It has long been recognized that texts, just like cultures, usually have a past of their own. This past frequently became reassessed and exploited by successive generations of medieval writers, a process which perhaps can best be referred to as reinscription. Reinscription represents one of the crucial mechanics of cultural memory, involving the rewriting of the past from a present perspective. Erwin Panofsky has argued for an essential difference in how such processes of reinscription were executed by Carolingian artists and by others in later periods. According to Panofsky, what differentiates Carolingian reinscriptions from those of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, especially in the context of the so-called ‘Twelfth-Century Renaissance’, is that Carolingian artists generally seem to have had little motivation to replace the original context of the sources they were drawing upon in order to endow them with a new and contemporary meaning. What remains largely absent from such modes of imitatio, therefore, is the artist's ‘effort to infuse into a given classical image a meaning other than that with which it had been invested from the outset’. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, by contrast, classical models were increasingly adopted in ways which detached them from their original context, recontextualizing and relocating them within new cultural, literary and aesthetic discourses. What Panofsky identifies as the ‘principle of disjunction’ in medieval pieces of art can also be observed, and significantly so, in historical narratives such as the HN.

In the course of the later eleventh and twelfth centuries, the HN underwent a number of important developments, both textually and with regard to its manuscript tradition. As the first two chapters of this book demonstrated, during the twelfth century the HN's primary area of transmission moved across the English Channel. Only half of the surviving twelfth-century copies were produced in Normandy, whereas five manuscripts originate from English scriptoria. At the same time, the ratio of independents to compilations begins to swing in favour of the latter. Evidently, in Anglo-Norman England, even more so than in Normandy, Dudo's work increasingly came to be transmitted as part of larger textual collections. On the one hand, this probably had to do with natural and unavoidable causes, such as, for example, that Dudo's history of Normandy under Richard I simply went out of date with the passing of generations.