Introduction
The primary sources of medieval history discussed in this volume are presented as falling into several different groupings. In the first five chapters a few of the many categories of primary sources are explicitly treated – sources qua sources. Each essay deals with a particular genus (or a generic grouping) of primary source. In the second section, Chapters 6 to 14, some historical topics are dealt with to illustrate how historians use a mix of different sources to shed light on topics of interest. In this category the diversity of sources and the ways that historians use them are the major focus. And in the third section, Chapters 15 and 16, we step outside the historian’s customary reliance on written sources and look, if but quickly, at what visual culture and archaeology add to the mix.
Primary sources are to the historian what molecules are to the chemist – the compounds from which larger constructions are assembled. While the chemist probes the nature of matter by combining molecules, the historian probes the past by a reading and analysis of the records left by the people, or at least by some of the people, of the period under discussion. Without such records the historian goes nowhere. These contemporary records are what we refer to as primary sources, that is, records from those who lived at the time under examination (while subsequent scholarly material is referred to as secondary sources). Primary sources are the foundation on which any examination of the past must rest – and where it must begin; even the first textbooks had to start there. And as scholarly and academic disciplines have developed and distinguished themselves from each other, it is the written records of that past that fall to the historian.
The records of medieval Europe, generated between the late Roman Empire in the fourth century and around 1500, and coming from a geographical span stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to Scandinavia, are voluminous. Though what has been preserved – what is extant – is obviously but a fraction of the writings and records of that medieval millennium, there are virtually mountains of sources of all sorts for us to study, many of them still unedited and unpublished. These sources can be divided, for our convenience, into a few major categories. One consists of narrative histories or chronicles – synthetic accounts that tell a tale in prose (in most cases). A second category consists of the records of government. This embraces an immense amount of material, emanating from the thrones, courts and chanceries of virtually every secular and ecclesiastical authority of medieval Europe. In their diversity and volume these records enable us to unravel the workings of the executive, administrative, legislative and policy-making aspects of public life and power. They take us up and down the socio-political ladder, from papal mandates to quarrels between peasants. A third major category is what we can lump together as private or personal records, with wills and family letters as good examples. Though other kinds of primary material could be added to the list, such as records of the early universities, these broad categories suffice for an introduction.
Were we to trace the history of modern scholarship regarding medieval Europe we would find that much of the work of the pioneers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century was devoted to editing and publishing primary sources. This, they all agreed, was the way to begin a serious study of the Middle Ages. However, because much of this scholarship focused on political and diplomatic history it was the vast body of narrative chronicles and of government records that received most of the early attention. Our interest today has shifted and private or personal sources, along with familiar material now read for different purposes, stake a large claim. We look for windows into the worlds of women, family life, sex and sexuality, children, demography, health and other such areas. Anything and everything seems proper grist for the historian’s mill, including the links between traditional written materials and visual sources (art history) and material remains (archaeology), as we shall see below.
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The purpose of this volume is to offer an introduction to some of the many kinds of primary materials that we use in our effort to understand the dynamics of medieval life. Though there are obviously more kinds of sources than any single volume can cover, and though we make no effort to give a reference book survey of extant materials, we try to give an idea of the complexity and variety of what has been preserved. The primary sources for medieval history vary widely, as does scholarly use of them. The essays in this volume are divided into three categories, a division emphasizing both the diversity of the material and the variations in how historians use them. We cover some traditional fields and sources that have been accepted as keys to medieval life; we also look at topics that would not have appeared had this volume been written a generation or two ago. Moreover, as well as a changing focus in the historians’ agenda we have that steady outpouring of scholarly work: new editions of sources, new interpretive work based upon them. So we not only ask new and different questions, along with the old ones, but we also have more resources at our disposal. Our view of medieval Europe continues to evolve in keeping with new scholarship and new scholars.
In the first group of essays we turn to some ‘generic sources’, as in a genus that contains a number of species. Wills or sermons or royal biographies or chronicles are the kinds of materials we have in mind. Though any category (or genus) of primary source admits of considerable variety within its boundaries, given the writings of ten centuries and of the many sub-cultures of Christendom, our premise is that there is sufficient similarity between material within a genre to allow for generalizations that cover the diverse examples. In a rough sense, a sermon is a sermon, whether it is a Latin sermon of a fourth-century Father of the church or a vernacular one from a parish priest of the fifteenth.
In the second group of essays we offer examples of how diverse kinds of sources are put together to talk to historical institutions or questions. We see how historians dip into a variety of sources and endeavour to synthesize them to illuminate a topic like manorial history or maritime activity or the role of women. The combination of sources drawn upon to study such topics gives them a sort of organic unity, though it is one imposed by the historian. A different combination of sources, or even a different reading of the same ones, might well result in a different picture with different conclusions. But it is the weaving of the different kinds of primary materials that gives us a nuanced picture of a complex topic like representative government or public health. And lastly, beyond the customary reliance on written sources, historians have long been encouraged to turn to related disciplines for a dialogue that crosses old boundaries. Since most of the people of medieval Europe would have been more immersed in the worlds of visual and material culture than in that of written materials, we conclude with two essays that explore the use of other kinds of primary materials, crossing the boundary lines of historical or disciplinary demarcation.
However, just because historians are at home with primary sources does not mean that essays devoted to their exposition have been an easy assignment. Each essay below is the result of its author’s interpretation of the common task. Some authors have chosen to focus on what is in effect a detailed case study, as with military history, on the idea that a close analysis of a few sources opens up a method of inquiry that allows us to assess the mindset that created the sources under investigation. In other cases we have a broad survey of a given genre (as with royal biography), or perhaps a dip into many different kinds of sources that can be put together for a broad sweep (as with urban history).
Medieval England is much in evidence in many of the essays. England was a relatively well ordered country with a long practice of record preservation, and because of the accessibility of many of these sources a number of essays draw largely from English examples. But as those authors point out, comparable essays could be offered for many other states and cultures, including the Byzantine Empire (sadly omitted here) and even the world of Islam. No collection can cover all possible topics, just as no single essay can cover all the records that we still have.
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The introduction to a volume of essays offers some general reflections and gives an overview of what is to follow. It is fitting to begin with a discussion of some ‘generic sources’, as medieval thinkers worried about the very reality of categories. The classic statement (by Boethius) sums up the question: ‘Now concerning genus and species, whether they have real existence or are merely and solely creations of the mind, and if they exist, whether they are material or immaterial, and whether they are separate from things we see or are contained within them – on all this I make no pronouncement.’ We obviously do make a pronouncement, in favour of the reality of a genus: sermons, as we have said, or royal biographies, as real categories with a generic identity.
The first two essays look at familiar forms of primary sources – royal biographies, as Ralph Griffiths surveys the field, and narrative chronicles as the genre is presented by Lister Matheson. Kings set the tone for the medieval state and so their lives were seen as inviting ground for political as well as for personal or biographical treatment. Beginning with Einhard on Charlemagne in the ninth century we have biographical material on rulers across much of Europe: England, France, the Empire, Byzantium, and so forth. Whether it was a great king like Louis IX of France or lesser princes and middling-level nobles, many of them caught the biographer’s attention. Contributions from Anglo-Saxon England, like Asser on Alfred, and from the Byzantine Empire, like Anna Comnena on her father the emperor Alexius, illustrate both the varieties of approach and the widespread appeal of such writing.
Matheson covers a broad canvas in a survey of (English) secular chronicles and historical narratives, explaining how much that we consider to be literature or romance had, for its intended audience, a serious historical component. Our line between ‘history’ and ‘creative writing’ was not a recognizable one in the Middle Ages. For those who read or heard the tales, Troy was as historical as William the Conqueror and the wide sweep of medieval ideas about a historical text serves notice that categories and genres are fluid matters, shaped by culture and interpretation. If the past is a different country, as we often say, to the medieval mind its narration had wider boundaries than our discipline-oriented view of such matters admits of.
But narrative sources are not our only carry-overs from the Middle Ages. Other types of primary materials are still with us and to a considerable extent in a recognizable form. While sermons rarely reach the level of popularity they once had as reading matter, they are still delivered as a matter of course in all manner of houses of worship, and a call from the pulpit can still be a powerful voice of conscience. Anne Thayer talks of the power and influence of the medieval sermon, their impact much enhanced in a world of limited literacy and with a great concern for orality (as well as for clerical authority). Everyone heard sermons; the learned also read them. For modern students medieval sermons are a window into how religious instruction on virtually every topic of spiritual and social concern was transmitted from the cleric to his flock. They were the bridge across which high theology was carried, very frequently in the vernacular, to the folk of medieval Christendom.
Other kinds of generic sources are also familiar to this day. Wills and letters are not all that different from their medieval form and use. A medieval will was designed to provide for the soul of the testator, to control the distribution of worldly assets and goods, and – for our eyes – to delineate a social network of family and friends and unnamed beneficiaries. As such, it is moulded and shaped by ecclesiastical injunctions, since testamentary matters fell largely within the Church’s jurisdiction. It also reflects the conventions of secular society, standing at the intersection of social–spiritual norms and of individualized intention and volition. The two long examples with which Shona Kelly Wray and Roisin Cossar open their essay offer fuel for this analysis, though regional and cultural differences across Europe are highlighted by the distinctions between wills of the south and the north. The concept of posthumous social control – that of the dead over the living – is also a consideration when we think of the provisions of last wills and the many persons touched by their existence.
Letters, as the essay indicates, were for many centuries perhaps the basic form of communication between people at many levels of society and for no end of purposes. They were the instrument through which much of the business of rulers and states, both secular and ecclesiastical, was conducted. If the modern reliance on letters is narrower than the medieval usage and their literary pretensions no longer at a premium, their basic function as communication has endured, though admittedly with more alternatives today. Accordingly, both wills and letters, as generic sources, are familiar and still very much with us, whether on a regular basis, as with letter-writing, or as part of the closing chapter of the life-cycle.
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When we turn to ‘topical sources’ we enter a different realm. Here we look, not at categories of sources but rather at areas of historical inquiry illuminated by an adroit combination of different kinds of sources. Here there is no single key to open the door. Rather – as with the chemist in our opening metaphor – the secret is in the combination. The choice of which sources to use, and in what mixture, is the challenge. Picking and choosing are skills the historian acquires through experience and in many cases through a good deal of trial and error.
The essays on topical questions illustrate some of the ways historians go about their business. Some are detailed case studies, with Bernard Bachrach’s essay on military history as a prime example of this approach. An important narrative source, Dudo of St Quentin writing in early eleventh-century Normandy, recounted military operations of the tenth century but in terms of the institutions and conventions of his own day, a century after ‘his’ events had taken place. This anachronistic perspective, embedded in a vital primary source, was designed to please those for whom it was written. It has coloured our perception of what had really been the case with military operations of the early tenth century. The lesson is that we should use a source with attention to the circumstances surrounding its creation, a caveat of particular importance when the source is a narrative, since its literary form creates an air of credibility that we must learn to question.
It is a convention of historical writing that winners write history. Mark Pegg unpeels the layers of this onion in a discussion launched by a close analysis of the questions put to and the answers received from a young woman in an inquisitorial proceeding in mid-thirteenth-century France. Not only has the inquisition against ‘heretics’ been a field of modern contestations over the ‘use’ of history, with Catholic and Protestant interpretations at wide variance, but much of the agenda and the mindset of the inquisitors themselves reflects a ‘reality’ that they may well have constructed for their own purposes, one with little relationship to those being questioned regarding beliefs or practices. In reading these sources we must remember that their form and substance rest heavily on all sorts of preconceptions and the ‘the objective fact of narrative habits’ can – all too readily – make us inclined to take them at face value. This may have pleased the inquisitors but it is a dark window through which to see the complexity of the situation.
Though a king’s main claim to his throne and all the privileges and powers that went with it usually rested on some sort of hereditary claim, a medieval monarch was a special person – anointed by the Church and having a role in a sacred and a political drama that ran both before and after his lifetime. Jinty Nelson explores the rituals and the liturgy devised by the Church and endorsed by the king himself that served to separate him from his subjects. At the same time, elements of a contractual theory of kingship can be found in the coronation oath, just as a popular element remains in the exaltation of the newly anointed and crowned ruler by the great figures of his realm. These rituals, across time and across much of Europe, are also a window on how one basic and virtually universal institution was shaped by differences in culture and well as in royal power and personality.
A wide sweep of the immense variety and volume of the sources that touch the gritty realities of rural life is offered by Philip Slavin, dealing with manorial and agricultural history. Though we talk about the problems posed by the loss of so many medieval sources, Slavin’s coverage – touching both the quantity of extant material and its scope and level of detail – is a powerful reminder of how much we do have. The sheer volume of local case studies and statistical data on crops and crop yields, taxes, disputes between peasants and lords or other peasants, or touching inheritance and marriage patterns, along with moral injunctions about labour and its rewards, is overwhelming. The costs of labour and agricultural profits and surplus, for a pre-industrial world wherein some eighty per cent of the population lived on the land, are issues of great importance to both high and low. Most of what we know about these men and women of the countryside, given the sources, is top-down information: the lord’s view of their economic potential, their tradition-bound social role, and of their efforts to assert an element of agency. The harsh reality is that most manorial records are about profit and loss, not about the people of the fields and villages.
Every textbook talks of the importance of maritime trade and seaborne commerce in medieval society. This major form of activity, involving international law, governmental policy, and a vast commitment of capital and human resources can only be adequately explored through the use of a variety of sources, as in Maryanne Kowaleski’s wide ranging essay. She deals with legal and diplomatic conventions and regulations, fiscal accounts, and the records of notaries and merchants, among other sources. And beyond the records of costs and tonnage we have discursive sources: descriptions of voyages mixing sober travel lore with a perennial curiosity about the wonders of distant lands. We learn about and from shipwrecks and navigational charts, and for those unlucky mariners there are archaeological finds telling of lost ships and undelivered cargoes. A look at the environment and ecology of coastal towns and regions rounds out a complex story and emphasizes how many aspects of life were affected by the tale of the seas and those who ventured upon them.
The emergence and growth of towns (and cities) are among the most striking aspects of medieval life. Until the twelfth or thirteenth centuries most records of urban life are of a top-down sort, telling of the lords’ willingness to exchange a degree of freedom and independence for monetary returns. Gradually, as life became more complex, competitive and profitable, the internal records of towns grew in variety, scope and sheer bulk; internal government, regulations covering crafts and guilds, rolls of citizens, urban customs and legal codes all took a place alongside those older royal, baronial or ecclesiastical charters that had granted a degree of autonomy. Caroline Barron also looks at how people came to take an interest in their own history, as they came to recognize their own importance and the value of recording privileges and customs for future use.
Sooner or later historians are apt to quote Thomas Hobbes to the effect that life is ‘nasty, brutish, and short’. Against this grim view of society and nature Carole Rawcliffe shows that in medieval Europe both individuals and institutions were keenly aware of what we think of as public health and the general well-being of the population. In fact, they often moved to enact (and sometimes to enforce) measures for public welfare: the regulation of noisome crafts like butchering and tanning, and of urban waste as in provisions for privies, and in steps to reduce the threat of plague and disease with clean water and a quarantine of forty days. We find such regulations, especially in towns, and they concern kings and princes as well as urban councils and civic officials. Though all societies live with a gap between ‘precept and practice’, the variety of primary sources that highlight this salutary and easily-overlooked aspect of life show that public health was an issue of recognized importance. A royal decree or an ordinance of a municipal council about the quality of life, no less than the founding of a hospital to ameliorate the ravages of age and disease, tells us that Victorian generalizations about medieval life, like that comment of Hobbes, can be very wide of the mark.
No other aspect of medieval history has opened up or been ‘discovered’ to rival our current interest in women’s history. Furthermore, what makes this vast area of historical writing so interesting is that virtually all the work of recent decades rests on primary sources long known and used by historians to delve into other questions about the past. But, as Katherine French points out, not only do women appear in significant numbers in so many of these sources, as in wills and grants of endowment, to give but two examples, but once we begin to look for and evaluate women’s roles we encounter their presence and activity almost everywhere. They can be studied as agents in legal matters, in urban life and customs, in material about households, in peasant and manorial life, in studies of crime and violence, and – of course – in matters of sex and sexuality. Both what French categorizes as descriptive sources – telling us what people actually did – and prescriptive sources – focusing on what people are told they should do – open windows on aspects of life that affect both women and men. From queens and high-born matriarchs to those who only appear in the written record because, as part of the urban poor, they testified regarding the miracles of Louis IX of France, their voices are too many and too singular to be ignored. That historical research in earlier days was so focused on the male half of the population reminds that our own social and political agenda is not unrelated to our agenda as historians.
Historians are wont to say that the legacy of the Middle Ages is still with us in the guise of cathedrals, universities and parliaments. Parliaments, or representative government, have indeed come down to us by way of a zig-zag trail of trial and error as we trace today’s institutions to their antecedents of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Furthermore, though Hannes Kleineke concentrates on developments in England – given the great variety of English sources and the way they can be cross-referenced to fill in some of the gaps – a comparable tale could be told for much of medieval Europe. Kleineke illustrates how the interests of different parties and voices, and the sources that embody these different interests, can be woven into a tapestry that gives a fair glimpse of the larger tale, the development of representative institutions. The king, those of various ranks who were summoned to his great council (parliament), the towns that reimbursed those chosen to represent them, the chroniclers who wrote narrative histories, and even poets with an eye on the political scene, all did their share regarding the creation of sources, even if each party mostly cared about furthering his (or their) own interest.
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If the written primary source is the bread and butter of historical research, we should nevertheless remember that no society – let alone medieval society, with limited literacy and a difficult access to parchment and ink – is going to be fully explicated by such materials. The visual world and that of material objects, ranging from buttons and brooches to town walls and castles, were very much part of the experience of the people of our period. In keeping with this we conclude with two essays that look at different kinds of sources.
The riches of medieval imagery, at both the macro- and the micro-level, are obvious to anyone who has been to a museum, visited a medieval site, or even leafed through a good coffee-table book. But to see is not necessarily to understand, let alone to be able to set the object or image into the many contexts of interpretation that Sara Lipton offers. We may identify a visual depiction: St Roch with his bubo, Mary Magdelene of the long red hair, and so on. But many images and depictions are less clear-cut, as in Lipton’s examples of royal sculptures or of probable Jews in manuscript margins. And beyond the question of identification we reach for deeper layers of analysis: what did the image mean to those who created it, who viewed it, who commented on it, and/or who commissioned and paid for it? These levels of interpretation are a challenge as we work to link visual culture to the written sources that cover the same world, the same culture. There are pitfalls and contradictions, but there are also opportunities to push ahead toward a more complex view of the society whence these images came.
Material culture is an academic way of talking about objects – things that have physical existence, and the study of such materials is the traditional realm of the archaeologist. But when the historical area being examined is one that is also richly embellished by written and visual survivals, then we look at how the archaeologist links that specialized form of research into those we are accustomed to unravel. David Hinton talks of material objects, from macro-structures like buildings and the outline of settlements, to micro-objects like buttons and animal bones. All of these physical remains, whether below the earth’s surface or identifiable by way of aerial photography or field-walking, are keys to the past and invaluable supplements or complements to what we learn from our use of those more familiar written materials. We might think of the separate disciplines as being different paths leading, or so we hope, to an intersection of mutual enlightenment.
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