New Introduction to the Faces of Time

Home , Geoffrey Gaimar, Helier, Robert Curthose, Rollo, Roman de Rou, Wace

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 historical 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 issues 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 reviewers 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 important 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 history—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’ discussions of historical narrative and their role as producers of that narrative), the portrayal of historical figures, and the techniques 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—medieval 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 narratives 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 structure 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 objective 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. 1120-ca.1180, a political sphere and era which saw a tremendous burgeoning in Latin historiographical production as well as the birth of historical writing in the vernacular (French), primarily focused on national origins (in verse; vernacular prose history was not to appear until the thirteenth century)4 and romance; ment” I refer to the more general sense of the fashioning of historical narrative, not to any strict adherence to generic categories or tropes or to an abandonment of the search for evidence in reconstructing the past; on generic categories, metaphors of historical presentation and tropes, see White’s most well known work, Metahistory: the Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Cen- tury Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). See also idem, “Introduction, Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality,” Rethinking History 9. 2-3 (2005): 147-57; Gabrielle Spiegel, “Theory into Practice: Reading Medieval Chronicles,” in The Medieval Chronicle: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on the Medieval Chronicle, ed. Erik Kooper (Amsterdam; Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1999), pp. 1-12, and eadem, The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), esp. ch. 3 where Spiegel postulates a “middle ground” between the postmodern loss of confidence in the referentiality of language and historians’ use of documents and artifacts to “reveal” the past (pp. 44-56, originally published as “Toward a Theory of a Middle Ground,” in Historia A Debate: actas del Congreso Internacional de “A Historia a Debate” celebrado el 7-11 de Julio de 1993 en Santiago de Compostela, ed. Carlos Barros, 3 vols., Santiago de Compostela, 1995, I, 169-76). 4 In addition to articles too numerous to list individually (except when referenced specifically), and books on individual historians, since 1994 a number of book-length studies have appeared on the extraordinary abundance of historical writing in (or associated with) Anglo-Nor- man England in this period including the appearance of vernacular historiography, studies often formulated with the concomitant rise of romance in mind. See especially Emily Albu, The Nor- mans in their Histories: Propaganda, Myth and Subversion (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001); Laura Ashe, Fiction and History in England, 1066-1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Peter Damian-Grint, The New Historians of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance: Inventing Vernacular Authority (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999); Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, King Arthur and the Myth of History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004); Laurence Mathey-Maille, Écritures du passé: Histoires des ducs de Normandie, Essais sur le Moyen Âge 35 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007); Monica Otter, Inventiones: Fiction and Referentiality in Twelfth-Century English Historical Writing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); David Rollo, Historical Fabrication, Ethnic Fable, and French Romance in Twelfth-Century England (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1998); Leah Shopkow, History and Community: Norman Historical Writing in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1997); Gabrielle Spiegel, The Past as Text; Robert Stein, Reality Fictions: Romance, History, and Govern- mental Authority, 1025-1180 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006); Charity Urbanski, Writing History for the King: Henry II and the Politics of Vernacular Historiography (Itha- ca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Michelle R. Warren, History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain, 1100-1300, Medieval Cultures 22 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); and Françoise Laurent, Pour Dieu et pour le roi: Rhétorique et idéologie dans l’Histoire des ducs de Normandie de Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Essais sur le Moyen Âge 47 (Paris: Champion, 2010). On the advent of historical narrative in French prose, see Gabrielle Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), which remains a seminal work on this subject; cf. as well Damian-Grint, The New Historians, ch. 3, “The Rise of Prose,” pp. 172-207. 5 2. to describe and understand how perceptions of personality, the individual, and the individual within groups informed the portrayal of historical figures and kingship primarily, but also less central secular figures (male and female) as well as religious (male and female); 3. to delineate the narrative elements and approaches that the French texts shared with their Latin contemporaries—or sources—and to propose where they diverged, and the multiple implications of those intersections and differences. To facilitate comparative contextualization of fairly similar material, I chose texts on two of the most compelling topics of the period, where writers sought both to explain English origins to the French-speaking ruling elite and to participate in the literary creation of a new world: the Norman conquest of England and the legendary history of Britain. The primary texts in question were William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum and His- toria Novella, Orderic Vitalis’s Historia Ecclesiastica, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae,5 Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, Wace’s Roman de Brut and Roman de Rou, and Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Chronique des ducs de Normandie;6 the works of other major Latin historians of the period such as Henry of Huntingdon and Robert of Torigni received attention where relevant but not full treatment; 4. to set the authors’ visions of history, portrayal of individuals, and techniques of narrative emplotment within cultural, socio-political, and sometimes codicological, contexts, focusing on circumstances of production and the effects of those circumstances on the primary social functions of the texts—educative, documentary, or legitimizing—both intended or actual (as far as we are able to determine, given the often scarce evidence beyond the texts themselves); 5. to question the relevance of—and ultimately set aside—the

5 Geoffrey’s Historia refers to the so-called “vulgate” version, unless otherwise indicated, and not to the First Variant (The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, II: The First Variant Version: A Critical Edition, ed. Neil Wright, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1988), the Second Variant (H. D. Emanuel, “Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae: A Second Variant Version,” Medium Ævum 35 (1966): 103-11) or other versions. On the manuscript traditions, see n. 108 below. For references to the First Variant and other versions in Faces, see pp. 205-6 n. 42, 207- 8 nn. 71 and 101, 215-16 nn. 76 and 80, 228 n. 144, 230 n. 187, and 233 n. 237. See n. 37 below on David Burchmore’s forthcoming edition and translation of the First Variant. 6 For the editions and translations of these primary texts used in The Faces of Time, please refer to section 6 below, “Updates to Editions and English Translations.” 6 long-standing models of homogenous audiences perceived as a binary by many scholars along the lines of class and gender— male, knightly, vernacular, epic/history vs. female, vernacular, romance—and male, clerical, Latin, history (non-romance) vs. female, cloistered, vernacular, romance.

Although some readers may have taken my one-sentence observation of 1994 that “no one has yet proposed a comprehensive poetics of historical discourse for this period, perhaps due to the enormous diversity of historical writing, even in the twelfth century alone,”7 to be a stated goal or a commitment to formulate such a poetics within the scope of Faces, it was never my intention, or presumption, to develop a systematic poetics of historical writing but instead to offer a contribution to the elaboration of a poetics. Nor was the book meant to be an exhaustive treatment of each of the texts taken holistically, beyond what was necessary to put them in the context of the aims of the book.8 The aim was to conduct a close reading of a small— but major—group of texts in a focused way, through the three lenses of authorial stance and historical philosophy (Chapter 1), character portrayal (Chapter 2), and social context and function (Chapter 3), ultimately with a view toward appreciating the dynamics of traditional Latin prose historical narrative and the new Old French verse histories written during the age of the rise of romance (though romance itself was not a focus), in an age where historians may have been more obsessed with distinguishing “truth” from “fiction” than we are in the postmodern world, all the while blurring the boundaries (see n. 16 below). Some readers may perhaps have looked for more discussion, in the original Introduction, of the various methodologies or analytical tools used, including Lanham’s taxonomy (discussed in Chapter 1), Robert Alter’s ex- position of modes of biblical characterization (discussed in Chapter 2) or the authors’ frequent stance as translators, and medieval meanings of translation (referred to throughout the book). In this new Introduction, please see below under Chapter 1 for a discussion of Lanham’s taxonomy and meanings of translation, and Chapter 2 for biblical (and other) modes of characterization.

7 Faces, p. 1. 8 Faces, p. 203, n. 27 to the Introduction: “This study is not meant to represent all historical writing in this period. Its aim is to illustrate patterns of narration found in an important group of texts; further research may prove that these patterns are representative of other traditions as well.” 7 b. Structure of the Book:

While it is possible that some readers might have preferred that Chapter 3 on circumstances of patronage and audience expectations be the first chapter, so that information about social context might have informed their reading of medieval historians’ philosophy of history in Chapter 1 and modes of characterization in Chapter 2, the original structure was intended to first address fundamental issues of the medieval writers’ attitudes toward the interrelationship between history and fiction (Chapter 1), since those attitudes inevitably informed their portrayal of historical individuals and by necessity, up to a point, explained them (Chapter 2). As when the book first appeared, readers are free to read the chapters out of order, since on many levels, the chapters can easily stand as independent though interrelated studies. In what follows, I will discuss each of the chapters in turn, with the aim of setting and re-examining them within the contexts of present-day scholarship. Unlike in the 1994 book, where the notes for all three chapters appeared as endnotes following Chapter 3 (this being the preference of the Press) and were accompanied by a complete bibliography, there will be no new separate bibliography in this new Introduction; readers should refer to the footnotes which contain bibliographical details of recent publications, in addition to some earlier references not appearing in the 1994 publication.

2. CHAPTER ONE: The Task and Role of the Historian

In the introduction to The Fiction of History, Alexander Macfie traces the transformation—in fact, the paradigm shift—in the perception and practice of history as a discipline, from the middle of the twentieth century to the second decade of the twenty-first.9 He writes: When I was at university in Manchester in the 1950s, history was uncompromisingly empirical, objective, inferential, realist and representational. It aspired to employ research and analysis— methods apparently drawn from the natural sciences…Lewis B. Namier…defined history… as the study of human affairs, con- crete events, fixed in time and space…10 [E.H.] Carr concluded that history is a continuous interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past, a process of selection in terms of historical significance, and a ‘se- 9 The Fiction of History, ed. Alexander Lyon Macfie, Routledge Approaches to History 7 (Mil- ton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2015), Introduction, pp. 1-9 (cited here at p. 1). 10 L. B. Namier, “History” in Avenues of History (London: Macmillan, 1952). 8 lective system’ not only of cognitive, but also of causal, orientation to reality.11 According to Alun Munslow, this type of realist and representational history as practiced in universities in the mid-twentieth century originated not only in nineteenth-century positivism but also from the rejection of the nineteenth-century idealism of philosophers including William James, Bertrand Russell, and George Moore.12 Other historians and philosophers of history trace it back more specifically to the work of German historian Leopold von Ranke who famously prescribed that the historian should try to describe the past “as it actually happened” using documentary evidence from archives; others trace it even further back to the early modern period.13 Regardless of the origins of this form of “realist and representational history,” Macfie outlines “the assault on history that took place, or at least reached a cre- scendo, in the second half of the twentieth century” as seen in the work of major philosophical figures including Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, Barthes who considered historical narrative “just ‘a particular form of fiction,’ in which the authorial ‘I’ is hidden” in order to give the impression of objectivity, and Derrida who maintained that since rhetorical elements such as metaphor are “devoid of all fixed meaning” one must conclude that “…as a result, all knowledge conveyed by language is in effect unreliable, most of all perhaps the knowledge of history.”14 This paradigm shift in modern times transformed perceptions of historical narrative from “a straightforward means of describing a real past (what actually happened) to being little more than a literary construct, a largely inadequate means of describing a past that may or may not have existed, at least in the manner conventionally supposed.” It resulted in the so-called “history wars,” the debate between those for whom history be-

11 E. H. Carr, What is History? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), pp. 24, 99, 126. 12 Alan Munslow, A History of History (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2012). 13 As Monica Otter notes, Ranke, whether “fairly or not, … has come to stand for a posi- tivistic view that treats historiographical texts as more or less unproblematic sources of factual information and tends to disregard the poetics of historical narrative altogether, except in so far as it helps establish the trustworthiness” of sources (“Functions of Fiction in Historical Writing,” in Writing Medieval History, pp. 109-32, cited here at p. 124 n. 1). 14 Macfie, Introduction, The Fiction of History, pp. 2-3; Roland Barthes, “Historical Dis- course,” trans. Peter Wexler, in Structuralism: A Reader, ed. Michael Lane (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 145-55; orig. pub. “Le discours de l’histoire,” Social Science Information 6 (1967): 63-75 (also in Barthes, Le Bruissement de la langue: essais critiques IV, Paris: Seuil, 1984, pp. 163-77); Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” in idem, Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 207- 72; orig. pub. “La mythologie blanche (la métaphore dans le texte philosophique),” Poétique 5 (1971): 1-52, and in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972), pp. 247-324. 9 came “entirely or in part, a sort of fiction and the concept of ‘true history’ an oxymoron,” as opposed to those who have been largely resistant to the postmodern challenge, who often—understandably—take umbrage at the thought that what they write could be construed as fiction.15 However, this postmodern lack of faith in the representational capacity of language and of historical writing should not be read back into the medieval period. We should not imagine that doubts of this sort were shared by medieval historians for whom reality—in fact, a spectrum of realities—existed “out there,” awaiting their formulation to bring that or those realities to life. The medieval historians treated in this study also faced a perceptual/conceptual divide between history and fiction—historia and fabula—between narratives that needed to be true and those that could be permitted to be untrue. However, while their belief that historical narrative could and should embrace truth and eschew falsehood may be shared by some modern historians on the theoretical plane, in practice, what defined “falsehood” as opposed to “fiction” for medieval writers was very different from our own perceptions; these differences are especially evident for example in their views of prophecy, miracles, and other forms of perceived divine intervention, as well as in their use of idealized historical figures, rhetorical set pieces, and legends as historical “evidence.” 16 In addition we need to keep in mind that “twelfth-century historians…tended to think of language 15 Macfie, Introduction, The Fiction of History, pp. 1-2. For excellent examples of recent work by philosophers of history, historians, and literary critics, from various sides of these issues, see The Fiction of History, ed. Macfie;The Sage Handbook of Historical Theory, ed. Nancy Partner and Sarah Foot (Los Angeles and London: Sage Publications, 2013); and Writing Medieval History, ed. Nancy Partner. 16 On medieval views of history and fiction and the often-blurred boundaries between those two “poles,” see esp. Monica Otter, “Functions of Fiction in Historical Writing”; Nancy F. Part- ner, “Medieval Histories and Modern Realism: Yet Another Origin of the Novel,” Modern Lan- guage Notes 114.4 (1999): 857-73; Robert Stein, “L’Après et son double: Reading Medieval His- tory after the Linguistic Turn,” Modern Language Notes 127.5 (2012): S243-S266; the somewhat less theoretical and more text-focused essays in Entre fiction et histoire: Troie et Rome au Moyen Âge, ed. Emmanuèle Baumgartner and Laurence Harf-Lancner (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1997); and Medieval Narratives between History and Fiction: From the Centre to the Periphery of Europe c. 1100-1400, ed. Panagiotis A. Agapitos and Lars Boje Mortensen (Copen- hagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2012). See also Chapter 3, “Historical Romance: A Genre in the Making,” Laura Ashe, Fiction and History in England, pp. 121-58; Dominique Boutet, Formes littéraires et conscience historique aux origines de la littérature française (1100-1250) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1999), esp. pp. 1-40; Peter Ainsworth, “Legendary History: Historia and Fabula,” in Historiography in the Middle Ages, ed. Deborah Mauskopf Delayannis (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 387-416; Marianne Ailes, “Early French Chronicle—History or Literature?” Journal of Medieval History 26.3 (2000): 301-12; and Laurence Mathey-Maille, Écritures du passé, pp. 189-219. For an illuminating discussion of the borderlands between history and fiction, though not specific to the medieval world, see Beverley Southgate,History Meets Fiction (Har- low: Pearson, 2009), esp. pp. 1-46. 10 as a network of symbols capable of pointing to the physical world and then toward a higher reality, not as a self-referential network of symbols never to be escaped because language itself can never be escaped.”17 As seen in Chapter 2, this belief in the capacity of language to refer to earthly individuals and events as well as pointing to a higher reality also manifested itself in the idealized presentation of historical figures that were formed most often “under the aegis of veracity and idealism, not veracity and realism.” 18 While this may seem naïve or paradoxical to us—a belief in historical veracity and the goal of “accuracy” coexisting with an often-overriding attachment to spiritual (as well as earthly) ideals—it is indeed what we find at nearly every turn in our medieval historians’ paths. Although the range of material from which they drew their “evidence” was much broader than that of recent historians (whether the latter evince more postmodern, “linguistic” leanings or more traditional view- points), medieval historians still viewed themselves as the primary filter through which data passed, even though their views varied as to the extent to which it was their responsibility to evaluate those data. In addition to isolated authorial interjections at various junctures in the texts, prologues and epilogues are often the privileged sites that allow us to examine the historians’ views of their task—or at least, the ways in which they wished their task to be perceived by their audience. As Peter Damian-Grint establishes for vernacular historians—and the same is often true of their Latin contemporaries—“the presentation of the seriousness and the auctoritas of vernacular history-writing provided the starting and finishing points of their work”; through their interjections in the texts, “in which they reiterate their truthfulness and reliability, they are constantly invading their own narrative space in order to ‘authorise’ it.”19 It is precisely our six historians’ approaches to authorization of their material that forms the main focus of Chapter 1. William of Malmesbury’s stated emphasis is on selection: he lays the responsibility for veracity of the material squarely at the feet of his sources, saying that he has been selective and he hopes they have been as well; each author needs to be an independent judge. He praises moderation and writes that he has been able to steer a “middle course” since he has both Norman and English blood in his veins (if only things were that simple!). Not one to have frequent recourse to modesty topoi, William envisages his role as a teacher and leader, the “‘only

17 Faces, p. xiv. 18 Faces, p. 55. 19 The New Historians, p. xi. 11 or at least the first’ distinguished follower of Bede.”20 Whereas William valued moderation and selectivity as tools of critical judgment, insisting on proper selection of materials to facilitate historical analysis, according to Orderic, it is the audience that should interpret the “facts” laid out by the historian, not the historian himself. Evaluation of the material by the historian was not stated as a major concern for Orderic, though he was “not unaware of the process of evaluation involved in writing the type of history which he undertook—for he certainly did not write an ‘annalem historiam’ (annal), regardless of his apology to that effect.”21 Like William—though perhaps not to the same extent as William who expresses a sense of the uniqueness of his mission to carry on after Bede—Orderic sets his Historia Ecclesiastica in the established sub-tradition of the Norman histories of Dudo of Saint-Quentin, William of Jumièges, and William of Poitiers22 and the nascent sub-tradition of crusade history within the broad-

20 Faces, p. 11. For recent discussions of William of Malmesbury’s views of his role as historian, and his place in the cultural and intellectual milieu of his time, see Björn Weiler, “William of Malmesbury, King Henry I, and the Gesta Regum Anglorum,” Anglo-Norman Studies XXXI: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 2008, ed. C. P. Lewis (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009), pp. 157- 77, and idem “William of Malmesbury on Kingship,” History 90 (2005): 3-22; Sigbjørn Olsen Sønnesyn, William of Malmesbury and the Ethics of History (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012); Eliza- beth Freeman, “Sailing between Scylla and Charybdis: William of Malmesbury, Historiograph- ical Innovation and the Recreation of the Anglo-Saxon Past,” Tjurunga: Australasian Benedictine Review 48 (1995): 23-37; Kristen A. Fenton, Gender, Nation and Conquest in the Works of William of Malmesbury (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008), eadem, “Ideas and Ideals of Secular Masculini- ty in William of Malmesbury,” Women’s History Review 16.5 (2007): 755-72; and Rebecca L. Slitt, “The Two Deaths of William Longsword: Wace, William of Malmsbury and the Norman Past,” in Anglo-Norman Studies XXXIV: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 2011, ed. David Bates (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012), pp. 193-208. Paul Antony Hayward notes that there are points in William’s histories where “he puts on display an almost Rankean commitment to getting the facts right,” seeking to at least “seem like a relatively objective reporter,” but Hayward concludes that perhaps more often “the strength of William’s commitment to accuracy is often in doubt” (“The Importance of Being Ambiguous: Innuendo and Legerdemain in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum and Gesta pontificum Anglorum,” Anglo-Norman Studies XXXIII: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 2010, ed. C. P. Lewis, Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011, pp. 75-102, cited here at pp. 76-77). Hayward also suggests William used a number of distancing techniques, including his “tendency to put contentious views into the mouths of others [historical figures], and to juxtapose them as alternatives,” rather than himself pronouncing controversial opinions on certain topics (p. 77). 21 Faces, p. 14 and n. 35; “Rerum euentus ut uidi uel posteris benigniter denoto … Consid- eret quisque prout sibi diuinitus inspiratum fuerit” (HE, VI, xiii, 436; “I make a record of events as I have seen or [heard of] them, for the benefit of future generations … Let each one interpret according to the inspiration he receives from heaven,” VI, xiii, 437). 22 Although Dudo of St.-Quentin can be (and has been; e.g. see R. W. Southern, “Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing I,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 20 (1970), 173-96, here p. 191) considered a “major Norman historian” (Faces, p. 16) in the sense that he wrote a major history of the Normans (for the Norman Duke Richard II) and spent 12 er scope of universal history, distinguishing himself “from those who con- fined their efforts to one abbey, one nation, one campaign, or one era.”23 Geoffrey of Monmouth was nothing if not unique among medieval historians: at best, he has been judged an inventive historian, at worst, a prevaricator, and the Historia regum Britanniae “one of the greatest romantic novels of all time.”24 The wide range of scholarly opinions regarding his considerable years of his life in Normandy, strictly speaking he was not a Norman, having been born in the Vermandois. 23 Faces, p. 17. For a range of recent studies devoted wholly or in part to Orderic (or where he figures significantly), see among others, Emily Albu,The Normans in their Histories, pp. 180- 213; Leah Shopkow, History and Community, 97-100; Pierre Bouet, “La ‘Mesnie Hellequin’ dans l’Historia Ecclesiastica d’Ordéric Vital,” in Mélanges François Kerlouégan, ed. Danièle Cosno, Ni- cole Fick, and Bruno Poulle, Annales littéraires de l’Université de Besançon 515 (Paris: Universi- té de Besançon, 1994), pp. 61-78; Marjorie Chibnall, “A Twelfth-Century View of the Historical Church: Orderic Vitalis,” in The Church Retrospective: Papers Read at the 1995 Summer Meeting and the 1996 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society, ed. Robert Swanson, Studies in Church History 33 (Woobridge: Boydell Press for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1997, pp. 115-34; repr. in eadem Piety, Power and History in Medieval England and Normandy, I, Vario- rum Collected Studies Series 683, Aldershot: Ashgate/Variorum, 2000, pp. 115-34); Kathleen Thompson, “Orderic Vitalis and Robert of Bellême,” Journal of Medieval History 20.2 (1994): 133-41; Elisabeth Mégier, “Divina Pagina and the Narration of History in Orderic Vitalis’ Historia Ecclesiastica,” Revue bénédictine 110.1-2 (2000): 106-23, and eadem, “Fortuna als Kategorie der Geschichtsdeutung im 12. Jahrhundert am Biespiel Ordericus’ Vitalis und Ottos von Freising,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 32.1 (1997): 49-70; Richard E. Barton, “Emotions and Power in Or- deric Vitalis,” Anglo-Norman Studies XXXIII: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 2010, ed. C. P. Lewis (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), pp. 41-59; Jean Blacker, “Women, Power, and Violence in Orderic Vitalis’s Historia Ecclesiastica,” in Violence against Women in Medieval Texts, ed. Anna Roberts (Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1998), pp. 44-55; Leonie V. Hicks, “Monastic Authority, Landscape, and Place in the Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis,” in Authority and Gender in Medieval and Renaissance Chronicles, ed. Juliana Dresvina and Nicholas Sparks (New- castle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), pp. 102-20; and Amanda Jane Hingst, The Written World: Past and Place in the Work of Orderic Vitalis (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009). 24 D. Dumville, “Sub-Roman Britain: History and Legend,” History, n.s. 62 (1977): 173-92, cited here at p. 175; repr. in idem Histories and Pseudo-histories of the Insular Middle Ages (Alder- shot: Variorum, 1990; retains original pagination). Acton Griscom presents a collection of opinions on Geoffrey as a romancer (Historia, ed., pp. 109-110), but was himself “perhaps the most earnest modern defender of Geoffrey as a sober historian” [from the earlier part of the twentieth century] (according to Valerie I. J. Flint, the most vocal advocate of the theory of the Historia as parody, “The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geofffrey of Monmouth: Parody and its Purpose. A Suggestion,” Speculum 54.3 (1979): 447-68, cited here at p. 448). Among the numerous treatments of Geoffrey as an historian—though without the expectation that what he wrote was necessarily factually accurate—from roughly 1920 -1990, refer to the original bibliography in Faces for J. S. P. Tatlock, Legendary History of Britain; Walter F. Schirmer, Die frühen Darstel- lungen des Arthurstoffes (Cologne, 1958); Robert Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain; Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England, pp. 206-208; R. S. Southern, “Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing: 1, The Classical Tradition from Einhard to Geoffrey of Monmouth”; Neil Wright (both editions, Historia, 1984, and First Variant, 1988); R. W. Leckie, 13 motivations or the traditions into which his work should fall reveals the richness of possible interpretations and in a way signals Geoffrey’s success at one of his central aims: writing his own version of history while defying classification.25 Not only has Geoffrey’s purported principal source, the liber

Jr., The Passage of Dominion: Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Periodization of Insular History in the Twelfth Century. See also Heinrich Pähler, Strukturuntersuchungen zur Historia Regum Britanniae des Geoffrey of Monmouth (Bonn, 1958, esp. pp. 58-60, 92-134) and Susan M. Shwartz, “The Founding and Self-betrayal of Britain: An Augustinian Approach to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae,” 10 (1981): 33-53. 25 Aside from philologists whose studies of vocabulary, names, and the origins of the same do not rely on the historicity of Geoffrey’s text as a defining concern, modern scholarly assessments of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s impact on historiography and romance through the HRB fall into at least four groups (Note: Because Galfridian scholarship is so vast and his impact was so great both in his lifetime and to the present day, these categories are being laid out for the purposes of understanding a pattern in his reception; scholarship will not be cited here under these categories in an effort to not reduce the studies to belonging in one or other “camp”): 1) historians who have argued that Geoffrey cannot be considered an historian due to the dubious contents of his work, and thus tend to discount the value of his text due to its lack of veracity; 2) historians who treat Geoffrey as an historian despite the often dubious nature of his “historical reporting” in large part because the majority of contemporaries accepted him as an historian even if they did not find truth in all he wrote; while considering Geoffrey an historian, these modern historians approach Geoffrey with a healthy dose of skepticism, notably Christopher Brooke, who wrote on the reception of the Historia: “It purported to be history, and history it was taken to be: with only a few dissentient voices the Latin world immediately accepted it as genuine, and gave it a tremendous reception and this is remarkable, since we now know that hardly a word of it is true, that there has scarcely, if ever, been a historian more mendacious than Geoffrey of Mon- mouth” (“Geoffrey of Monmouth as an Historian,” in Church and Government in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to C. R. Cheney on His Seventieth Birthday, ed. C. N. L. Brooke, D. E. Luscombe, G. H. Martin, and Dorothy Owen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976, pp. 77-91, cited here at pp. 77-78) and “There has been much argument as to how much he invented, and this will never be concluded for no one doubts that some of his sources are lost. What the pa- tient researches of Tatlock and others have made abundantly clear is that he liked to create, as it were, a mosaic pattern in which most of the pieces had some existence in his material, some of the pieces were recognisably historical, but most of the pattern was invention” (ibid, p. 79); 3) literary scholars whose focus may be narrative strategies and mentalities (rather than primarily a reconstructive understanding of the past) who treat Geoffrey as an historian despite the often dubious nature of his “historical reporting,” again, because of the reception of his contemporaries or near-contemporaries; and 4) literary critics who view Geoffrey in broader intergeneric terms, beyond that of a practitioner of historical or pseudo-historical writing, but instead as a cultural phenomenon and primary traceable source of Arthurian narrative. A range of approaches (primarily written from the vantage point of Geoffrey as an historian) in recent studies not mentioned in other contexts in this Introduction include (with apologies to many which due to space limitations cannot appear here): John Gillingham, “The Context and Purposes of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain,” Anglo-Norman Studies XIII: Proceedings of the Bat- tle Conference 1990, ed. Marjorie Chibnall (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1991), pp. 99-118 (omitted from Faces in 1994; repr. in idem, The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Iden- tity and Political Values, Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000, pp. 19-39); Michael J. Curley, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Twayne’s English Authors Series 509 (New York: Twayne, 1994); Linda Georgianna, “Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae: Lessons in Self-Fashioning for the Bastards 14 vetustissimus supposedly translated from the Welsh into Latin and brought to him by Walter archdeacon of Oxford never been identified but theHis - toria contains much material that has either been impossible to trace or to identify satisfactorily.26 Despite the mystery surrounding this work—or perhaps because of it—Geoffrey’s text has been one of the most popular and influential histories—or pseudo-histories—the West has ever known, in addition to the earliest broad-ranging source of Arthurian material. As I state in Chapter 1, there are contradictions between Geoffrey’s ostensible stance as a translator—a claim that he didn’t write the material himself but was simply “translating”—and his defensiveness toward other writers and possessiveness toward his work (claims of proprietary right over the story of the early kings of Britain) seen in the epilogue, where he warns his Welsh contemporary, Caradoc of Llancarfan, to stick to the Welsh kings, and William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon to the Saxon kings.27 Christopher Brooke proposes that Geoffrey used the topos of translation of Britain,” in Crossing Boundaries: Issues of Cultural and Individual Identity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Sally McKee, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and Renaissance 3 (Turnout: Brepols, 1999), pp. 3-25; Laurence Mathey-Maille, “Mythe troyen et histoire romaine: de Geof- froy de Monmouth au Brut de Wace,” in Entre fiction et histoire: Troie et Rome au Moyen Âge, pp. 113-25; Julia C. Crick, “The British Past and the Welsh Future: Gerald of Wales, Geoffrey of Monmouth and Arthur of Britain,” Celtica 23 (1999): 60-75; Juliette Wood, “Where Does Britain End? The Reception of Geoffrey of Monmouth in Scotland and Wales,” in The Scots and Medieval Arthurian Legend, ed. Rhiannon Purdie and Nicola Royan, Arthurian Studies 61(Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), pp. 9-23; Paul Dalton, “The Topical Concerns of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britannie: History, Prophecy, Peacemaking, and English Identity in the Twelfth Century,” Journal of British Studies 44 (2005): 688-712; Michelle R. Warren, “Making Contact: Postcolonial Perspectives through Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannie,” Arthuriana 8.4 (1998): 115-34; D. R. Howlett, “The Literary Context of Geoffrey of Monmouth,” Arthuriana 5.3 (1995): 25-66; Fiona Tolhurst, Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Feminist Origins of the Arthurian Legend, Arthurian and Courtly Cultures (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), eadem, Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Translation of Female Kingship, Arthurian and Courtly Cultures (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), and eadem, “Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannie and the Critics,” Arthuriana 8.4 (1998): 3-11. 26 “quendam Britannici sermonis librum uetustissmum” (Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain: An Edition and Translation of De gestis Britonum [Historia Regum Britanniae], ed. Michael D. Reeve, trans. Neil Wright, Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007, Prol., 9-10, p. 5). See also Ian Short, “Gaimar’s Epilogue and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Liber vetustissimus,” Speculum 69.2 (1994): 323-43. This excellent article was not yet available when Faces went to press. 27 Faces, pp. 21-23. For a list of those manuscripts that do not contain the epilogue (found in the majority of Historia manuscripts), see Julia C. Crick, The Historia regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, IV: Dissemination and Reception in the Later Middle Ages, Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991, pp. 296-99. Geoffrey also refers to Gildas which adds another layer of complexity or confusion as one wonders whether it is his “source” which mentions Gildas or whether he is using multiple sources, a situation on which he is not forthcoming since he seems to have little interest in being seen as a theoretician or researcher (Faces, p. 18). 15 “like other writers, to hide a fiction,”28 and to exonerate himself, which is certainly plausible. Of the six historians in this study, Geoffrey’s conception of “translation” is closer to the modern one of transference of material from one language to another, than the conception of the vernacular historians. As Peter Damian-Grint explains in detail, “the vernacular historians appear to have deliberately conflated translation and interpretation, presenting translation as a form of interpretation, in order to provide authorisation for their own historical texts. This conflation also appears to have led to a confusion between the two concepts, with interpretation being seen as a necessary part of the shift from one language to another.”29 Since the vernacular historians were reducing reams of Latin source material to far fewer lines of French verse, it stands to reason that a large part of their task was selective and therefore interpretative, even if they didn’t articulate it as such. The taxonomy according to which Richard Lanham replaces the traditional rhetorical vertical model of high, middle, and low style with a horizontal spectrum of infinite variety along a continuum from “opaque” style to “transparent” style is useful in describing Geoffrey of Monmouth’s style or authorial self-presentation.30 According to Lanham, looking at styles across a horizontal spectrum eliminates the habit of judging the dignity of the subject, its decorum, and its morality, as with the classically derived high, middle, and low style, while providing the possibility of an infinite variety of styles: evaluation is based upon stylistic self-consciousness: at one end is the “transparent” style, where the author is self-conscious but modest and self-effacing (or where self-references are absent); at the other end is the “opaque” style, whether the author calls frequent attention to the act of writing and where the style is an object “to be looked at rather than through.”31

28 “Geoffrey of Monmouth,” p. 83; Faces, p. 21. 29 Damian-Grint, The New Historians, p. 20. On the heterogeneity of medieval understandings of translation, see especially Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), individual essays in the collection, Pratiques de traduction au Moyen Âge/Medieval Translation Practices, ed. Peter Anderson (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2004), and Douglas Kelly, The Conspiracy of Allusion: Description, Rewriting, and Authorship from Macrobius to Medieval Romance, Studies in the History of Christian Thought 97 (Leiden: Brill, 1999). 30 Faces, p. 19. See Richard Lanham, Style: An Anti-Textbook (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974, pp. 44-68; rev. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2007, pp. 71-104). 31 Lanham, Style, p. 47 (1974 ed.). See also Nancy Partner on the usefulness of Lanham’s spectrum and “a potent addition” to it found in Gombrich’s discussion of the ways in which the mind of the artist or observer presents and adapts schematic forms to the goals of expression, whether representational (“serious” in Lanham’s terms) or openly schematic (“rhetorical”) (“The New Cornificius: Medieval History and the Artifice of Words,” inClassical Rhetoric and Medieval Historiography, ed. Ernst Breisach, Studies in Medieval Culture 19, Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1985, pp. 5-60, esp. pp. 43-44); E. H. 16 As I had observed in Chapter 1, “Lanham’s paradigm is especially useful in characterizing one of the essential tensions in Geoffrey’s historical writing: while his highly rhetorical style is ‘opaque,’ his presence as an historian, that is, as an analyst [of historical events], conscious of the processes of analysis rather than those of rhetoric, is decidedly weak or ‘transparent’.”32 Furthermore, “this same tension between style of the narrative as a whole and the historian’s voice on the subject of historical writing is apparent in William’s and Orderic’s work as well”; for William, “his historiography calls more attention to itself than does his rhetoric; in Orderic’s case, the style is more ‘transparent’ than ‘opaque,’ yet one never loses sight of the author’s prejudices.”33 If we apply Lanham’s model to Gaimar’s presentation of his task as historian, Gaimar’s rhetoric can be seen as relatively “transparent” but his presence as an historian is somewhat more “opaque” in that he calls attention to the craft of composition in a number of ways. In two of the most unusual passages in French historical writing—and certainly the earliest of this kind—Gaimar refers to a sort of competition between himself and a fellow poet, David,34 and outlines a network of sources he used in writing the Estoire des Engleis, and his patron’s role in creating his opportunities to use those sources; although he tells us virtually nothing about the French books he claims to have used (6437), he is much more forthcoming about his Latin and English sources and his patron’s assistance.35

Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 173. 32 Faces, p. 19. 33 Faces, p. 19. 34 Faces, pp. 28-29. This alleged rival David has not yet proven identifiable, nor is his poem extant (Short, “Gaimar’s Epilogue,” pp. 326-27 and Estoire des Engleis/History of the English, ed. and trans. Ian Short, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. xxx-xxxi). 35 Faces, pp. 24-30, 169-71. Selected recent work on Gaimar’s historiography and related issues of patronage includes Ian Short, “Gaimar’s Epilogue,” idem, ed. and trans., Estoire des Engleis/History of the English, pp. ix-xvi, xxxix-xlix, and idem, “What Was Gaimar’s Estoire des Bretuns?” Cultura Neolatina 71 (2011): 143-45; Paul Dalton, “Geffrei Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, Peacemaking, and the ‘Twelfth-Century Revival of the English Nation’,” Studies in Philology 104 (2007): 427-54, and idem “The Date of Geffrei Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, the Connections of his Patrons and the Politics of Stephen’s Reign,” The Chaucer Review 42.1 (2007): 23-47; Henry Bainton, “History between the Province and the Nation: Localising Geffrei Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis” (unpublished master’s thesis, University of York, 2004), and idem, “Translating the ‘English’ Past: Cultural Identity in the Estoire des Engleis,” in Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England, c. 1100-c. 1500, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. (York: York Medieval Press, 2009), pp. 179-87; Elizabeth Freeman, “Geffrei Gaimar, Vernacular Historiog- raphy, and the Assertion of Authority,” Studies in Philology 93.2 (1996): 188-206; Emma Bérat, “The Patron and her Clerk: Multilingualism and Cultural Transition,” New Medieval Literatures 12 (2010): 23-45; Damian-Grint, New Historians, esp. pp. 24-25, 49-53, 114-15, 123-24, 132- 17 According to Ian Short,36 the punctuation of Bell’s edition in the latter part of the epilogue (6453-6464 of 6430-6526) suggests that Gaimar names four separate sources in the course of the lengthier version of the epilogue: 1) “the good book of Oxford which belonged to Walter archdeacon of Oxford” (6458-6459, Bell, ed.) (which Gaimar used to supplement Rob- ert of Gloucester’s book since it had material the latter lacked),37 2) “Walter

33, 154-55, 161-65, 218-20, 246-47, 255-56, and idem “Estoire as word and genre: meaning and literary usage in the twelfth century,” Medium Aevum 66 (1997): 190-95; John Gillingham, “Kingship, Chivalry and Love: Political and Cultural Values in the Earliest History Written in French: Geoffrey Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis,” in idem, The English in the Twelfth Century, pp. 233-58 (orig. pub. in Anglo-Norman Political Culture and the Twelfth Century Renaissance, ed. C. Warren Hollister, Woodbridge: Boydell, 1997, pp. 33-58); Jean Blacker, “’Dame Custance la gentil’: Gaimar’s Portrait of a Lady and her Books,” in The Court and Cultural Diversity: Selected Papers from the Eighth Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society (Queen’s University Belfast, 26 July-1 August 1995), ed. Evelyn Mullally and John Thompson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 109-19; Catherine Croizy-Naquet, “De la translation à la compilation: le cas de l’Estoire des Engleis de Geiffrei Gaimar,” Le travail sur le modèle, ed. Danielle Buschinger, Médiévales 16 (2002): 19-29, and eadem, “L’Estoire des Engleis de Geiffrei Gaimar ou comment faire mémoire du passé,” Le passé à l’épreuve du présent. Appropriations et usages du passé du Moyen Âge à la Renaissance, ed. Pierre Chastang, Mythes, critique et histoire (Paris: Presses de l’Univer- sité Paris-Sorbonne, 2008), pp. 61-74. 36 “Gaimar’s Epilogue,” pp. 328-29. In addition to a revision of the dates of composition of Gaimar’s Estoire (from Bell’s 1135-40 which became standard, to March 1136- April 1137, pp. 336-340; for a discussion of both Bell’s and Short’s evidence, and an alternative proposal of c. 1141-50, see Paul Dalton, “The Date of Geffrei Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis”) and a reevaluation of his sources, Short also proposes that Gaimar may have had access to an earlier copy of Geof- frey’s Historia than that of 1138-39 which Robert of Torigni showed Henry of Huntingdon at Bec in 1139 (p. 339; Short cautiously refrains from identifying the nature of that copy, while at the same time acknowledging that in this period, works often circulated in more than one copy, as did, for example, Henry’s own Historia Anglorum; see Diana Greenway, trans., p. xix, n. 5). Perhaps even more interestingly, Short observes that “at all events, Gaimar’s two separate books of overlapping material [the “good book of Oxford” and Robert of Gloucester’s book] stand in clear contrast to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s single source, Archdeacon Walter’s liber vetustissimus. And what is surely equally, if not more, significant is that Gaimar fails to make any mention of Geoffrey of Monmouth—almost as if his name was not yet, when the Estoire des Engleis was composed in 1136-37, attached to the Welsh historical tradition represented by Archdeacon Walter’s and by Earl Robert’s books” (p. 340). Short goes on to speculate as to whether these two texts might have formed a “pre-Geoffrey of Monmouth historical corpus to which Gaimar had access independently of Geoffrey” and when and how did Geoffrey who claims to have access to the liber vetustissimus get his hands on it? (p. 340). Although as Short points out, the relationship between Geoffrey’s alleged liber vetustissimus in the “British tongue” and Gaimar’s sources remains elusive, the network of sources to which Gaimar alludes has fascinating implications beyond his own work and is very suggestive for our understanding of intercultural literary exchanges in this period. 37 Short, “Gaimar’s Epilogue,” pp. 332-33, 340. For a selection of scholars who have argued that the “good book of Oxford” was the First Variant version, in support of the theory that the latter preceded the composition of the vulgate HRB (Keller and Caldwell primarily), and those who provide ample evidence to support what is now the majority viewpoint that the FV was a 18 Espec’s book which Robert earl of Gloucester had translated from the Welsh books of the British kings” (6442-6446, Bell, ed.) (quite possibly a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia), 3) “the history at Winchester” (6461, Bell, ed.), and 4) “an English book from Washingborough” (6463, Bell ed.). Following Short’s emendations of the epilogue, where one can now read the “Washingborough book” in apposition to the “history at Winchester,” the “history at Winchester” is most likely a general reference to the Anglo-Sax- on Chronicle well known in its chained exemplar at Winchester (described by Gaimar earlier on, 2327-2336, Bell ed.; 2329-2338, Short ed.) and the “Washingborough book” as Gaimar’s actual source, quite possibly a more archaic version of the Peterborough Chronicle, one of the surviving elements of the “Northern Recension” of the ASC.38 Gaimar seems to have seen his role in writing primarily as that of translator; although he himself doesn’t mention the interpretive component, as Short notes, translater in the Estoire can often mean “to make an interpretive vernacular adaptation of.”39 Although Gaimar doesn’t call attention to the synthetic processes involved in his creation of his compilation—essentially a vernacular adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and other sources—nor to any overt political bias or subtext,40 Gaimar’s methods were later recension of the vulgate (including Wright and Leckie), see Faces of Time, pp. 205-6 n. 42 (Hans-Erich Keller, “Wace et Geoffroy de Monmouth: Problème de la chronologie des sources,” Romania 98 (1977): 1-14 and Robert Caldwell, “The Use of Sources in the Variant and Vulgate Versions of the Historia Regum Britanniae and the Question of the Order of the Versions,” Bib- liographical Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society 9 (1957): 123-24). David Burchmore, whose current work on an edition and translation of the First Variant will call for a reevaluation of the question of the order of the versions based in part on his interpretation of Gaimar’s epilogue, references a little-known article by Caldwell in which the latter identifies the “good book of Oxford” with Geoffrey’s liber vetustissimus (“Geoffrey of Monmouth, Prince of Liars,” North Dakota Quarterly 39 (1963): 46-51) (private communication). See The History of the Kings of Britain: The First Variant Version, ed. and trans. David W. Burchmore, Dumbarton Oaks Medie- val Library 57 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming). I am grateful for his having sent me an early draft; I have not yet seen the published version. 38 “Gaimar’s Epilogue,” p. 325 (ll. 6429-6526, Bell’s numbering; the emendations are also found in Short’s edition and translation of the Estoire des Engleis (now ll. 6435-6532)). Gaimar appears to have used a version of the Northern Recension of the ASC, not the version found in the Winchester MS (even though he may have seen it); in fact, he may have used a version more archaic than the Peterborough copy of the Northern Recension (MS. E), a more archaic copy once connected to Washingborough but now lost (Short, “Gaimar’s Epilogue,” pp. 328-33). 39 Estoire, ed. and trans., Short, p. 455 note to l. 6436 (mentioning as well ll. 6440, 6450, and 6486). 40 Although not expressed overtly by Gaimar, John Gillingham rightly sees Gaimar’s history as a tool to support or expand his audience’s multicultural identities, such that “French-speakers living in England could see the Anglo-Saxon past as their past,” going on to add that “the king and a tiny handful of the very greatest magnates, holding vast estates in Normandy as well as in England and Wales, may have thought of themselves primarily as Frenchmen, but the over- 19 synthetic, his style fairly transparent except in the epilogue where he calls attention to his task, providing “both a valuable model and a modus operandi for future writers of vernacular translation-histories.”41 Again turning to Lanham’s paradigm “Wace’s style is transparent in its self-effacing tone and simplicity, yet opaque in its success in calling attention to itself”: that is, in calling attention to the tasks of writer as historian. In recent years, many studies have appeared further nuancing Wace’s use of rhetorical devices, some of his own devising, especially his remarkably frequent use of what becomes for Wace a veritable topos—the “je no sai” topos, that is, negative truth claims asserting ignorance rather than “affirming” the “truth” of something he cannot verify.42 Although Wace usually does not name his written sources,43 as Damian-Grint and others have pointed out as whelming majority of the landowners of England knew that they were English, French speaking, of mixed ancestry—as William of Malmesbury was [as was Orderic]—(usually French on their father’s side and proud of their forefathers’ achievements), but English even so” (“Begin- nings of English Imperialism,” in idem, The English in the Twelfth Century, pp. 3-18, cited here at p. 6; orig. pub. in Journal of Historical Sociology 5.4 (1992): 392-409). 41 Faces, p. 30. 42 On Wace’s repertoire of rhetorical devices, including forms of truth claims, see Peter Da- mian-Grint, The New Historians, pp. 158-59, 163-68, and idem “Truth, Trust and Evidence in the Anglo-Norman estoire,” in Anglo Norman Studies XVIII: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 1995, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1996), pp. 63-72; Penny Eley and Philip E. Bennett, “The Battle of Hastings according to Gaimar, Wace and Benoît: Rhetoric and Politics,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 43 (1999): 47-78, where they point out that “statements beginning ‘ne sai’ are in fact the commonest form of authorial/narratorial intervention in the Rou as a whole” (p. 68, n. 52); Françoise Le Saux, Companion to Wace, pp. 102-7, 132-34, 166, 212- 14, 233, 248, 267; Ilkyung Chung Lim, “’Truth’ and the Normans: Wace’s Le Roman de Rou,” Romance Languages Annual 8 (1997): 46-50. See also n. 74 below on Wace’s self-presentation. 43 Although Wace’s work is largely text-based, he does mention oral sources such as eye-witness accounts of the Conqueror’s crossing including the mention from his father of “seven hun- dred ships minus four” (“sept cenz nes, quatre meins,” iii, 6425), which he then supplements with the figure of three thousand ships which he says he found in writing (iii, 6429-32), saying that he is not sure whether the latter is correct (“ne sai dire s’est verité,” iii, 6430). Elizabeth van Houts observes that “the testimonies about the involvement of his contemporaries’ grandfathers and great-grandfathers in 1066 formed an important addition to the Latin chronicles, which barely relate the names of individual soldiers…his information is not infallible… but where charter material clearly supports the list of Wace [of those who crossed with the Conqueror] we cannot ignore this evidence… This combination, then, of oral and written family history is perhaps Wace’s most important contribution to the historiography of the Norman conquest of England” (“Wace as Historian,” in Family Trees and the Roots of Politics: The Prosopography of Britain and France from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century, ed. Katherine S. B. Keats-Rohan (Wood- bridge: Boydell, 1997), pp. 103-32 (repr. in eadem, History and Family Traditions in England and the Continent, 1000-1200, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999, pp. 103-32, and in Glyn S. Burgess, trans. The History of the Norman People: Wace’s Roman de Rou, Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004, pp. xxxv- lxii), cited here at pp. 115-16; cf. eadem, “The Memory of 1066 in Written and Oral Sources,” in Anglo-Norman Studies XIX: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 1996, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1997), pp. 167-79, esp. pp. 178-79; see also Matthew Bennett, “The 20 well, his view of translation is also synthetic just as Gaimar’s was, requiring a significant amount of evaluation of material, and not involving a simply strict language-to-language transfer.44 Unlike Wace, and the three Latin historians (and Gaimar in his epilogue), Benoît45 is singularly unforthcoming about the uses of history or the place of his work in different traditions;46 although he calls on truth claims,

Uses and Abuses of Wace’s Roman de Rou,” in Maistre Wace: A Celebration. Proceedings of the In- ternational Colloquiuim held in Jersey 10-12 September 2004, ed. Glyn S. Burgess and Judith Weiss (St. Helier: Société Jersiaise, 2006), pp. 31-40, esp. pp. 33-34. On other instances of eye-witness accounts including Wace’s own presence at the translation of the bodies of Richard I and Richard II at Fécamp in 1162, see also Jean Blacker, “ ‘Si que jel vi e jeo i ere’: témoignages de Wace sur Richard sans Peur,” in Richard sans Peur, duc Normandie: entre histoire et légende. Actes du colloque tenu à l’Université du Havre (29-30 mars 2012), ed. Laurence Mathey-Maille and Élis- abeth Gaucher-Rémond, Annales de Normandie 64.1 (2014): 131-44; Peter Damian-Grint, The New Historians, pp. 57- 58, 148-49, 201 and note 107. For an analytical hierarchy of types (and uses) of oral information—ranging from accounts based on the writer’s own experience to forms of hearsay at first, second, or further remove, see Elisabeth van Houts, “Genre Aspects of the Use of Oral Information in Medieval Historiography,” in Gattungen mittelalterlicher Schriftlichkeit, ed. Barbara Frank, Thomas Haye, and Doris Tophinke (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1998), pp. 297-311, and also eadem, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe, 900-1200 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), esp. ch. 2, “Chronicles and Annals,” pp. 19-39. On perceptions of eyewitness accounts in French historiography from c. 1170 through the Chroniques of Jean Froissart (late fourteenth-early fifteenth centuries), see Peter Ainsworth, “Contemporary and ‘Eyewitness’ History,” in Historiography in the Middle Ages, pp. 249-76. 44 On Wace’s views of translation, see Peter Damian-Grint, The New Historians, pp. 25-27, 30, 54, 117-18, 173, 229-30, and idem, “Translation as enarratio and the Hermeneutic Theory in Twelfth-Century Vernacular Learned Literature,” Neophilologus 83 (1999): 349-67; Laurence Mathey-Maille, “De Facetia a curteisie: Wace traducteur de Geoffroy de Monmouth,” Bien Dire et Bien Aprandre 13 (1996): 189-99, and eadem, “Traduction et création: de l’Historia Regum Bri- tanniae de Geoffroy de Monmouth au Roman de Brut de Wace,” in Écriture et modes de pensée au Moyen Âge (VIIIe-XVe siècles), ed. Dominique Boutet and Laurence Harf-Lancner (Paris: Presses de l’École normale supérieure, 1993), pp. 187-93. From among the vast literature on translatio, see n. 29 above. 45 Although I am still not completely convinced of the traditional identification of the “Be- neeit” of the Chronique des ducs de Normandie with Benoît de Sainte-Maure, author of the Roman de Troie, I used the name Benoît de Sainte-Maure in Faces, and will continue to do so here, for simplicity’s sake; see Faces, pp. 37, 45, 186, and 210 nn. 124-25. See Françoise Vielliard who observes, referring to the evidence and conclusion on the identity of the two Benoîts provided by G. A. Beckmann, “la question n’est néanmoins pas tranchée définitivement” (“Benoît de Sainte-Maure et les modèles tardo-antiques de la description du monde,” in L’antichità nella cultura europea del Medioevo = L’ antiquité dans la culture européenne du Moyen Âge: Ergebnisse der in- ternationalen Tagung in Padua, 27. 09. - 01. 10. 1997, ed. Rosanna Brusegan and Alessandro Zironi , Griefswald: Reineke, 1998, pp. 69-79, cited here at p. 71 n. 13), and Peter Dembowki’s review of Beckmann in Romance Philology 22.3 (1969): 342-45 (Gustav Adolf Beckmann, Trojaroman und Normannenchronik: die Identität der beiden Benoît und die Chronologie ihrer Werke, Munich: M. Hueber, 1965). The majority of scholars who have addressed this issue however appear to agree with Beckmann in identifying the two Benoîts as one. 46 Peter Damian-Grint observes that “Benoît’s authorial strategy in the Chronique, although 21 both positive and negative, his use of this technique appears scaled back certainly when seen in light of Wace’s work.47 Benoît evokes principally the edificatory value of past events, that histories furnish tools for self-im- provement and self-awareness, very standard in tone and message. Unlike Wace, Benoît does cite authorities such as Isidore, Pliny, and Augustine, but none of them are historians; he seems primarily concerned with “doctrine e cognicion” and seeks to avoid digressions unless they contribute to ency- clopedic or universal history. Although two of Benoît’s more lengthy digressions—the discourse on the three orders of society (in the form of a dialogue between Duke Richard I and Abbot Martin of Jumièges, 13239-13400) and Duke Richard I’s speech on the nature of the Trinity and the Last Judgment, delivered to the Danish heathen (25854-26506)—are more germane to his history of the Norman dukes than for example the opening passages on the creation of the world, the disposition of the earth, Noah and the Amazons, nevertheless the image of historian as purveyor of general knowledge and exempla dominates his presentation of the task of historian.48 Although we cannot expect our six authors to represent the entire field of historical endeavor in French verse and Latin prose in the twelfth century, we can identify general tendencies in common among their efforts to authorize their material and their views of their responsibilities as media- tors of historical “truth” for their audiences—or posterity. Whereas William aiming for the same effect as Wace’s makes use of very different means. …Benoît, in striking contrast to Wace, makes virtually no reference at all to the work of the historian; nor does he draw attention to the use he makes of oral traditions or eyewitness. … Benoît’s authorisation relies not on explicit claims and demonstrations of critical acumen but on an implicit, low-key but pervading demonstration of his learning and skill as a writer and translator” (The New His- torians, pp. 59-60). 47 On Benoît’s use of a variety of truth claims (as well as Gaimar’s and Wace’s, among others), see Damian-Grint, The New Historians, pp. 157-68, and also Ian Short in the Introduction to his new translation of ll. 33445-44544 (end) of Benoît’s Chronique in Three Anglo-Norman Kings: The Lives of William the Conqueror and Sons by Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Mediaeval Sources in Transla- tion 57 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2018), esp. pp. 7-25 on Benoît’s truth claims and other characteristics of his stance as historian. 48 On the importance of exempla and the educative function of history as elements central to Benoît’s vision of historical writing, see Peter Damian-Grint, “En nul leu nel truis escrit: Research and Invention in Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Chronique des ducs de Normandie,” Anglo-Norman Studies XXI: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 1998, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999), pp. 11-30, and idem, “Propaganda and essample in Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Chronique,” in Medieval Chronicle IV, ed. Erik Kooper (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 39-52; cf. Laurence Mathey-Maille, Écritures du passé, esp. pp. 142-53, and Françoise Laurent, Pour Dieu et pour le roi, pp. 216-30. On Wace’s self-presentation as a historian and Benoît’s as a moral- ist, see Laurence Mathey-Maille, “L’Écriture des commencements dans le Roman de Rou de Wace et la Chronique des ducs de Normandie de Benoît de Sainte Maure,” in Seuils de l’œuvre dans le texte médiéval, ed. Emmanuèle Baumgartner and Laurence Harf-Lancner, 2 vols. (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 2002), I, pp. 79-93. 22 of Malmesbury emphasizes the importance of reliability of sources and the necessity of selectivity with the historian as cipher, Orderic appears to place the responsibility for interpretation on the reader/listener, while not thoroughly exculpating the historian; Geoffrey of Monmouth stands apart as he does in almost all respects, resembling more closely the French historians in his claim to translate. However, Geoffrey’s claim appears to depend more closely on a definition of translation as language-to-language transfer—likely to best absolve him of responsibility—than does the French writers’ sense of translation as a synthetic process, the latter seen most clearly in Gaimar’s enumeration of multiple sources for his “translation.” Of the French writers, Wace appears the most preoccupied with the “truth,” touching on both Wil- liam’s and Orderic’s preoccupations: the historian’s responsibility to choose sources effectively, and the reader’s responsibility for interpretation (at times when faced with contradictory information). Benoît appears to “revert” to Geoffrey’s mode of providing a water-tight, inescapable version of events, heavily imbued with dogma (political in Geoffrey’s case, and primarily religious in Benoît’s) and a program to be adopted (though Geoffrey’s “program” is more open to multiple interpretations than Benoît’s).

3. CHAPTER TWO: Modes of Characterization: Images of the Kings

Modern historians seek to construct on documentary evidence the most truthful portrayal of individual monarchs or other figures, for example while writing biographies of Henry II or studies of William Marshall; literary scholars, on the other hand, analyze portrayals of King Arthur or Lancelot in romances destined to be received as fictions not histories. In Chapter 2, I set out to determine how, by exploring the portrayal of character in historical texts from across linguistic and cultural divides in our eight histories, we could usefully generalize as to the understanding of character: putting truth claims and “objectivity” aside, how did these medieval historians draw their figures? Were there patterns of portrayal common to the Latin and French texts? There were (and still are) relatively few discussions of techniques of character portrayal considered from intergeneric perspectives, though historical studies of individual historical figures (and literary analyses of fictional characters from individual authors) abound. Beyond the principal goal of identifying techniques of presentation of historical figures used by the six authors in this study, I sought: 1) to put to rest the traditional idea that two-dimensional medieval characterization was due to a lack of literary talent, rather 23 than being informed by complex systems of thought and world views foreign to our own; 2) to explore the extent to which religious ideals and other idealis- tic frameworks informed characterization of individual figures; 3) to assess the interplay between the individual and the collective—both diachronically and synchronically—as seen through methods of characterization.

In the early 1980s, when I was originally writing the doctoral thesis upon which Faces was based, Robert Alter’s groundbreaking study, The Art of Bib- lical Narrative, proved to be the most illuminating critical source for issues of characterization in historical narrative, in addition to Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, and the work of Hans Robert Jauss and others of the Rezeptionsäs- thetik school (to which I will return later in this Introduction).49 Alter, and his colleague Frank Kermode with whom he edited The Literary Guide to the Bible, saw themselves as participating in an important paradigm shift involving a move away from historicist criticism which emphasized the reality anterior to the text—the Bible’s sources, multiple authorship, and events and institutions which informed it—toward an appreciation of the Bible itself by drawing attention to “its artfulness—how it orchestrates sound, rep- etition, dialogue, allusion, and ambiguity to generate meaning and effect.”50 As Steven Weitzman observes, this does not mean that reading the Bible “as literature” was completely new (it can be traced back to the eigh- teenth century, and then further back to the Greek scholar Longinus, Mat- thew Arnold having coined the term in the nineteenth), but that it gained new impetus from growing trends in literary scholarship. He highlights the “impact on American scholarship of Russian formalism, structuralism and semiotics, the ‘linguistic turn’ in historiography and other fields that helped to disseminate the influence of literary analysis beyond English depart- ments, and the ‘postcritical’ turn in biblical exegesis that sought to use the methods of modern critical scholarship to rehabilitate traditional sources like the Bible and rabbinic literature as sources for contemporary religious and philosophical thought,” noting that “however newfangled it seemed in the 1980s, the ‘literary approach’ to the Bible, the attempt to understand it as a work of aesthetic and not just religious or historical value, is as old

49 The Art of Biblical Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1981). As Steven Weitzman writes in his lead article as editor of a retrospective collection of essays on the influence of Alter’s work, from a purely practical standpoint “with the exception of Auerbach, Alter’s work clearly reso- nated in a way no earlier study had done for many decades” (“Before and After The Art of Biblical Narrative,” Prooftexts 27.2 (2007): 191-210, cited here at p. 196). 50 Weitzman, “Before and After,” p. 191. 24 as most other methods of biblical study.”51 Although at the time, I could have chosen instead to compare techniques of character presentation between the French verse histories and French romances, I found techniques of analysis of biblical material—often considered historical just as the Latin histories as well as the French—more compelling due to the assumptions underlying “historical” forms.52 Bearing in mind that the Bible was written by multiple authors at differing times, Alter nonetheless asks fundamental questions about the literary fabric of the Bible as a unified work of art, also reminding us of our own limitations as readers by formulating implicitly a number of major assumptions we make and assumptions we have, given our early educational formation in modern literature or our experience with love speeches and casuistry in medieval romance: How does the Bible manage to evoke such a sense of depth and complexity in its representation of character with what would seem to be such sparse, even rudimentary means? Biblical narrative offers us, after all, nothing in the way of minute analysis of motive or detailed rendering of mental processes; whatever indi- cations we may be vouchsafed of feeling, attitude, or intention are rather minimal; and we are given only the barest hints about the physical appearance, the tics and gestures, the dress and imple- ments of the characters, the material milieu in which they enact their destinies. In short, all the indicators of nuanced individuality to which the Western literary tradition has accustomed us—pre- eminently in the novel, but ultimately going back to the Greek epics and romances—would appear to be absent from the Bible. In what way, then, is one to explain how, from these laconic texts, figures like Rebekah, Jacob, Joseph, Judah, Tamar, Moses, Saul, David, and Ruth emerge, characters who, beyond any archetyp- al role they may play as bearers of a divine mandate, have been etched as indelibly vivid individuals in the imagination of a hun- dred generations?53 In addition to biblical writers’ use of frequent silences timed in order to add pathos, Alter devises a spectrum or scale of techniques, rejecting the

51 Weitzman, “Before and After,” pp. 191-92. 52 For an analysis of the genesis of romance and intersections between historiography and romance, see Douglas Kelly, The Art of Medieval French Romance (Madison: University of Wiscon- sin Press, 1992), esp. pp. 68-93. Among the many recent articles devoted to specific romance characters (rather than techniques of characterization considered intergenerically), see in particular the collection Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance, ed. Neil Cartlidge (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), which includes studies of characterization of “historical” figures, such as Hengist (Margaret Lamont, “Hengist,” pp. 43-57) and Harold Godwinson (Laura Ashe, “Harold Godwineson,” pp. 59-80), as well as more general studies of character-types in fiction. 53 Alter, Art of Biblical Narrative, p. 114. 25 idea that characterization in biblical narrative was “monolithic” or “primi- tive”:54 at the lower (or ostensibly less explicit or certain) end, character is revealed through the “report of actions…appearance, gesture posture [and] costume”; the middle range involves “direct speech either by the character himself or by others around him”; and at the top is the “reliable narrator’s explicit statement of what the characters feel, intend, desire.”55 Alter concludes that the lower end “leaves us substantially in the realm of inference” and that “the power of biblical narrative often derives more from what is not said than from what is directly expressed.”56 He adds that biblical figures do not have fixed epithets based on qualities of personality such as “the brave” or “the wily” as in Homeric epic, for example, but “rather only relational ones (‘daughter of Saul’ or ‘wife of David’) because biblical authors viewed character as a ‘center of surprise,’ as something which develops and is transformed by time.”57 Alter expresses the view that biblical writers exhibit, on the one hand, “a profound belief in a strong, clearly demarcated pattern of causation in history and individual lives, and many of the framing devices, the motif-structures, the symmetries and recurrences in their narratives reflect this belief”; a further distinguishing feature though is their—perhaps contradictory to us—perception of “unsoundable capacities for good and evil, in human nature” which leads them to present their characters—“free agent[s] created in God’s image”—in ways that “destabilize any monolithic system of causation” in narratives marked by “an interplay of significantly patterned ambiguities”: their techniques of characterization are ultimately “a faithful translation into art of this view of man.” 58 The characterizations found in our eight histories are also marked by a tension between divine will and humans as free agents, but perhaps more so by a continual dialogue between the individual and the group, and even more importantly between the individual and tradition, between the individual and the typical, a typical which often transcends the current

54 Alter, Art of Biblical Narrative, p. 117. 55 Alter, Art of Biblical Narrative, p. 117; cf. Faces, p. 118. What I did not incorporate into Chapter 2 in my application of Alter’s ideas was his positing of this schema as presented by a “reliable narrator,” a concept I am very skeptical of in general, and which may possibly have contributed to some of the negative evaluations of his close readings on the part of “scholars who had come to see that way of reading as naïve or suspect” (Weitzman, p. 196). That said, it is difficult to believe that when Alter writes “every biblical narrator is of course omniscient,” that he means they are actually omniscient, but rather that they use techniques to portray themselves as such (Art of Biblical Narrative, p. 126). 56 Faces, p. 118; Alter, Art of Biblical Narrative, pp. 114-17. 57 Faces, pp. 118-19; Alter, Art of Biblical Narrative, pp. 126-27. 58 Alter, Art of Biblical Narrative, pp. 125-26. 26 group. As I pointed out in my original introduction to Chapter 2, there is a paradox: although our six historians conceived of their works as accurate and truthful—perhaps with the exception of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who is often an exception to every generalization—they molded their personages according to ideals, focusing on idealism rather than realism, where the individual is seen relative to the ideal, as well as synchonically to the group and diachronically to the tradition: Although the scarcity of documentary evidence might have inhib- ited realistic portrayal, a more likely explanation for the schematic, almost codified, portrayal of many historical personages of the period involves the extent to which ideals were thought to affect human behavior over time. Historical personages were molded according to certain ideals; as a result, the hand of the medieval historian as formative tool is much more clearly in evidence than the hand of the modern historian. Where the modern historian would like FDR [for example] to ‘speak for himself,’ the medieval would like him to speak for the generations of FDRs before him and reflect the universal ideals shared by those generations…The medieval historian, faced with the task of describing FDR, would most likely see the Caesar, Charlemagne, or Alexander in him: FDR would be defined in terms of a glorious—therefore heroic— tradition, his individuality thereby paling in comparison…FDR’s individuality might disappear altogether, with only the shell of the man remaining, filled with the superimposed images of the most famous and praiseworthy leaders history could provide.59 Characters, particularly in the French histories, appear as slides in a kaleidoscope: that is, with each turn of the kaleidoscope—wielded by the historian—the colors which in this metaphor are the primary static qualities of personality or idealized features appear in different configurations, thereby creating the “characterization.” Thus, individuation is achieved indirectly, not as a goal through “shading” or “nuancing” but in comparison to other figures—one twist or slide differing from every other twist or slide.60 Among the six historians, Orderic achieves the most individuation, not in terms of inner psychology but in the variety of characters and the choice of details— perhaps how many or which colors are available in each slide—which gives

59 Faces, p. 54. 60 “Characters were typecast, not because authors’ repertoires of techniques were severely limited, but because they viewed people in terms of types who responded to the dictates of good or evil. Individual character was seen as composed of separate traits, which did not admit of variation in and of themselves but appeared in various combinations, as individual colors in a kaleidoscope always remain distinct while forming different patterns according to their arrange- ment. Thus for these historians and their audiences aesthetic and intellectual pleasure could be derived from observing how static, unchanging traits could occur in different combinations, creating a constant dialogue between the typical and the individual” (Faces, p. 56). 27 the Historia Ecclesiastica an “illusion of reality, of life beyond the typical, while still remaining in sight of the typical.” Benoît falls at the other end of the individuation spectrum; it is as if the ten Norman dukes blend into one exemplum of Norman dukedom, each achieving his grandeur relative to the tradition of which he is an integral but subordinate part.61 Similarly, Ord- eric’s characters are “measured against the ideal, allowing for the possibility of imperfection” whereas Benoît’s “almost without exception fulfill the ideal completely and are baldly declared to be perfect.”62 For the Latin historians, the most salient features of characterization can be summed up as follows: 1) In addition to the influence of hagiographic models, Asser, and Bede, William relied on Suetonius’s portraits of the Caesars, particularly that of Augustus, to achieve his goals of both glorifying the Anglo-Saxons—for William, the coming of the Anglo-Sax- ons was surely an “achievement”63—and attempting to inte- grate what he found as the most redeeming qualities of Norman French culture with that of the English64; 2) Presentation of character in Orderic is marked by the range and variety of figures, Orderic’s emotional reactions to his subjects (including his vituperation against William Rufus), and the Christian theme of the vanity of earthly glory; 3) There is very little individuation in Geoffrey’s Historia, as if the audience were expected to focus on the role of the characters

61 Faces, p. 56. 62 Faces, p. 55. 63 For recent work on William of Malmesbury’s views of the adventus Saxonum, see Robert M. Stein, “Making History English: Cultural Identity and Historical Explanation in William of Malmesbury and Laȝamon’s Brut,” in Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), pp. 97-115; Christopher H. Flack, “Writing Conquest: Traditions of Anglo-Saxon Inva- sion and Resistance in the Twelfth Century,” unpub. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2013, ch. 2, “The Adventus Saxonum in the Twelfth-Century: William of Malmesbury and Hen- ry of Huntingdon,” pp. 51-84 (http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/159710/ Flack_umn_0130E_14367.pdf?sequence=1). Cf. also James Campbell, “Some Twelfth-Century Views of the Anglo-Saxon Past,” Peritia 3 (1984): 131-50 (repr. in idem, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History, London: Hambledon Press, 1986, pp. 209-28; repr. 2000). 64 On William of Malmesbury’s views of French and English culture and the political subtexts of their interactions in eleventh- and twelfth-century England, see John Gillingham, “Be- ginnings of English Imperialism,” and idem, “Civilizing the English? The English Histories of William of Malmesbury and David Hume,” Historical Research 74.183 (2001): 17-43; also R. R. Davies, The Matter of Britain and the Matter of England (an inaugural lecture delivered before the University of Oxford on 29 February 1996) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 10 (“ardent and fawning Francophilia”). Cf. Emily A. Winkler, “William of Malmesbury and the Britons,” in Discovering William of Malmesbury, ed. Rodney M. Thomson, Emily Dolmans, and Emily A. Winkler (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2017), pp. 189-201. 28 in the drama, rather than on the characters themselves; notable exceptions are Arthur and the pattern of duality seen in the antagonistic brother pairs which lead up to Arthur and then re- sume after his reign. In Geoffrey the British nation is the central character, and Geoffrey’s new version of events reclaiming the history of the Britons as descendants of the Trojans in opposi- tion to the Saxon “achievement” is the key to the presentation of character.65 In each historian’s particular and distinct ways of negotiating the typical and the individual—though rarely through the use of silences and studied ambiguities as Alter finds with biblical authors—we see our Latin historians’ approaches to “translating into art” their views of the human and the divine. Although it is difficult to overlook our Latin and vernacular authors’ tendency to present at least the major figures in essentially similar terms, there are notable signs which separate the vernacular historians from their Latin models or contemporaries: 1) the “courtly” elements for the benefit of both the secular audience and the clerical they may have wanted to im- press; 2) the more limited lexicon due in part to the stage of development of the vernacular but also to the stress put on particular qualities (the four primary values of prouesse, vaillance, hardiesse, and sagesse which carry so much of the weight of characterizations of heroes who are invariably proz,

65 Among the seemingly innumerable discussions of Geoffrey’s championing of the Britons and their symbolic significance (and related questions including which Britons) published in approximately the last twenty-five years, see especially John Gillingham, “The Context and Purposes of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain”; Fiona Tolhurst, “The Britons as Hebrews, Romans, and Normans: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s British Epic and Reflections of Empress Matilda,” Arthuriana 8.4 (1998): 69-87; R. R. Davies, “Island Mythologies,” in idem, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093-1343 (The Ford Lectures De- livered in the University of Oxford in Hilary Term 1998) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 31-53 (ch. 2); Francis Ingledew, “The Book of Troy and the Genealogical Construction of History: The Case of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae,” Speculum 69.2 (1994): 665-704; Alan MacColl, “The Meaning of ‘Britain’ in Medieval and Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 45.2 (2006): 248-69; Christopher Lucken, “La fin des temps et la fiction des origines. L’Historiographie des îles britanniques: du royaume des anges à la terre des Bret- ons,” Médiévales 38 (L’invention de l’histoire)(2000): 35-70; Laura D. Barefield, “From Trojan to Briton: Brutus’s Masculinity and Lineage in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae,” in Courtly Arts and the Art of Courtliness: Selected papers from the Eleventh Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 29 July-4 August 2004), ed. Keith Busby and Christopher Kleinhenz (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), pp. 193-201, and eadem, “Gender and the Creation of Lineage in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae,” Enarratio 9 (2002): 1-14; Alex Woolf, “Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Picts,” in Bile ós Chrannibh: A Festschrift for William Gillies, ed. Wilson McLeod et al. (Ceann Drochaid, Perth- shire: Clann Tuirc, 2010), pp. 439-50; and Daniel Helbert, “‘Alienos Ortulos’: Geoffrey of Mon- mouth in the Garden of Others,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 118.2 (2019): 211-33. 29 vaillanz, hardiz, and sage);66 and 3) a tendency to assert character rather than providing evidence in the form of corroborative material (though Geoffrey is certainly “guilty” of this as well), the French histories standing in relation to their Latin sources as “summaries of great works of literature do to the works themselves.”67 In fact, the impression of thematic unity in Gaimar’s Estoire stems in large part from the rendering of Anglo-Saxon history “courtly” for the new ruling Anglo-Norman elite: his presentation of character is informed largely by his desire to clothe figures in courtly garb, as it were, using dialogue for example as an “indication of the degree of civilization of the speaker,” praising Robert Curthose’s gallantry in the Holy Land (he is one of the only historians to do so), writing the most positive portrayal of William Rufus extant,68 and teasing the poet David for not having included enough details about Henry I’s extramarital love life in his biography. Gaimar apparently considered an account of dosnaier (lovemaking) and gaber (joking), amur, and richesse to be “as capable of representing ‘reality’ as an account of matters of state.” 69 In Gaimar’s view, apparently, the worlds of chivalric elegance and politics complemented each other, and certainly were not mu- tually exclusive.70 Interrelated with issues of language and patronage, these conclusions mesh with recent perspectives on the Estoire, where the poem

66 Maurice Keen reminds us that the classic virtues of good knighthood are prouesse, loyauté, largesse, courtoisie and franchise (Chivalry, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984, p. 2). 67 Faces, p. 134. 68 For Gaimar on Robert Curthose and William Rufus, see William M. Aird, Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy c. 1050-1134 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012), pp. 282-83; Nicholas L. Paul, To Follow in Their Footsteps: The Crusades and Family Memory in the High Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), p. 230 n. 77; Gillingham, “Kingship, Chivalry and Love”; Emma Mason, William II: Rufus, the Red King (Stroud: Tempus, 2005), esp. pp. 161-62, 200- 01, 204-06, 211-13, 223, 225-26, 230, 232, 234; and Elizabeth Freeman, “Geffrei Gaimar, Vernacular Historiography,” on characterization in the Estoire, including that of William Rufus (pp. 193, 203-4). 69 Faces, p. 96. Richard Southern commented on Gaimar’s boast regarding David’s having ignored merriment at Henry’s court and his ability to do better, “it is hard to see what there was to joke about,” reflecting Southern’s view of Henry as a “cold, hard, inscrutable man” Medieval( Humanism and Other Studies, New York: Harper and Row, 1970, pp. 230, 233, cited in Gilling- ham, “Kingship, Chivalry and Love,” p. 57). Gillingham asks scholars to consider that Gaimar may himself have been joking, since “as a ruler Henry had many great qualities, but being either chivalrous or courtly were not among them” (“Kingship, Chivalry and Love,” p. 57). 70 On Gaimar as an important writer from whose text can be gleaned chivalric values, whom he finds largely ignored by historians of chivalry (at least prior to the late 1990s), John Gilling- ham writes “if what turns heroic warfare into chivalric warfare is the desire to please women, then Gaimar is not chivalric. On the other hand if, alongside the traditional military values, it is the routinely compassionate treatment of high-status enemies which principally characterizes chivalry, then Gaimar can very fairly be described as such an author” (“Kingship, Chivalry and Love,” p. 54). 30 is seen as an “assimilating” text—that is, a “hybridization” of cultures where Anglo-Saxon material and cultural concerns are adapted to fit Anglo-Nor- man language and customs, with the latter as dominant, an appropriation of Anglo-Saxon material and culture by Anglo-Norman language and customs—but in addition a cross-cultural textual model more akin to the experience of medieval women, admitting of “multiple cultures simultaneously,” without one culture necessarily dominating any other.71 With respect to characterization, there are differences in approach between Wace’s Brut and the Rou. In the former, the Britons are just one in a series of peoples, not the “stars,” (unlike in Geoffrey, where the Britons are most often favored over the Anglo-Saxons; or the Normans in the Rou); the goal is neither comprehension necessarily, nor interpretation of all the material (for example weighing of the relative merits of the series of no fewer than 99 kings in his primary sources), but information. Wace portrays the Caesars—enemies of the Britons including Arthur—positively through means of a technique I earlier referred to as “reflex praise” (that is, a famous character must be presented positively unless a notorious villain);72 the Brut is also marked by a significantly larger number of passages marked by lyr- ical repetitions at the head of lines (anaphora) than the Rou, which lends more of an air of uniformity to the presentation of character in the Arthuri- an chronicle than the Norman.73 71 On the Estoire as an “assimilating text,” see Short, ed. and trans., p. lxix, and Hugh M. Thomas, The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity, 1066-c.1220 (Ox- ford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 65. Emma Bérat proposes that the latter views may be more male-oriented, and argues for an interpretation of the relationships between the compet- ing claims of the Saxons, Danish, Normans and Welsh that could be seen by implication as more female-oriented, supporting multiple cultures simultaneously (not necessarily aligned with one particular group), echoing the experience closer to that of medieval women (“The Patron and Her Clerk,” p. 44 and n. 105, on the cross-cultural experience of medieval women). With reference to Gaimar’s invention/transformation of the Haveloc story, Scott Kleinman sees the Danish and Norman claims in Gaimar as more parallel or coexistent rather than one subsuming the other (“The Legend of Havelok the Dane and the Historiography of East Anglia,” Studies in Philology 100 (2003): 245-77). 72 Faces, pp. 97-98; cf. Damian-Grint, “Propaganda and essample,” p. 48, on the use of this technique in Benoît’s Chronique. 73 For example, Brut ll. 1209-17, 9323-25, 9327-29, 97775-779, 10244-46, 10599-609, 10613-16; cf. Le Saux, Companion to Wace, pp. 104-5, 166, 282. Still valuable (but not referenced in Faces) are F.M. Warren’s three articles containing over sixty references to stylistic features in Wace’s chronicles, “Some Features of Style in Early French Narrative Poetry (1150-70). Part I,” Modern Philology 3.2 (1905): 179-209, “Some Features of Style in Early French Narrative Poetry (1150-70). Part II,” Modern Philology 3.4 (1906): 513-39, and “Some Features of Style in Early French Narrative Poetry (1150-70).—Concluded [sic],” Modern Philology 4.4 (1907): 655- 75. For recent highly detailed work on epic structures particularly in Part Two of the Rou, see Hannah Weaver, “A ‘Geste’ for the King: Wace’s Epic Experiment in the Roman de Rou,” Viator 46.3 (2015): 41-60. 31 In the Rou, where military enterprises are the most distinguishing feature of Norman rule, Wace employs primarily four modes of characterization for major figures: 1) short, direct descriptions; 2) anecdotes for Rollo, Richard I, and Richard II (and other early leaders); 3) a central episode for William the Conqueror, William Rufus, Rob- ert Curthose, and Henry I; 4) dialogue for William the Conqueror and Robert Curthose.74 In addition to making himself so present in his history that the historian in effect becomes an actor in his own drama,75 Wace has his goal of appearing impartial override all other motivations in character portrayal. The most outstanding examples are: 1) his reluctance to present a homogenous image for William the Conqueror;

74 On Wace’s use of dialogue, see Penny Eley, “Speech and Writing in Wace’s Roman de Rou and and Jordan Fantosme’s Chronicle,” in Maistre Wace: A Celebration, pp. 121-38, and eadem and Philip E. Bennett, “The Battle of Hastings according to Gaimar, Wace and Benoît: Rhetoric and Politics,” Nottingham Medieval Studies 43 (1999): 47-78; Laurence Mathey-Maille, “De l’His- toria Regum Britanniae de Geoffroy de Monmouth au Roman de Brut de Wace: la naissance du roman,” in Le Travail sur le modèle, ed. Danielle Buschinger, Médiévales 16 (Amiens: Presses du Centre d’Études Médiévales, Université de Picardie Jules Verne, 2002): 5-10; and Françoise Le Saux, Companion to Wace, pp. 67, 102-7, 122, 178, 235. 75 On Wace’s various modes of authorial self-reference and images of the historian at work, see Emmanuèle Baumgartner, “Le Brut de Wace: préhistoire arthurienne et écriture de l’histoire,” in Maistre Wace: A Celebration, pp. 17-30; Jean Blacker, “Narrative Decisions and Revi- sions in the Roman de Rou,” in Maistre Wace: A Celebration, pp. 55-71; Peter Damian-Grint, The New Historians, pp. 58-59, 109, 135, 201, 229, 256, 259, 261; Laurence Mathey-Maille, “De l’Historia Regum Britanniae de Geoffroy de Monmouth au Roman de Brut de Wace: la naissance du roman”; Elisabeth van Houts, “Wace as Historian”; Christian Bratu, “‘Je, aucteur de ce livre’: Authorial Persona and Authority in French Medieval Histories and Chronicles,” in Authorities in the Middle Ages: Influence, Legitimacy and Power in Medieval Society, ed. Sini Kangas, Mia Kor- piola, and Tujia Ainonen, Fundamentals of the Medieval and Early Modern Culture 12 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), pp. 183-204, idem, “Clerc, Chevalier, Aucteur: The Authorial Personae of French Medieval Historians (12th—15th Centuries),” in Authority and Gender in Medieval and Re- naissance Chronicles, ed. Dresvina and Sparks, pp. 231-59, esp. pp. 231-43 and idem, Je, auteur de ce livre: L’affirmation de soi chez les historiens de l’antiquité à la fin du Moyen Age, Late Medieval Europe 20 (Leiden : Brill, 2019), esp. pp. 534-64. For a different view of the uniqueness of Wace’s stance, see Peter Damian-Grint who writes “There is in fact no evidence that Wace is any more independent and critical than any other twelfth-century historian. His highly self-conscious self-presentation as a scholar who carefully weighs up the credibility of different sources is in fact a literary topos: its value lies not in the information it gives us about his methods (which is non-existent), but in the clear picture it draws of what an intelligent—and successful—writer thought a vernacular historian ought to look like…the self-image that Wace projects provides us with abundant circumstantial evidence as to what they [the audience] might have been expect- ing” (“Propaganda and essample,” p. 49). 32 2) his portrayal of Edward the Confessor’s “change of heart” following what can be perceived as a betrayal of the king on the part of Harold Godwinson, leading Wace to present two versions of Edward’s bequest and thus multiple versions of events leading up to the Norman Conquest;76 3) two versions of Rufus’s death. His consistently positive portrayal of Robert Curthose is the only substan- tial counter-example to this pattern of wanting to show multiple sides of an issue or a personage.77

76 As noted in Faces (pp. 104, 183-84, and 216 n. 87; see also Holden, ed., vol. 3, pp. 148- 50), Wace provides multiple versions of events including Edward’s bequest to William I: first, a pro-English version he may have found in Eadmer of Canterbury or Simeon of Durham or heard from oral sources, to the effect that Harold Godwinson decides on his own to go to Normandy to free the hostages held by William as a guarantee of Edward’s promise of his inheritance (iii, 5585-5588); second, the Norman version, related by William of Jumièges, William of Poitiers, and Orderic where Edward takes the initiative to send Harold to assure William of his succession to the throne of England (iii, 5598-5602)—in fact Wace writes that he is not sure which is true but has found both versions in written sources (iii, 5603-5605); and third, he adds more conflicting details likely associated with English traditions (iii, 5797-5828) (see Holden ed., vol. 3, pp. 149-50): on his deathbed, Edward reiterates to a crowd of influential barons that he has given his kingdom to William upon his decease and that many of them had sworn an oath to that effect (iii, 5797-5802), but the lords on Harold’s behalf convince the king that there will never be peace if William succeeds, pressing him to finally declare—and Wace says “I do not know whether he did this with a willing heart” (iii, 5820)—that either Harold or another English lord will be duke or king (“Or(e) facent Engleis duc ou rei,/Heraut ou altre, je l’otrei” iii, 5821-5822) since he couldn’t have William (presumably given the crowd’s views), thus allowing his barons to do as they pleased (“a ses barons a graanté/qu’il en facent lor volenté” iii, 5827- 5828). Although I perhaps overstated the case when I originally referred to this multiple-version situation as a “distressing jumble” (p. 104), it remains clear that Wace often sought to provide as much information as he could, rather than comforting/soothing patrons and others with single, straight-forward versions of various events. From a slightly different perspective, Laura Ashe argues that Wace on the whole displays a “reverence for facts and knowledge irrespective of their usefulness to the cultural master narrative, and indeed of their completeness, or usefulness in the coherence of his own narrative.” She adds that “he might have chosen to omit information which he could not fully narrativize; in other words, only to tell the stories which he could finish, shape and moralize. Instead, even in recounting events which took place sixty or seventy years before his writing, he gives the impression of being captured in a morass of uncertainties, and unfinished, unfinishable stories” (Fiction and History, p. 76), that is, in a way, presenting the raw material of history without digesting it for his audience in potentially pleasing—but ostensibly more artificial—ways. 77 Of the numerous historians William M. Aird refers to in his recent biography of Robert Curthose, Wace was apparently the most positive in his portrayal of this figure Robert( Curthose, p. 10; cf. pp. 142, 198-99, 208, 215-17, 223, 226, 232, 242, 244); Elisabeth van Houts writes that “Wace used the Roman de Rou to highlight the tragedy of Robert Curthose, older brother of Henry I, who had lost out on the English throne twice (in 1087 and 1100) and who then lost the duchy so dramatically at Tinchebrai (in 1106),” going on to surmise that “if anything, the Roman de Rou’s emphatic rehabilitation of Curthose’s cause, at the same time as Wace’s potential defense of the Young King, may well have precipitated Wace’s demise as court historiographer” 33 In what I believe was an attempt to appear impartial and to avoid seeming unduly to have molded his material (though the extent to which historians mold their material is always open to debate), Wace avoided 1) using literary models (such as Suetonius as William of Malmesbury did); 2) employing a unified vision or dogma (as Geoffrey of Monmouth had); or 3) staging the historical figures with any consistency to illustrate “courtly” behavior (as Gaimar had). Wace’s use of a “high percentage of conventional phrases to describe historical figures serves to circumvent individuation and judgment on character as it subordinates the individual to the collective”; his chief aim was to write a “relatively judgment-free, nonpropagandistic history of the Normans from a military perspective, excluding both social and administrative topics” as well as motivations and to a large extent individuality.78 Apparently less interested in portraying motivations and individuality than Wace—if we can judge by the frequency of characterization accomplished in the Chronique des ducs de Normandie simply by heaping on a standard set of stock adjectives—Benoît certainly appears to have been interested in smoothing out the rough edges of the Roman de Rou in what is perhaps the earliest vernacular example of revisionist history we have.79 In

(“Latin and French as Languages of the Past in Normandy During the Reign of Henry II: Robert of Torigni, Stephen of Rouen, and Wace,” in Writers of the Reign of Henry II: Twelve Essays, ed. Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones, The New Middle Ages, New York: Palgrave Macmil- lan, 2006, pp. 53-77, cited here at p. 61). See also Nicholas Paul (To Follow in their Footsteps, pp. 229-33), who in providing additional evidence for Wace’s positive portrayal of Robert, comments that Wace was unique in claiming that Robert had given the standard he wrested from the emir of Ascalon in 1099 (which Wace transposes to the more famous battle of Antioch in 1098) to the abbaye aux dames in Caen founded by his parents and where his sister Cecelia was abbess from 1112 rather than to the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (pp. 89 and 231). 78 Faces, p. 119. 79 Peter Damian-Grint argues that there seems to be an “almost complete lack of verbal agree- ment [between the Rou and the Chronique]—the usual sign of borrowing among historians of the period,” and that evidence is weak that Benoît used Wace as a “crib” for translating his sources (“En nul leu nel truis escrit,” p. 13). Nonetheless, although there are verbal parallels (as illus- trated for example in Faces, Chap. 2, n. 103, pp. 217-18), the differences in the two narratives at critical junctures are nonetheless uncanny, as if Benoît somehow surmised what might go over better with his patron than Wace, lending the Chronique the appearance of “revisionist history” when viewed in the context of the Rou, its immediate textual predecessor. See also Ian Short who brings evidence to bear that Benoît—whose “principal narrative mode is also rhetorical in so far as it has panegyric at its centre. His ideological aim is a propagandistic one”—had already begun writing the Chronique in the early 1170s, before Henry transferred his commission from Wace in 1174, that is, that the two works overlapped chronologically, and that Benoît used the first, shorter early version of theRou ’s Troisième Partie, represented by MS. B (Paris, BnF, fr. 375) (Three Anglo-Norman Kings, pp. 9, 6-7, and 6 n. 19; for textual parallels, see notes to ll. 35528 and 36128, p. 194); unlike Carin Fahlin in her edition, Short considers the line from MS. B, “Autresi cum fist Maistre Wace” (see Faces, p. 188, now emended in the revised e-book, and n. 34 addition to consistently sidestepping Wace’s references to the problematic nature of historical research (or substituting any of his own), Benoît’s tidy- ing up includes: 1) giving only the Norman version of Edward’s bequest to William I; 2) William the Conqueror’s deathbed speech has no disparaging remarks; 3) the Conqueror’s burial is sanitized; 4) the portrayal of William Rufus is uniformly critical; 5) like William of Malmesbury and Orderic, the presentation of Robert Curthose is divided, and Benoît sides with King Henry I in the disputes and final battle with Robert. On the level of characterization, among our eight texts, the Chronique most closely resembles Geoffrey’s vulgate Historia, but where Geoffrey uses a remote, symbolic framework (including many unfamiliar names, and abstract prophetic references) to shape his material, Benoît approaches his subject through panegyric.80 Benoît relies chiefly on three modes of characterization: 1) superlatives and stock group of adjectives; 2) anecdotes (though without major inconsistencies or ambiguities as in Wace); 3) dreams and dream glosses. He does not use dialogue to reveal character: 1) speeches are composed to fit the circumstances, not the speakers; 2) they are constructed primarily to

272) as the preferred reading (p. 11). For an extended discussion of Benoît’s borrowings from Wace, see also Françoise Vielliard, “De la première redaction de la partie octosyllabique longue du Roman de Rou à la seconde: Étude des procédés d’interpolation,” in Le Texte dans le texte: L’interpolation médiévale, ed. Annie Combes and Michèle Szkilnik (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013), pp. 41-61, and eadem, “Les deux versions de la partie octosyllabique longue du Roman de Rou et leur posterité médiévale,” Medioevo Romanzo 35.1 (2011): 35-57. See n. 98 below regarding John Gillingham’s reservations that Henry II himself may have directly expressed interest in revisionist history from Benoît. It is of course possible that Wace may have been such an outlier in his views that Benoît’s return to—or instead, choice of—a more traditional Norman stance may have been simply that, rather than a revision of Wace’s text inspired by any perceived expectations of the king’s literary or historiographical desires; see also Elisabeth van Houts, “Latin and French as Languages of the Past,” pp. 60-65. 80 Damian-Grint counters the frequently expressed view among scholars who find significant propagandistic overtones in the Chronique, stating that Benoît’s use of hyperbole “in a more sustained fashion” than that found in the characterizations of other vernacular historians is due rather to “his view of essample as a central function of historiography,” such that the teaching function of exempla informs the very positive portrayals of the Norman dukes, not necessarily a desire to whitewash or gloss over shortcomings (“Propaganda and essample,” p. 47). Cf. Françoise Laurent on portraiture and panegyric in the Chronique (Pour Dieu et pour le roi, pp. 143-230). 35 demonstrate verbal skill, and the high level of sophistication primarily of the nobility; and 3) most dialogue involves negotiations preceding and following military engagements. Characterization is also achieved through rep- etition at the level of vocabulary, in contrast to Orderic for example whose narrative meanders, allowing his characters to react to a variety of circumstances in a variety of ways; in the Chronique, characterization is achieved largely through action, not description. In the Chronique, male individuals possess the traits of prowess, val- or, wisdom, beauty, generosity, nobility, and strength; leaders add charity, sweetness of temper, good judgment, honesty, humility, and piety. Insofar as the Norman dukes are concerned, for Gaimar, courtesy is at the top, for Wace it is toward the top, but for Benoît it is lower down, outpaced by a positive attitude toward the church; sagesse is often more important than prouesse. In the Chronique, evil is the perverted use of sagesse, and sometimes just the epithet “Judas” carries the entire characterization. For the ideal woman, the most detailed “portrait” is that of Arlette, but most important here, too, is her role in the lineage as mother of William the Conqueror, subordinating the individual to the collective (though the exemplarity of the individual is a sine qua non for excellent service to the collective).81 For roughly the first four-fifths of the narrative, characterization relies on a network of stock adjectives, semantic tags (and often metrical ne- cessities) linking the individual to the ideal and to the collective. In the last fifth of the narrative, Benoît races to arrive at the point where Wace left off, abandoning dialogue and large blocks of adjectives, nonetheless retaining the panegyric tone but at a much quicker, more hurried pace. It is important to reiterate at this juncture Gabrielle Spiegel’s eluci- dation of the centrality of genealogy in structuring historical narrative, since the unifying structural function of genealogy informs characterization as well. Spiegel writes that genealogy restored to medieval historiography the linear consciousness of history which, as Erich Auerbach brilliantly demon- strated, was destroyed by the adoption of figuration as the basic

81 Faces, pp. 125-28. For a comprehensive study of Wace’s presentation of female figures, including differences in use of dialogue among other devices, see Glyn S. Burgess, “Women in the Works of Wace,” in Maistre Wace: A Celebration, ed. Burgess and Weiss, pp. 91-106; for the Brut, see Charlotte A. T. Wulf, “A Comparative Study of Wace’s Guinevere in the Twelfth Century,” in Arthurian Romance and Gender: Masculin/féminin dans le roman arthurien médiéval, ed. F. Wolfzettel (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1995), pp. 66-78, and Gemma Wheel- er, “Rewriting the Past: Women in Wace’s Roman de Brut,” Reading Medieval Studies 37 (2011): 59-77; and for the Rou, Susan M. Johns, “Women and Power in the Roman de Rou of Wace,” Anglo-Norman Studies XXXVI: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 2013, ed. David Bates (Wood- bridge: Boydell, 2014), pp. 117-34. 36 strategy of historical interpretation in the early Middle Ages…In- sofar as vernacular chroniclers remain faithful to the human, bio- logical significance of their genealogies, they can perceive relationships between historical figures and events in the past as part of one continuous interrelated stream of history… as a succession of gestes performed by the successive representatives of one or more lignages…whose personal characteristics and deeds…bespoke the enduring meaning of history as the collective action of noble lin- eages in relation to one another and to those values to which their gestes gave life.82 In our texts we can observe as well a working relationship between genealogy and figuration, particularly when we define figuration in the horizontal sense along an historical continuum (rather than vertically as it is commonly defined, referring to earthly symbols which are manifestations of a “higher” reality). Applying Spiegel’s observation on the importance of genealogy as a structuring device, we see in our histories that “genealogy lends structure and forms the basis of a vision where descendants are shown to be either fulfillments of or improvements upon illustrious ancestors. ‘Bad’ characters are aberrations in otherwise glorious royal lines.”83

4. CHAPTER THREE: Patronage and Social Function: Users and Uses of History

One of the central ideas informing The Faces of Time is the extent to which our medieval historians, whose works embrace legendary material and contain improvised speeches and idealized characters, appear to have exercised a far greater degree of “imaginative reconstruction” of the past than modern readers of history assume “ought” to be found in historical narrative. Twen- ty years ago, I cited Nancy Partner’s observation of this “gap” between a medieval reader’s (and often listener’s) expectations of historiography and a modern reader’s: “whereas medieval historians were expected to fulfill their audience’s requirements for ‘information, morality, amusement, and beauty of language,’ modern historians write for those who ‘demand “hard” information, disdain amusement [and] resist morality’.”84 Our critical awareness

82 “The Social Logic of the Text,” p. 80. 83 Faces, p. 133. 84 Faces, p. 135 and Partner, Serious Entertainments, p. 3. See also eadem, “Making up Lost Time: Writing on the Writing of History,” Speculum 61.1 (1986): 90-117, eadem, “The Post-traditional Middle Ages: The Distant Past through Contemporary Eyes,” in Writing Medieval Histo- ry, pp. xi-xvi, and eadem, “Foundations: Theoretical Frameworks for Knowledge of the Past,” in The Sage Handbook of Historical Theory, pp. 1-8; Gabrielle Spiegel, “In the Mirror’s Eye: The Writing of Medieval History in North America,” in eadem, The Past as Text, pp. 57-80. 37 of our expectations in the postmodern era and those of medieval audiences obliges us to suspend our requirement that histories contain solely material that is verifiable. As the study of medieval historical writing moves forward, we must continue to direct our attention to “what the fabric of history can tell us of the mentalities of the writers and of the audiences for whom they wrote.”85 Although I mention Hans Robert Jauss’s name only once (p. 235, note 1), the theories of reception and the historico-literary importance of audience which he and his most prominent colleague in the Constanz School, Wolfgang Iser, articulated in the latter part of the twentieth century, underscoring the inseparability of text and context, implicitly informs Faces throughout—even though I recognize that, for this remote period, whatever we can glean of medieval context, including codicological evidence, needs very careful treatment if we are to understand the convergence and dialogue between text and reader in the creation of meaning.86 Despite the impossibility of determining with any exactitude an author’s intentions, Chapter 3 aims to analyze the intersections between the audience’s possible expectations and the author’s efforts to meet those expectations, attempting to determine the twelfth-century audience’s “horizon of expectations” while at the same time recognizing those through which, today, we inevitably filter all we read and see. 85 Faces, p. 134. 86 As mentioned above, providing an exhaustive list of recent scholarship on the multiple topics treated in The Faces of Time is not possible, but among sources on patronage in the twelfth century (in addition to those cited in the new editions and translations listed in section six of this new Introduction), those which should be mentioned include Ian Short, “Tam Angli, quam Franci: Self Definition in Anglo-Norman England,”Anglo-Norman Studies XVIII: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 1995, pp. 153-75, idem, “Literary Culture at the Court of Henry II,” in Henry II: New Interpretations, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill and Nicholas Vincent (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012), pp. 335-61, and idem, “Gaimar’s Epilogue”; Charity Urbanski, Writing History for the King; Paul Dalton, “The Date of Geffrei Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, the Connections of his Patrons and the Politics of Stephen’s Reign”; Emma Bérat, “The Patron and Her Clerk”; Jean Blacker, “‘Dame Custance la gentil’”; Peter Damian-Grint, The New Historians; Françoise Le Saux, A Companion to Wace; Gioia Paradisi, Le passioni della storia: Scrittura e memoria nell’op- era di Wace, Dipartimento di Studi Romanzi Università di Roma “La Sapienza,” Testi, Studi e Manuali 16 (Rome: Bagatto Libri, 2002), esp. pp. 79-89; Karen M. Broadhurst, “Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine: Patrons of Literature in French?,” Viator 26 (1996): 53-84; Susan M. Johns, Noblewomen, Aristocracy and Power in the Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman Realm (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); Francis Ingledew, “The Book of Troy”; John Gillingham, “Kingship, Chivalry and Love” and idem “Some Observations on Social Mobility in England between the Norman Conquest and the Early Thirteenth Century,” in England and Germany in the High Middle Ages, ed. A. Haverkamp and H. Vollrath (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 333-55 (repr. in idem, The English in the Twelfth Century, pp. 259-76); Martin Aurell, “Henry II and Arthurian Legend,” in Henry II: New Interpretations, pp. 362-94, and idem, L’Empire des Plantagenêt 1154-1224 (Paris: Perrin, 2003), esp. pp. 148-77. 38 As I argued toward the end of the introductory section to the original Chapter 3, external evidence including the codicological, letters, and cross-references in other texts or other types of documents are essential pieces of what is inevitably a puzzle as to the context of our histories. How- ever, since external evidence is not voluminous, we are often thrown back on the texts themselves, a process which could be thought to introduce an element of circularity into our reconstructions of social function and expectations. As I noted in 1994, “it may seem misguided at best to base an analysis of the social function of a text on the testimony of the text itself; the same is true of an inquiry into audience expectations based on the text.” However, given the remoteness of the time frame and the arbitrariness of preservation, “the texts themselves remain our best source, particularly if we remain on guard against taking the images of their creators and recipi- ents at face value.”87 In the past twenty-five years, scholars have continued to question the earlier model of textual production and patronage which assumed that Latin works were aimed solely at the clergy—who therefore had a monop- oly over learning, and the power associated with it—and vernacular works at the laity; they have also questioned the model of Latin for men, vernacular for women. Evidence regarding social standing, education, and gender points to more interchange between clerical and courtly audiences—both male and female—than had previously been assumed. More recent scholarly work has continued to demonstrate that a wider spectrum of readers/ listeners were able to function at more varied levels in Latin, as they did in the vernacular, and that women as well as men were found at various points along the continuum of reading and writing—as patrons and receivers of a broad range of writing of many kinds (including things such as history, legal documents such as charters, and literature).88 However, in addition

87 Faces, p. 147. 88 Particularly noteworthy is the rapidly growing research on the intersections between patronage and gender, as well as literacy and gender in the twelfth century or with implications for the twelfth century, including for example, Susan M. Johns, Noblewomen, Aristocracy and Power in the Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman Realm; June Hall McCash, “The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women: An Overview,” in The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, ed. J. H. McCash (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), pp. 1-49; and Elizabeth Robertson, “’This Living Hand’: Thirteenth-Century Female Literacy, Materialist Immanence, and the Reader of the An- crene Wisse,” Speculum 78.1 (2003): 1-36. On the possible exaggeration of claims for women’s lack of Latinity in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, see Alexandra Barratt, “Small Latin? The Post Conquest Learning of English Religious Women,” in Anglo-Latin and its Heritage: Essays in Honour of A. G. Rigg on his 64th Birthday, ed. Siân Echard and Gernot R. Wieland, Publications of the Journal of Medieval Latin 4 (Turhout: Brepols, 2001), pp. 51-65; on Empress Matilda’s command of Latin, see Van Houts (“Latin and French as Languages of the Past,” pp. 67-69). For a systematic overview of forms of literacy (in preparation for an analysis of the roles of women 39 to the broader base of literacy in Latin than we had previously recognized, we need to keep in mind the element of aural comprehension of Latin—or the lack thereof—because there is sufficient evidence to suggest that while members of the nobility and royalty often had at least some training in reading Latin, their ability to understand spoken Latin was limited: Anglo-Nor- man or a northern French dialect was most likely the most logical medium for readings and performances since it was the language spoken at home by most of the ruling elite.89 In addition to the strictly practical considerations of daily use of language, there were other messages conveyed through the medium of Old French.90 First, Norman domination over the English: Anglo-Norman was an instrument and symbol of power as well as a cultural affirmation, since it simultaneously projected Anglo-Norman military and political superiority to members of the ruling caste and excluded those English speakers who were not capable of understanding it; second, it was a means of cultural affirmation and bearer of social norms for the elite who were surrounded by the majority, English- (or Welsh-)speaking non-elites. However, in his discussions of William of Malmesbury’s adulation of French language and the French themselves91 and of Gaimar’s promotion of courtly culture, John Gillingham raises issues concerning the English and their British neighbors (with the former dominant over the latter) and the growing range of prejudices against those perceived to be of Celtic origins: readers), taking into account the range of important distinctions between reading silently, being read to, listening, and the extent to which reading may or may not involve the ability to write, see D. H. Green, “Reading in the Middle Ages” in Women Readers in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), part 1, pp. 7-82. It is worth keeping in mind as well Mi- chael Clanchy’s observation in his now classic study, From Memory to Written Record, that when medieval writers applied the term litteratus (“literate”) to a layperson, they most often referred to erudition or accumulated knowledge rather than the capacity to read and write (Faces, p. 228 n. 164; From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066-1307, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979, pp. 182-83; 3rd ed. Chichester, West Sussex; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). 89 Faces, p. 143. 90 Pointing out the multilingual context of the Angevin world, Simon Meecham-Jones reminds us that in Britain in the twelfth century, a linguistic choice (between English, French, or Latin) was also an ideological one: “to choose to write in any particular language was, inescap- ably, to make an ideological statement about the purpose of the text and the author’s relationship to the structures of power… it was a gesture through which writers articulated an embrac- ing or rejection of their linguistic and racial ‘identities,’ and their promotion or reservation from the assimilated and ‘Angevin’ identity modeled and embodied in Henry’s exercise of kingship” (“Introduction,” Writers of the Reign of Henry II, pp. 1-24, cited here at p. 6). 91 “For William, Norman conquest and continuing domination was one thing, but the ac- quisition of French culture and customs quite another. In William’s eyes, the more ‘Frenchified’ England and the English became, the better” (“Beginnings of English Imperialism,” in idem, The English in the Twelfth Century, p. 6). 40 In the twelfth century the French language was increasingly be- coming the lingua franca of a cosmopolitan, Europe-wide community. To speak it, or write songs in it, was one way of showing that you were the sort of Englishman who counted, who shared the civilized values of Western Europe. This was clearly not an insular sense of Englishness, but it was, for all that, a kind of Eng- lishness.92 Rather than seeing the French language exclusively as a tool of domination over the English, from this perspective French was useful as well to those English who aspired to raise their social standing vis-à-vis the Irish, Scots, and Welsh. Of the various social functions of the histories analyzed in The Faces of Time, three dominate, although they are not necessarily—if ever—mutu- ally exclusive: 1) documentary; 2) educative; and 3) legitimizing or political. The documentary included scholarship motivated by intellectual curi- osity, that is, preserving the past from oblivion and scholarship pursued for utilitarian ends—to provide proof, say, of land ownership and bloodlines in the event of contrary claims made by an adversary—though technically speaking, French histories did not serve as strong a documentary function as the Latin, given the relative social “weight” of the respective languages. 93 The monastic communities were the most interested in historiography’s documentary function, since many were driven to record their claims as oral culture was gradually replaced by written; they could no longer rely on oral testimony to confirm either liturgical or proprietary traditions unknown and often mistrusted by the foreign overlords. As a consequence of the “Normanization” of the English episcopacy, monastic historians in particular were galvanized to create documents including narrative histories as well as charters (at times spurious) to defend their local saints as national heroes, to reinforce their corporate identity, and for pragmatic fiscal rea- sons.94 In addition, nostalgia for a lost or usurped past cannot be discount-

92 “Beginnings of English Imperialism,” p. 6; see also pp. 99-100 in Gillingham, “Founda- tions of a Disunited Kingdom,” in idem, The English in the Twelfth Century, pp. 93-109 (orig. published in Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History, ed. A. Grant and K. Stringer, London: Routledge, 1995, pp. 48-64). 93 Although the social “weight” of writing in English in England during the period of focus (ca. 1120-1180) was beyond the scope of The Faces of Time, I would like to draw readers’ attention in particular to the following three essays in the collection Writers of the Reign of Henry II (ed. Kennedy and Meecham-Jones, 2006): Mary Swan, “Old English Textual Activity in the Reign of Henry II,” pp. 151-68; Elaine Treharne, “The Life of English in the mid-Twelfth Centu- ry: Ralph d’Escure’s Homily on the Virgin Mary,” pp. 169-186; and Elizabeth Solopova, “English Poetry of the Reign of Henry II,” pp. 187-204. See also Ian Short, “Anglice loqui nesciunt: Mono- glots in Anglo-Norman England,” Cultura Neolatina 69 (2009): 245-62. 94 Faces, p. 144. Two of the more outstanding examples of documentary function of works 41 ed as a motivating factor to “document” claims.95 The educative function —again remembering that there is inevitably overlap with the other two functions and keeping in mind that each group (clergy and nobility, although here too there was often overlap as some members of the clergy began life as members of the noble class) sought to jus- tify its ways to the other—encompasses the teaching of such wide-ranging topics as moral precepts, Christian dogma, ancestral heroism, and courtly etiquette, among others. For example, Orderic was ostensibly charged with not only providing a history of his abbey, the Church, and the Normans, but also with furnishing material for the lectio divina; William of Malmesbury while often furnishing documentation, sought to educate while legitimizing Robert of Gloucester’s actions (primarily his abandonment of Stephen and siding with Matilda in the civil war which marked Stephen’s reign, 1135- 54);96 Geoffrey sought to educate those in power or those who aspired to power through his moral tale of strife and internecine warfare as well as through opening up a 300-year window into the history of the island, to include the Britons whose history was virtually unknown (given the scope of our historians would be William’s efforts to protect Malmesbury against attacks from those such as Warin, a Norman abbot who threw the relics of the Anglo-Saxon saints from the church (1070-87) (Gesta Pontificum, V, 421; Faces, pp. 148, and 224, n. 83, on Warin’s recantation; see also David Knowles, The Monastic Order in England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940, 2nd ed. 1963, pp. 117-19, and S. J. Ridyard, “Condigna Veneratio: Post-Conquest Attitudes to the Saints of the Anglo-Saxons,” Anglo-Norman Studies IX: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 1986, ed. R. Allen Brown, Woodbridge, Boydell, 1986, pp. 179-206, esp. pp. 194-95) and from the encroachment of Roger of Salisbury, Henry I’s viceroy; William may have wanted to use the Historia Novella in part to convince Robert of Gloucester to help remove Warin from Malmes- bury, returning the abbey to its former pre-1118 state of independence when Henry put Roger in charge (Faces, p. 152). One of the more well known instances of documentary falsification was in fact William’s forging of three Anglo-Saxon charters in his efforts to establish Glastonbury Abbey’s independence from Canterbury, though he was unwilling to go as far as manufacturing a claim to Dunstan’s relics on behalf of Glastonbury (cf. Faces, pp. 211, n. 2 and 235, n. 277). The most famous documentary fabrication of the century though must be Glastonbury’s claim in 1191 to have uncovered Arthur and Guinevere’s tomb (along with their “remains”) on the abbey grounds, a fraud perpetrated to raise money to restore the abbey following the fire of 1184 (see among others N. J. Higham, King Arthur: Myth-making and History, London: Routledge, 2002, pp. 230-32). 95 Although strictly speaking dealing with different bodies of work, Renée R. Trilling’s fascinating study of Old English heroic poetry and chronicles, The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English Verse, provides much food for thought (Toronto: University of To- ronto Press, 2009). 96 Of the at least six volumes dedicated to Stephen’s reign over the last twenty-five years, the following is particularly comprehensive (though military and political relations with Scotland and Wales are absent), including Paul Dalton’s chapter on allegiances (“Allegiance and Intelli- gence in King Stephen’s Reign,” pp. 80-97): King Stephen’s Reign (1135-1154), ed. Paul Dalton and Graeme J. White (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008). 42 of what Geoffrey provided, quite possibly unknown to the Britons as well as to all others); Wace’s Brut contributed to the moral and social education of the nobility as did Gaimar’s Estoire, the former teaching in more authen- tic written form what the court already “knew” about Arthur through oral stories, and the latter establishing models of courtly behavior through En- glish legendary heroes like Haveloc the Dane (a quintessentially English hero possessed of French courtly manners in Gaimar’s hands) and historical figures such as William Rufus; Benoît intended to educate the court in the moral precepts and values of the clergy, the “doctrine e cognicion”—albeit never defined—in which the Norman dukes were each successively better versed than their predecessors.97 The legitimizing function is by far the broadest category, encom- passing efforts to legitimize power, as well as to gain, protect, and glorify it; it is quite possible that Henry II, like his predecessors, wanted secular authorities to rival the church as a source of scholarly and literary activity, promoting his positive image at home in answer to critics (apologia for the Becket disaster, and for the struggles with his sons who waged war against him off and on for nearly twenty years) but also abroad, primarily for the benefit of the French monarchy.98 Although Henry II did not create a scrip-

97 Faces, pp. 147, 153, 167, 178, and 187. 98 The nature of patronage at the court of Henry II, and the king’s involvement in literary affairs, is currently undergoing reassessment. Karen Broadhurst concludes that there is little evidence of Eleanor’s commissioning of the Roman de Troie, nor connections with other romans d’antiquité including the Thèbes and the Eneas, or writings of the Tristan legend, identifying the Roman de Rou and the Chronique des ducs de Normandie as the only vernacular works that can be associated with Henry II with any confidence (“Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquit- aine: Patrons of Literature in French?” esp. pp. 67-70, 81-84); her “bracing conclusions…are valuable correctives to the post-hoc mythologizing of the aesthetic priorities of Henry and his Queen” (Meecham-Jones, “Introduction,” Writers of the Reign of Henry II, p. 4). John Gillingham is skeptical regarding claims that Henry himself played a role in encouraging the writing of history either in Latin or in French; in fact, he doubts that Henry was interested in having Benoît write a contemporary history of his reign (which Benoît never reached, arriving at virtually the same spot as Wace in his own narrative, c. 1106) or he would have communicated that more clearly at the time of Wace’s decommission (pp. 29-31) (“The Cultivation of History, Legend, and Courtesy at the Court of Henry II,” Writers of the Reign of Henry II, pp. 25-52). But as Mee- cham-Jones states with respect to literature, historiography, and other genres, “whether texts that magnified and sustained Anglo-Norman rule were commissioned by the king and queen themselves, or by their aristocratic adherents, modifies scarcely if at all, the role of the texts within the ideological construction of Plantagenet legitimacy. Writing the reign of Henry II was to prove a task achieved, consciously and unconsciously, by the efforts of an impressive variety of writers, drawn from many corners of Henry’s extensive domains” (“Introduction,” Writers of the Reign of Henry II, p. 4). See also Charity Urbanski whose analysis supports the more traditional approach to Henry II and historical writing, arguing that especially with respect to vernacular verse historiography (and Wace’s and Benoît’s Norman histories in particular), the monarch “had been prescient in co-opting this genre and using it to disseminate a royally au- 43 torium staffed with ideologues, his apparent preference for historiography and other nonfictional genres over romance (judging from the extant works dating from his reign) probably did not reflect male literary preferences, but rather the need to defend beleaguered causes more effectively as fictional texts may have been perceived as “adequate for entertainment but wanting as propaganda, history being used to meet political needs far more pressing than the need for diversion.” 99 We do need to remember, though, that much of what may appear to us as fictional, such as stories of King Arthur, for example, was presented as fact and of great symbolic capital to many in power in numerous contexts: as R. R. Davies has observed, “the matter of Britain, early Britain, had in effect been hijacked and put into the service of England,” and he illustrates the “effectiveness of the takeover” with examples including that of the late twelfth-century historian Roger of Howden who transformed King Arthur from rex Britonum to rex Anglie.100 Regarding the mid-twelfth century, the same could perhaps be said of Norman historical writing, that it too was “hijacked” and molded to serve the political ends of the Henry II, who in 1154 went from being just one prince “among many others” to “become the most powerful ruler in Europe, richer even than the Emperor” who now “completely overshadowed his own nominal overlord, the king of France.”101

5. CONCLUSION:

The close readings which informed The Faces of Time yielded both expected and unexpected conclusions: among the unexpected, the extent of idealization of historical figures, particularly in the Latin histories which we might have assumed would be more realistic; the extent of idealization is perhaps less surprising in the vernacular histories which attempted to reduce reams of Latin prose into more digestible episodic clusters forgoing documentation in favor of stock portrayals constructed from familiar semantic mark- ers. Unexpected as well were the amount of individual differences among texts dealing with the “same material,” which at times, appears anything but the same. Among the expected conclusions are those that demonstrate the continual interdependence of text and context. thorized history of his dynasty” (Writing History for the King, p. 215). However, regardless of the extent of any direct role the king may have had in historiographical production, the histories were meant to serve various political ends, beyond entertainment of court retainers, their fami- lies, and ecclesiastical functionaries. 99 Faces, p. 146. 100 The Matter of Britain and the Matter of England, p. 17. 101 John Gillingham, The Angevin Empire, p. 6. 44 When we read texts of such a remote period, we are repeatedly con- fronted by our own “horizon of expectations,” by the “otherness” of the texts, and “by the individual voices of the historians whose works on the one hand beg for generalizations to promote comprehension of the larger issues and on the other defy them.”102 As I noted in Faces, “positivist expectations of historical writing have often tended to discount the creative processes beyond historical texts” but for a fuller picture of the values of the times, the texts need to be read as more than a mine of sheer fact: “historical discourse itself begs examination as a major form of expression,” as a gauge of intellectual, moral and aesthetic attitudes, a barometer of culture(s) because “when the search for historical accuracy is temporarily suspended, the techniques commonly associated with fictional narrative such as modes of characterization, recurrent motifs, local color, and dialogue lose their traditional association with imaginative fiction and can thus be viewed for what they are: elements in the formation of narrative.”103 Again, it is necessary to be mindful of this perspective so clearly articulated by Gabrielle Spie- gel—that of the “middle ground,” where in analyzing historical narrative, one considers the historical background and contexts, but does not focus intently on the search for sources and “facts” to the exclusion of the rhetorical and organizational fabric of the narratives themselves.104 The creative element in the construction of historical narrative was not always openly acknowledged by the six historians explored in this study, some of whom claimed to be “finders” of narratives—following the topos of “I found it in a little book”—while paradoxically operating as “shapers” of narrative. That their perceptions and practice of translation as a synthetic, compilational process varies so greatly from our own—the latter based more firmly on a language-to-language transfer—also serves to separate us from these historians, pointing up the “otherness” of their works, and informing what may seem to us to be perpetual contradictions between, for example, the sense of literary property (seen most clearly in Geoffrey of Monmouth among our historians) and claims to be translators. The modes of characterization used by these historians clearly demonstrate that each was actively adapting his sources to suit his particular vision of history, “regardless of the fact that they wished themselves and their works to be perceived as vehicles of historical fact.” 105 Unlike authors of romances who were often considered to have created characters to explore

102 Faces, p. 197. 103 Faces, p. 196. 104 Cf. nn. 2-3 above. 105 Faces, p. 197. 45 “a new consciousness of the self and recognition of the importance and distinctiveness of the individual,”106 these twelfth-century historians sought to have their historical figures more closely resemble ideal types, based on classical models, or on more recent constructs of knighthood, monkhood, and kingship, types which may appear to us more suited to fiction than to historiography. That we may see so many parallels between the techniques of these historical narratives and those more readily associated with fiction, particularly epics and romance, should not surprise us given the early close relationship between those genres based on what could be called historical impulse, stemming from a desire for authentication, as Dominique Boutet reminds us: “Est-ce un hasard si les premières œuvres de quelque importance en langue vulgaire, chansons de geste et romans d’Antiquité, en- tretiennent un rapport avec l’Histoire, voire avec l’historiographie en langue latine? La référence historique, sous les différentes formes qu’elle revêt dans les textes, devrait alors être rattachée à ce désir d’authenticité, de justification du discours littéraire par une autorité extérieure à la fiction romanesque.”107 Although primarily focused on six historians and eight works, The Faces of Time was intended, in 1994, to participate in a discussion which has grown significantly broader in the past twenty-five years on the fluid boundaries between 1) historical narrative and fiction, 2) clerical and lay worlds, 3) patronage and textual production, and 4) aesthetic and political subtexts, to mention only a few of the arenas which both affect—and play out in—these narratives. Particularly in a field as vast as the history of medieval historical writing, no single study can hope to ask all the “right questions”—let alone answer them: much work remains to be done across the field as a whole, for example, on the rhetorical training of historians, on their notions of data including exempla, and their conceptions and practices of compilation and how those affected the nature of their literary compo- sitions; and in addition, specifically pertaining to historical writing in En- gland in the twelfth century, on the cultural implications of the relationships between Latin, French, and English literary production. Nonetheless, the group of Latin and French dynastic histories of the Anglo-Norman regnum set within an interdisciplinary framework in The Faces of Time, can serve to highlight historical narrative as both distinct, but also as only one piece of a much larger narrative picture. These texts,

106 Robert W. Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance (New Haven: Yale Univer- sity Press, 1977), p. 2. 107 Boutet, Formes littéraires et conscience historique aux origines de la littérature française (1100- 1250), p. 32. 46 along with so many others, offer a fascinating window onto what medieval historians—and other writers—believed about themselves and their subject matter, about their past(s), and what they had to gain in presenting both the ideals and realities—that is, what they perceived as realities—in the narrative recreations of their worlds, both as they thought they were, and as they hoped they would be remembered.

6. Updates to Editions and Translations (into English) of Princi- pal Texts:

1. William of Malmesbury: a. Gesta regum Anglorum: In the 1994 book, I used W. Stubbs’s edition (Willelmi Malmesbirinsis Monachi de Gestis Regum Anglo- rum Libre Quinque; Historiae Novellae Libri Tres, 2 vols., Rolls Series, London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1887-89) and J. A. Giles’s translation (William of Malmestury’s Chronicle of the Kings of England, London: Henry G. Bohn, 1847). The standard edition with facing-page translation now available is William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings, 1, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors (†), completed by R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom, Oxford Medieval Texts (Ox- ford: Clarendon Press, 1998) and Gesta regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings, 2: General Introduction and Commen- tary, R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom, Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999); b. Historia Novella: I previously used ed. and tr. K. R. Potter, The Historia Novella of William of Malmesbury (Nelson’s Medieval Texts, London: Thomas Nelson, 1955); now available is Wil- liam of Malmesbury, Historia Novella: The Contemporary Histo- ry, ed. Edmund King (with K. R. Potter’s translation), Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

2. Orderic Vitalis, Historia Ecclesiastica: The standard edition and translation remains that of Marjorie Chibnall, The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, 6 vols., Oxford Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968-80).

3. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae: All references to the text in the 1994 book were to Acton Griscom’s edition (The Histo- riae Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, New York: Longmans, 1929), with frequent consultation of Neil Wright’s edition, The Histo- 47 ria Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth I: Bern, Burgerbibliothek, MS. 568 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1984) and Edmond Faral’s edition (Historia Regum Britanniae in La Légende arthurienne—Etudes et documents, 3 vols., III, 64-303, Paris: Champion, 1929); the translation used was Lewis Thorpe’s (The History of the Kings of Britain, Harmond- sworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1966), which was based principally on Griscom’s single-manuscript edition of Cambridge, University Library, MS. 1706, with emendations from Faral’s edition of Cambridge, Trin- ity College, MS. 1175 ; for the First Variant, I referred to Neil Wright’s edition, The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth II: The First Variant Version (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1988). A multi-manuscript edition of the vulgate Historia (with facing-page translation) is now available: The History of the Kings of Britain: An Edition and Trans- lation of De gestis Britonum [Historia Regum Britanniae], ed. Michael D. Reeve, trans. Neil Wright, Arthurian Studies 69 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007).108 See also Michael Faletra whose recent translation (of the vulgate) is based on Neil Wright’s edition (1984) (except for retaining Griscom’s chapter divisions), The History of the Kings of Britain (Peter- borough, Ont.: Broadview, 2008) and The History of the Kings of Britain: The First Variant Version, ed. and trans. David W. Burchmore, Dumbar- ton Oaks Medieval Library 57 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming).

4. Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis: Alexander Bell’s edition, L’Estoire des En- gleis by Geffrei Gaimar, Anglo-Norman Text Society 14-16 (Oxford:

108 On the vastly complex manuscript relationships, see in particular the introduction to Reeve’s edition of the vulgate Historia, pp. vi-lxxvi, and idem, “Transmission of the Historia Regum Britanniae,” Journal of Medieval Latin 1 (1991): 73-117; and Wright, ed., First Variant, pp. lxxviii-cxvi. See also David Dumville’s work referenced in Faces (“An Early Text of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae,” 1985; “Update,” 1983; “Update,” 1985; “Update…: A Second Supplement,” 1985) and Julia Crick’s work referenced in Faces (“Update,” 1986 and “Update,” 1987) as well as eadem, The Historia regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, III: A Summary Catalogue of the Manuscripts (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1989), The Historia regum Bri- tannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, IV: Dissemination and Reception in the Later Middle Ages, and “Two Newly Located Manuscripts of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britannie,” Arthurian Lit- erature 13 (1995): 151-56. On the multiple dedications, see Julia Crick, The Historia regum Bri- tannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, IV, pp. 13, 17, 98, 100, and 113-20 (Crick gives four dedications in descending order of frequency—to Robert of Gloucester alone; the nameless dedication; to Robert of Gloucester and Waleran of Meulan; and to King Stephen and Waleran, p. 120), and also Reeve, ed., pp. ix-x (Reeve posits five rather than four different forms of dedication, distinguishing between those “to someone nameless” and “to no-one at all,” p. ix); cf. Faces, p. 20 and p. 206, nn. 56-61. See also Jaakko Takhokallio, “Early Manuscript Dissemination,” in A Companion to Geoffrey of Monmouth, ed. Georgia Henley and Joshua Byron Smith (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). 48 Basil Blackwell, 1960 and repr. New York: Johnson Reprint, 1971) has recently been supplanted by Geoffrei Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis/ History of the English, ed. and tr. Ian Short (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

5. Wace: a. Roman de Brut: For many scholars, Ivor Arnold’s edition (Le Roman de Brut de Wace, 2 vols., Société des Anciens Textes Français, Paris: SATF, 1938-40) has largely been replaced by Wace’s Roman de Brut: A History of the British: Text and Trans- lation, trans. Judith Weiss (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999; rev. ed. 2002). Based on Arnold’s edition, Weiss’s text includes frequently emended readings; Arnold’s introduction and manuscript information still remain valuable (I, vii-c, esp. vii-lxxiv), as do the extensive variants (Weiss has also included a limited number).109 b. Roman de Rou: A. J. Holden’s edition remains standard (Le Ro- man de Rou de Wace, 3 vols., SATF, Paris: A. & J. Picard, 1970); it has been reprinted (without notes or variants) as the basis of the new translation, Wace, The Roman de Rou, trans. Glyn S. Burgess (St. Helier: Société Jersiaise, 2002), with new notes by Burgess and Elisabeth van Houts; the translation has been reprinted (without Holden’s text) in The History of the Norman People: Wace’s Roman de Rou (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004). c. La Conception Nostre Dame, La Vie de sainte Marguerite, and La Vie de saint Nicolas: Wace, The Hagiographical Works: The Conception Nostre Dame and the Lives of St Margaret and St Nich- olas, trans. with introduction and notes, Jean Blacker, Glyn S. Burgess, and Amy V. Ogden, Studies in Medieval and Reforma-

109 Recent manuscript discoveries bring the total of Brut manuscripts to 19 complete or nearly complete copies, plus 13 incomplete copies that survive either as extracts or as manuscript fragments; the number of fragments and extracts increases to 17 if different extracts within the same manuscript are counted separately. See Judith Weiss, “Two Fragments from a newly discovered Manuscript of Wace’s Brut,” Medium Aevum 68 (1999): 268-77, and Ian Short, “Un Roman de Brut anglo-normand inédit,” Romania 126 (2008): 273-95 (the scroll, London, College of Arms 12/45A, whose anonymous verse Brut Short edits in this article also contains on the verso a copy he describes as “pas toujours très exacte” (p. 274), of ll. 9059-13680 of Wace’s Brut; see pp. 274-77). See also Ruth J. Dean, Anglo-Norman Literature: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts, with the collaboration of Maureen B. M. Boulton, Anglo-Norman Text Society Occasional Publication Series 3 (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1999), pp. 2-4, and Jean Blacker, Wace: A Critical Bibliography, with the collaboration of Glyn S. Burgess (St. Helier: So- ciété Jersiaise, 2008), pp. 6-9, to which should now be added the extract in London, College of Arms 12/45A. I am very grateful to Prof. Short for additional information and nuancing of the current count. 49 tion Traditions 169 / Texts and Studies 3 (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Ashford’s text of the CND, Ronsjö’s Saint Nicolas, and Keller’s Sainte Marguerite have been reproduced (but without their original variants and notes, though some principal variants not provided by Keller are added in the Notes).

6. Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Chronique des ducs de Normandie: Carin Fahlin’s edition remains standard (Chronique des ducs de Normandie. Publiée d’après le manuscrit de Tours avec les variantes du manuscrit de Londres, 4 vols.: vols. 1 and 2, Bibliotheca Ekmaniana Universita- tis Regiae Upsaliensis 56, 60, Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1951, 1954; vol. 3, Glossaire, revised, completed, and published posthu- mously by Östen Södergård, Bibliotheca Ekmaniana Universitatis Regiae Upsaliensis 64, Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1967; vol. 4, Notes, by Sven Sandqvist, Acta Universitatis Lundensis. Sectio I, Theologica, Juridica, Humaniora 29, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wik- sells, 1979). The first English translation (partial, ll. 33445-44544 [end]; text retitled Histoire des ducs de Normandie) is now available: Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Three Anglo-Norman Kings: The Lives of Wil- liam the Conqueror and Sons, trans. with introduction and notes, Ian Short, Mediaeval Sources in Translation 57 (Toronto: Pontifical Insti- tute of Mediaeval Studies, 2018).

Note: The volume numbers of the editions themselves if in multiple volumes (as well as the texts’ book numbers, line numbers, etc.) which were originally used in the 1994 book (according to conventions at the time) have been retained in the revised e-book for ease of identification.

7. Comments on Translation Changes and Terminology:

There are only three points that I feel need additional comment:

1) On p. 104 (1994 pagination), I have made changes to the translation, including removal of the word “betrayed” in l. 5857 (iii, 5857). However, the result of the actions which Wace re- ports constitutes essentially a betrayal of Edward’s wishes by the English barons supporting Harold Godwinson’s claim to the throne as Edward lay dying, and also a betrayal by Harold. Following William’s hearing that Harold had the kingdom, he explains his distress to his supporters: “I am distressed by this,” said the duke, “but I can do no more. I am distressed because 50 of Edward and his death and because of Harold who has done wrong by me. He who has taken the kingdom, which was given and promised to me, does me wrong. Edward had given it to me and Harold had sworn this to me” (for iii, 5901-5908; Burgess, trans., p. 227). 110

2) On p. 115 (1994 pagination), I have changed my translation of “ço diseit” in l. 10329 (iii, 10329), substituting the pronoun “he” (“he said”) referring to Robert, for the impersonal third person “it is said” (which is possible but less likely). I had originally chosen the latter expression following the logic that given Wace’s positive portrayal of Robert,111 it had seemed remote to me that Wace would have wanted to attribute that sentiment— that England should have been his because he was the eldest— to Robert only (rather than to public sentiment). However, Kate McGrath’s study112 on appropriate and inappropriate anger in historical narratives of the Anglo-Norman regnum suggests that Wace may have presented a very angry response on Robert’s part at having been once again denied (or deprived/robbed of) the throne (the first time, at the death of his father in 1087 and then at the death of his younger brother William II in 1100) precisely as further “evidence” to shore up Robert’s claims—as an expression of justifiable anger “to highlight the tragedy of Robert Curthose”113– and to counter the views of others such as Orderic that Robert was often “soft” (“Robertus mollis”).114

110 See n. 76 above, and Damian-Grint’s comment that Edward the Confessor’s wishes that his lands go to William were ignored by his “stubborn” vassals, a situation made worse by the fact that Harold had already sworn to William that he would support his claim (“En nul leu,” p. 19). 111 See the details provided by Van Houts on Wace’s “rehabilitation” of Duke Robert in “Latin and French as Languages of the Past,” pp. 54 and 61 (and n. 77 above). 112 Kate McGrath, “The Politics of Chivalry: The Function of Anger and Shame in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Anglo-Norman Historical Narratives,” in Feud, Violence and Practice. Essays in Medieval Studies in Honor of Stephen D. White, ed. Belle S. Tuten and Tracey L. Billado (Alder- shot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 55-69, esp. pp. 62-64 on Orderic’s portrayal of Robert. 113 Van Houts, “Latin and French as Languages of the Past,” p. 61. 114 Cf. Orderic’s use of this term for Robert, Faces, pp. 72-73. For further detailed analysis of the complex succession following the Conqueror’s death and the untimely death of William Ru- fus, as well as of Robert’s successes (in the First Crusade, and notable for piety and generosity), failings (rebellions against his father, mismanagement of Normandy as duke, including leniency against wrongdoers), and (often negative) fate at the hands of twelfth-century historians, see Judith A. Green, “Robert Curthose Reassessed,” Anglo-Norman Studies XXII: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 1999, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000), pp. 95-116, and eadem “La Bataille de Tichebray: Un tournant dans l’histoire de la Normandie et de l’Angle- terre,” in Tinchebray 1106-2006. Actes du colloque de Tinchebray (28-30 septembre 2006), ed. Véro- 51 3) As readers will note, I often retained the original terms estoire and geste in my translations in Faces; at this time, I am elect- ing to let those stand. I am inclined to agree with R. Howard Bloch and Douglas Kelly, among others, that vernacular writers including historians often appear to have used those terms interchangeably, at least in the earlier periods; for the time being at least, I will refrain from entering the debates involving the possible specificity of usage and the difficulties of translating those terms.115

Jean Blacker November 2019 nique Gazeau and Judith Green, Le Pays Bas-Normand 271-72 (2009): 47-60; William Aird, “Le Retour du croisé: Robert Courteheuse, duc de Normandie, et les conséquences de la première croisade,” in Tinchebray 1106-2006, pp. 35-45, and idem, “Frustrated Masculinity: The Relation- ship between William the Conqueror and his Eldest Son,” in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. Dawn M. Hadley (London: Longman, 1999), pp. 39-54 (in addition to idem, Robert Curthose Duke of Normandy (c. 1050-1134), esp. pp. 209-10 on the treaty of 1101); see also C. Warren Hollister, Henry I, edited and completed by Amanda Clark Frost (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 39, 104-6, 114, 181-82. On Wace’s portrayal of the relationship between Robert and Henry I (largely at the latter’s expense), see Charity Urbanski, Writing History for the King, esp. pp. 108-25; cf. Peter Damian-Grint, “Robert Courteheuse et Henri Beauclerc, frères ennemis dans les estoires de Wace et de Benoît,” in Tinchebray 1106-2006, pp. 79-92. See also Ian Short who remarks that Wace and Benoît “were certainly very different writers and historiographers. In contrast to Benoît’s theological and providentialist vision of history, Wace offers a more realistic, more critical and more questioning interpretation of the past” as well as “In comparison to the maverick Wace—some have even called him subversive—Benoît must have been much more in tune with his master’s voice. If Wace was awkwardly questioning, then Benoît was comfortably complacent” (Three Anglo-Norman Kings, pp. 4-11) and Laurence Mathey-Maille, Écritures du passé, p. 258; cf. Françoise Laurent, Pour Dieu et pour le roi, pp. 1-17 and Benoît, Vie de Guillaume le conquérant (Chronique des Ducs de Normandie), trans. Paul Fichet (Bayeux: Éditions Heimdal, 1976)[trans. into modern French of ll. 33445-42042], pp. 1-12. 115 Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies, p. 98 and Douglas Kelly, “Matiere and genera dicendi in Medieval French Romance,” Yale French Studies 51 (1974): 147-59, p. 147 (cited by Dami- an-Grint, The New Historians, p. 211, n. 5); see also Emmanuèle Baumgartner who, distinguishing estoire as the recording of the past and geste as the glorification of that past, notes no surprise that Wace uses them interchangeably, not necessarily as exact synonyms but as complementary terms: “Rien d’étonnant donc à ce que le terme de geste soit utilisé en alternance avec estoire par Wace pour designer l’œuvre suivante, le Rou ou plus justement la geste des Normands; un texte dans lequel, à la différence du Brut, Wace entre de plain pied dans l’écriture de l’histoire” (“Du ‘roman’ à l’histoire: le motif de la bataille rangée chez Wace et Benoît,” in Histoire et roman, Actes du colloque du Centre d’Études Médiévales et Dialectales de Lille 3, Université Charles-de-Gaule— Lille 3, 1- 2 et 3 octobre 2002, ed. Catherine Croizy-Naquet and Philippe Logié, Bien Dire et Bien Aprandre 22 (2004): 23-37, cited here at p. 30; cf. Laurence Mathey-Maille, Écritures du passé, pp. 255-57. For differing views on these terms, see Damian-Grint, The New Historians, pp. 211- 25.