Rewriting saints and ancestors : memory and forgetting in France, 500-1200

"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." --Provided by publisher List of Illustrations ix Preface xi Notes on Terminology xiii Introduction 1 1. Cartularies: Remembering the Documentary Past 9 2. The Composition and Purpose of Cartularies 22 3. Twelfth-Century Narratives of the Past 38 4. Polyptyques: Twelfth-Century Monks Face the Ninth Century 53 5. An Age of Forgery 63 6. Remembering the Carolingians 87 7. Creation of a Carolingian Dynasty 106 8. Western Monasteries and the Carolingians 126 9. Eighth-Century Transitions: The Evidence from Burgundy 152 10. Great Noble Families in the Early Middle Ages 176 11. Early Frankish Monasticism 193 12. Remembering Martyrs and Relics in Sixth-Century Gaul 213 Conclusion 228 Appendix I. Monasteries in Burgundy and Southern Champagne 233 Appendix II. Churches in Auxerre 245 List of Abbreviations 251 Notes 253 Bibliography 327 Index 353 Acknowledgments 361 Rewriting Saints and Ancestors examines the ways medieval French writers re-remembered and rewrote the lives of saints and dynastic ancestors, reconceptualizing the past in order to make sense of the present.