short for his additional input on the translations and review of my updating of material on Gaimar, and to Jane H. M. Taylor whose critical acumen has greatly benefitted this new Intro- duction. They are of course absolved of any responsibility—for I have not always been persuaded to take their excellent advice. Any errors that remain are my own. * * * * * * * The commentary and updating in this new Introduction are structured as follows: 1) Introduction a) Goals, Texts, and Methodologies b) Structure of the Book 2) Chapter 1 3) Chapter 2 4) Chapter 3 5) Conclusion 6) Updates to Editions and English Translations 7) Comments on Select Translation Changes and Terminology 1. INTRODUCTION a. Goals, Texts, and Methodologies: The Faces of Time,2 which was, I emphasize, a literary study of twelfth-centu- 2 The title of my book was originally inspired by the title of Peter Munz’s The Shapes of Time: A New Look at the Philosophy of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1977). Munz sought to reinterpret the nature and philosophy of history, arguing against the dominant positivist view that history is the study of an objective reality (considered by Munz and others to be “uncapturable” in any “purely representational” form), instead arguing that the only im- portant difference between history, fiction, and myth—all of which tell stories—is that history is preoccupied with locating and relating events in space and time. Although I have no intention of debating here the relative merits of the various philosophical positions on the writing of his- tory—on the relation between textuality, the non-referentiality of language (skepticism toward language’s capacity to refer to events outside itself), and historical research—like Robert Stein, I would like to underscore that “what this multiplicity of perspectives demonstrates [is] that textuality is an inescapable part of what the historian is faced with at every stage of work, from the analysis of sources to the creation of the finished argument” (“Literary Criticism and the Evidence for History,” in Writing Medieval History, ed. Nancy Partner, London: Hodder Arnold, 2005, pp. 67-87, cited here at p. 81). Very useful is Gabrielle Spiegel’s articulation of a “middle ground” (see n. 3 below), where one recognizes the importance of documentary research in the advancement of historical knowledge (the quest for “what actually happened,” even though that 3 ry Old French (verse) and Latin (prose) historical narrative had four major goals: 1. to explore the visions of history (including the authors’ discus- sions of historical narrative and their role as producers of that narrative), the portrayal of historical figures, and the tech- niques of emplotment3 of Latin and Old French historical nar- may be impossible to recreate “perfectly”), while at the same time acknowledging the critical importance of form and the unavoidability of “narrative spin” on the part of historians—me- dieval and modern—in the creation of historical texts. The medieval historians who are the subject of this study, however, did believe in a history that existed beyond the texts they used and those they created, as well as in the attainability of the more traditional criteria of objectivity and truth, although they didn’t always achieve them or reproduce them (cf. Faces, pp. xiii-xiv; all references hereafter will be to this shortened title with pagination from the original 1994 publication). 3 “Emplotment” is a term coined by Hayden White in Metahistory to describe the ways in which historians fashion their source material into narratives. White argues that historical nar- ratives encode historical data, which by themselves do not constitute a story, into four possible plot types—tragic, comic, romantic, or ironic—each accomplished through the use of the cor- responding tropes of metaphor, metonomy, synecdoche, and irony. Historical events—or series of events such as the French Revolution—can be emplotted in different ways that will produce different interpretations and must be evaluated, while keeping in mind the subjective role of the historian, since even in more traditional accounts of historical phenomena, historical narrative is not a “neutral ‘container’ of historical fact… stories, like factual statements, are linguistic enti- ties and belong to the order of discourse” (“Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth in Historical Representation,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedlander, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992, pp. 30-53, cited here at p. 37). Although White was perceived as a “narrativist” particularly early in his career, based largely on the literary, formalist techniques set out in Metahistory which was informed by his intention to “treat the historical work as what it most manifestly is—that is to say a verbal struc- ture in the form of a prose narrative that purports to be a model, or icon, of past structures and processes in the interest of explaining what they were by representing them” (p. 2), according to Gabrielle Spiegel, he has been wrongly credited with the inauguration of the “linguistic turn” in the philosophy of history, that is, in parallel with other fields, the interpretive emphasis on structures of language and skepticism toward language’s ability to represent “reality” (“Above, About and Beyond the Writing of History: A Retrospective View of Hayden White’s Metahistory on the 40th Anniversary of its Publication,” Rethinking History 17.4 (2013): 492-508, cited here at pp. 492-93). Despite White’s “attack on the illusion of transparent representation and objec- tive treatment of the past” (Spiegel, p. 494) and certain commonalities with those who place sole emphasis on narrative form in historical discourse, White does not push the radical position that one can never get “through” language to reach a “real past” to the extreme of denying the past—that since truth is relative and the past uncapturable in any absolute sense, by extension, that the past never really existed and all is invention or the fiction of the historian—an argument which, when stretched, can inform such reactionary positions as denial of the historicity of the Holocaust, for example; see also Spiegel: “More fatal for the historical consideration of literature than even the fracturing of the literary work into multiple and conflicting codes was the way in which semiotics inevitably dehistoricized literature by denying the importance of a historically situated authorial consciousness, a dehistoricization of the literary text that was tantamount to the denial of history” (“History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 65.1 (1990): 59-86, cited here at p. 62) . Where I have used the term “emplot- 4 rative from the Anglo-Norman regnum, ca.