The Politics of Historiography the Memory of Bishops in Eleventh-Century Rouen*

The Politics ofHistoriography: The Memory ofBishops in Eleventh-Century Rouen Page 1 of 1 The Politics of Historiography The Memory of Bishops in Eleventh-Century Rouen* FEliCE UFSHITZ At the beginning of the eleventh century the suburban monastery of St. Quen of Rouen was placed under the control of its own regular abbots and thus became for the first time since its ! I ) foundation in the seventh century independent of the bishops of Rouen. This reqularreforrn of St. Ouen inaugurated at Rouen an extended period of competltlont5etw~eei1 the"abhey and the • episcopal see, a competition simi~tne~eliipolnneouS"trTtrn=eCCleslaslJcarDa"ttlesraging , particularly at Tours and orteens as well as throughout the south oJ-francel The battle 'i ' between the two rouennai~,institutions was fought on many fron,tS ~rough competition for / '-)loble patronage, through competition for relics, through mollumental building campaigns, and 2 j/ so forth The battle was al~ught on a less rneterlal, more "symbolic plane: through the sponsorsntporrtvar~s""'a"'infS'Cults, including the production of-h-ist-o-ri-cafn"arrativ"es connected with those veneratlons.nn-tocatttv after locality in eleventh-century France, controversies, confliCfSantHttreats to (normally ecclesiastical) community identity stimulated the creation of new imagined pasts3 BishoP~'p-en-u~French: Quen) of Rouen, the seventh-century founder of his eponymous monastic house of St. Ouen, had been for many centuries the primary recipient of the saintly venerations of the people of Rouen; in other words, he had been the most important figure in the past history of Rouen. During the period when the abbey and the see were connected (that is, from the seventh through the tenth centuries), Audoenus had been a particularly convenient symbol of the ; j ~' J.. J '_J Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com Publication Information: Article Title: The Politics of Historiography: The Memory of Bishops in Eleventh-Century Rouen. Contributors: Felice Lifshitz - author. Journal Title: History and Memory. Volume: 10. Issue: 2. Publication Year: 1998. Page Number: 118. http://www.questia.com/reader/print 9/26/2008 The Politics of Historiography: The Memory of Bishops in Eleventh-Century Rouen Page 1 of 1 rouenneis urban past. However since Audoenus represented and indeed embodied a degree of intimacy between abbey and cathedral which had been superseded in the eleventh century, it nOlong8 suited the purposes or historians, either-o{the-ab6eyon)nne-·see~·-fo·Slio-tiighthim as the key figure in the development of the church and town of Rouen. Both revisionist historiography and the promotion of saints' cults therefore proceeded, in eleventh-century Rouen, in two mutually exclusive directions. Indeed, cathedral historians had already begun to shift their emphasis, as early as the mid-tenth century, away from the pontificate of St. Audoenus to that of St. Romanus, a predecessor of Audoenus who had lived and died before the abbey was even founded" On at least two occasions in the eleventh century, in 1053 and 1073, the monks of St. Ouen I and the clergy of the cathedral of Rouen clashed publicly over the issue of the relics and festival celebrations of the historical saints of the region. The 1053 incident marked the first • public appearance of a complete newcomer to the cultic world.ang imaginative memory of the town of Rouen: Nigasius, the monastic counterweight ~asius'sfestival was fixed as 11 October from at least the ninth century, when he is commemorated (with his companions Quirinus and Pientia) as a priestly martyr of the Vexin in Usuard's Martyrology, the calendar of saints' feasts first compiled at St.-Germain-des-Pres near Paris and then adopted by most Latin churches" The date of 11 October was perfectly suited to syphon enthusiasm away from Romanus's 23 October feast, which in early eleventh-century Rouen marked the first renewed burst of celebratory steam after the major 15 August festival of the Virgin Mary. In 1053 the monks of St. Wandrille de Fontenelle, carrying their own relics (such as those of St. Vulframnus), fled the drought- and famine-plagued countryside for the diocesan capital of Rouen. A monk of the community described their reception in the narrative known as the Inventio et miracula sancti Vulframni.7 The Fontenelle refugees were greeted, outside the city, by the canons of the cathedral of Rouen, the latter bearing relics of Romanus, who was rapidly rising (through support of the cathedral clergy) to the status of principal patron of the town. The two processions merged into one and began to return to the cathedral, each holding aloft their standards, namely Romanus and Vulframnus. But then the unexpected occurred: ~ 1 J 9 Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com Publication Information: Article Title: The Politics of Historiography: The Memory of Bishops in Eleventh-Century Rouen. Contributors: Felice Lifshitz - author. Journal Title: History and Memory. Volume: 10. Issue: 2. Publication Year: 1998. Page Number: 119. http://www.questia.com/reader/print 9/26/2008 . The Politics ofHistoriography: The Memory ofBishops in Eleventh-Century Rouen Page 1 of I Thus, accompanied by this crowd of devoted people, we were advancing through the town and feeling no violence of immoderate pressure, when suddenly there came forward with the body of St. Nigasius a whole chain of monks of St. Ouen, whitened by their albs and cloaked in their habits, and they stood in our way holding before them candles, and crosses likewise, and incense-burning censers, and in this way they began to lead us away, chanting with great honor. Moreover, once we had gone a bit further, there arrived a multitude of nuns, resounding with the sweet melody of their votces" The cathedral canons were powerless to stop the two-pronged advance of male and female regular clergy, and the Fontenelle visitors were led, behind the standard of St. Nigasius, not to I the cathedral but to St. Ouen; there they deposited their relics and rested. By 1073 the • competition between the abbey and the cathedral of Rouen had escalated well beyond the competition for prestigious guests and had even erupted into outright violence, for in that year a band of monks from St. Ouen physically attacked Archbishop John while he was celebrating, in the cathedral, a mass for the festival of St. Audoenus? Violent incidents similar to the attack on Archbishop John of Rouen also took place at Tours, and over ide~t'cal issues of where and by whom the cults of the region's patrons would be celebrated. 1 . uch tensions and conflicts can be understood as identical, mutatis mutandis, to the battles w ich have been waged in more recent times over non-sainted embodiments and symbols of local history and local identity. Furthermore, public expressions of identity through the celebration of particular patrons, whether in the form of permanent monuments or of annual processions at festivals, are only part of the story.ll The reason we can know what visions of the past Romanus, Nigasius or any other saint represented is that those who promoted their festivals also wrote biographies (as well as other sorts of narratives) concerning them. The representations of the past which are contained in those historiographic narratives are as politicized and context-driven as are those of any other kind of historiography. The ghettoization of biographies of those who have been considered "saints" into a category called "hagiography" r_ j ii.';: Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com Publication Information: Article Title: The Politics of Historiography: The Memory of Bishops in Eleventh-Century Rouen. Contributors: Felice Lifshitz - author. Journal Title: History and Memory. Volume: 10. Issue: 2. Publication Year: 1998. Page Number: 120. http://www.questia.com/reader/print 9/26/2008 . The Politics ofHistoriography: The Memory ofBishops in Eleventh-Century Rouen Page 1 of 1 during the past century and a half has often obscured their historiographical, and therefore their political, nature.12 A particularly apt parallel to the 1053 and 1073 Rouen incidents is the imbroglio over the erection of monuments to Walther von der Vogelweide and Dante Alighieri in the South Tyrol in 1889 and 1896.13 Both Walther and Dante represented radically divergent visions of the past history, and consequently of the present identity, of the Tyrol: should public commemoration and therefore official proclamation declare the region to be "German" or "Italian"? At Rouen in the eleventh century, saintly patrons as divergent as Walther and Dante were proposed by the cathedral and the monastery respectively as symbols of the local past I which would be suitable to supplementing the increasingly outmoded Audoenus: Romanus and Nigasius. It is crucial to emphasize, however, that the eleventh-century rouennais battles are • parallels not precursors of the nineteenth-century Tyrolean battles. The latter wording would imply that public rituals concerning the bodies of saints belong to some earlier, immature stage of development of a process whose telos culminates in more "modern" ritual forms. For one thing, rituals concerning saints have hardly been superseded, and they continue to take place; for another, one point of this essay is to emphasize that the eleventh-century conflicts and rituals were fully as politicized as have been any nineteenth- and twentieth-century manifestations of memorializing symbology. In this, I second Annabel Wharton in questioning "the assumption of disjunction between modernity and premodernity" and "the ubiquitous absence of the past in contemporary accounts of urbanism.,,14 * It is not difficult to understand why the community of the abbey of St. Ouen preferred not to heroize Romanus, who was after all the predecessor of their own founder; t~cult of Roman~s_ therefore focused historical memory on a moment Y!llen the episcopal see h~ci~lS for spifitilaT-tfrestlge-ahdpower-;-tfa-weVer,llleaDbey's proposed replacement bishop-saint of Rouen, Nigasius, was not a choice that makes any obvious logical sense.

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