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Rewriting Saints and Ancestors : Memory and Forgetting in France, 500-1200 / Constance Brittain Bouchard.

By: Material type: TextTextSeries: The Middle Ages SeriesPublisher: Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2014]Copyright date: ©2015Description: 1 online resource (384 p.) : 7 illusContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780812246360
  • 9780812290080
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 944/.01072 23
LOC classification:
  • D13.5.F8 B68 2015eb
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Ilustrations -- Preface -- Notes on Terminology -- Introduction -- 1. Cartularies: Remembering the Documentary Past -- 2. The Composition and Purpose of Cartularies -- 3. Twelfth-Century Narratives of the Past -- 4. Polyptyques: Twelfth-Century Monks Face the Ninth Century -- 5. An Age of Forgery -- 6. Remembering the Carolingians -- 7. Creation of a Carolingian Dynasty -- 8. Western Monasteries and the Carolingians -- 9. Eighth-Century Transitions: The Evidence from Burgundy -- 10. Great Noble Families in the Early Middle Ages -- 11. Early Frankish Monasticism -- 12. Remembering Martyrs and Relics in Sixth-Century Gaul -- Conclusion -- Appendix I. Monasteries in Burgundy and Southern Champagne -- Appendix II. Churches in Auxerre -- List of Abbreviations -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Acknowledgments
Summary: Thinkers in medieval France constantly reconceptualized what had come before, interpreting past events to give validity to the present and help control the future. The long-dead saints who presided over churches and the ancestors of established dynasties were an especially crucial part of creative memory, Constance Brittain Bouchard contends. In Rewriting Saints and Ancestors she examines how such ex post facto accounts are less an impediment to the writing of accurate history than a crucial tool for understanding the Middle Ages.Working backward through time, Bouchard discusses twelfth-century scribes contemplating the ninth-century documents they copied into cartularies or reworked into narratives of disaster and triumph, ninth-century churchmen deliberately forging supposedly late antique documents as weapons against both kings and other churchmen, and sixth- and seventh-century Gallic writers coming to terms with an early Christianity that had neither the saints nor the monasteries that would become fundamental to religious practice. As they met with political change and social upheaval, each generation decided which events of the past were worth remembering and which were to be reinterpreted or quietly forgotten. By considering memory as an analytic tool, Bouchard not only reveals the ways early medieval writers constructed a useful past but also provides new insights into the nature of record keeping, the changing ways dynasties were conceptualized, the relationships of the Merovingian and Carolingian kings to the church, and the discovery (or invention) of Gaul's earliest martyrs.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9780812290080

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Ilustrations -- Preface -- Notes on Terminology -- Introduction -- 1. Cartularies: Remembering the Documentary Past -- 2. The Composition and Purpose of Cartularies -- 3. Twelfth-Century Narratives of the Past -- 4. Polyptyques: Twelfth-Century Monks Face the Ninth Century -- 5. An Age of Forgery -- 6. Remembering the Carolingians -- 7. Creation of a Carolingian Dynasty -- 8. Western Monasteries and the Carolingians -- 9. Eighth-Century Transitions: The Evidence from Burgundy -- 10. Great Noble Families in the Early Middle Ages -- 11. Early Frankish Monasticism -- 12. Remembering Martyrs and Relics in Sixth-Century Gaul -- Conclusion -- Appendix I. Monasteries in Burgundy and Southern Champagne -- Appendix II. Churches in Auxerre -- List of Abbreviations -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Acknowledgments

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

Thinkers in medieval France constantly reconceptualized what had come before, interpreting past events to give validity to the present and help control the future. The long-dead saints who presided over churches and the ancestors of established dynasties were an especially crucial part of creative memory, Constance Brittain Bouchard contends. In Rewriting Saints and Ancestors she examines how such ex post facto accounts are less an impediment to the writing of accurate history than a crucial tool for understanding the Middle Ages.Working backward through time, Bouchard discusses twelfth-century scribes contemplating the ninth-century documents they copied into cartularies or reworked into narratives of disaster and triumph, ninth-century churchmen deliberately forging supposedly late antique documents as weapons against both kings and other churchmen, and sixth- and seventh-century Gallic writers coming to terms with an early Christianity that had neither the saints nor the monasteries that would become fundamental to religious practice. As they met with political change and social upheaval, each generation decided which events of the past were worth remembering and which were to be reinterpreted or quietly forgotten. By considering memory as an analytic tool, Bouchard not only reveals the ways early medieval writers constructed a useful past but also provides new insights into the nature of record keeping, the changing ways dynasties were conceptualized, the relationships of the Merovingian and Carolingian kings to the church, and the discovery (or invention) of Gaul's earliest martyrs.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 30. Aug 2021)