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The concept of medieval historiography as 'usable past' is here challenged and reassessed. The contributors' shared claim is that the value of medieval historiographical texts lies not only in the factual information the texts contain but also in the methods and styles they use to represent and interpret the past and make it ideologically productive. Violence is used as the key term that best demonstrates the making of historical meaning in the Middle Ages, through the transformation of acts of physical aggression and destruction into a memorable and usable past. The twelve chapters assembled here explore a wide range of texts emanating from throughout the francophone world. They cover a range of genres ('chansons de geste', histories, chronicles, travel writing, and lyric poetry), and range from the late eleventh to the fifteenth century. Through examination of topics as varied as rhetoric, imagery, humor, gender, sexuality, trauma, subversion, and community formation, each chapter strives to demonstrate how knowledge of the medieval past can be enhanced by approaching medieval modes of historical representation and consciousness on their own terms, and by acknowledging - and resisting - the desire to subject them to modern conceptions of historical intelligibility. Noah D. Guynn is Associate Professor of French at the University of California, Davis; Zrinka Stahuljak is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. Contributors: Noah D. Guynn, Zrinka Stahuljak, James Andrew Cowell, Jeff Rider, Leah Shopkow, Matthew Fisher, Karen Sullivan, David Rollo, Deborah McGrady, Rosalind Brown-Grant, Simon Gaunt.
This infinite passage through violence is what is called history.
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference
In the 1869 preface to his Histoire de France (1833–67), the great Romantic historian Jules Michelet declares that, prior to the composition of his magnum opus, France “avait des annales, et non point une histoire” [had annals but not a history]. In his view, annals are to history as mere facts are to life itself: while the former do little more than compile information about great men, pivotal events, and dominant institutions, the latter captures the national spirit and life in its totality: “la vie historique … en toutes ses voies, toutes ses formes, tous ses éléments” [historical life … with all its paths, all its forms, all its elements] (p. iii). Positing history “comme résurrection de la vie intégrale” [as the resurrection of the whole of life] (p. iv), he proposes a set of obligations for the historian: he must penetrate beneath the “surface” of past events in order to access France's social, cultural, and political endeavors in their “infini détail” [infinite detail] (p. i); embrace “l'unité vivante des éléments naturels et géographiques qui l'ont constituée” [the living unity of the natural and geographical elements that constituted her] (p. i); delve into the “sources primitives” (p. i) that abound in her manuscript collections and archives; and study the somatic, humoral, and pathological conditions of the population, thereby apprehending France itself “comme une personne” [as a person] (p. xxiii).