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Phantoms of Remembrance: Memory and Oblivion at the End of the First Millennium. By Patrick Geary. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. xiv + 248 pages.
The Norman Conquest of Pious Neustria. By Felice Lifshitz. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1995. viii + 324 pages.
Writing Ravenna: The Liber Pontificalis of Andreas Agnellus. By Joaquin Martinez Pizarro. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. vi + 213 pages.
Making History: The Normans and Their Historians in EleventhCentury Italy. By Kenneth Baxter Wolf. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. xiii + 192 pages.
When medieval historiography enters contemporary theoretical discussion, it is usually in terms of its discursive or figurative aspects. This can occur in two ways. On the one hand, medieval histories are adduced as minimally complex works that operate in the most straightforward or stereotypical ways; thus if even these chronicles or annals are ideologies or narratives rather than testimonies, then so must be any historical work. The other, and more sophisticated, tack is to particularly value medieval histories for their "imaginative" qualities. Their value, in this view, is perhaps more literary than historical; they should be appreciated on their own narrative terms, not as sources for facts. Yet the temptation then looms to classify these texts as "narratives" and then do nothing much more about them. This presumes that the mere awareness of history-as-narrative stemming from Hayden White's Metahistory is enough and there is no need to understand how individual medieval histories operate and how these operations are embedded in both medieval and contemporary contexts.
The first book to seriously address these concerns was Walter Goffart's The Narrators of Barbarian History (Princeton UP, 1988). Goffart boldly departed from the traditional way of seeing early medieval historians writing in Latin-such as Jordanes, Paul the Deacon, and Gregory of Tours-as enthusiastic chronicles of the "barbarian" peoples who took over the western provinces of the Roman Empire. Goffart proffered another view of these writers, one which saw them as narrative artists writing for particular purposes in their own present, purposes which were at least as important to them as any prima facie need for historical transmission. The narrative reinterpretation of these historians also liberated them from the racialist and Aryanist construction to which they had been...