Gabrielle M. Spiegel

Memory and History: Liturgical Time and Historical Time

This article investigates the differential structure and representation of time in memory and history. It examines two moments in Jewish historical thought—in the Middle Ages, and in works written within and after the Holocaust—and demonstrates the fundamentally liturgical nature of Jewish historical memory in selected texts from these two periods. Following the groundbreaking work of Yerushalmi, it seeks to demonstrate that for Jews, historical experience is incorporated into the cyclical reenactment of paradigmatic events in Jewish sacred ritual. Recent or contemporary experiences acquire meaning only insofar as they can be subsumed within Biblical categories of events and their interpretation bequeathed to the community through the medium of Scripture, that is to say, only insofar as they can be transfigured, ritually and liturgically, into repetitions and reenactments of ancient happening. In such liturgical commemoration, the past exists only by means of recitation; the fundamental goal of such recitation is to make it live again in the present, to fuse past and present, chanter and hearer, into a single collective entity. History, in the sense that we understand it to consist of unique events unfolding within irreversible linear time, is absorbed into cyclical, liturgical memory. This article argues that the question of Jewish history—both medieval and post-Holocaust—poses in a compelling fashion the question of the relationship between memory and history more generally, and serves to contest the current tendency in academic historiography to collapse history into memory. It claims that to the extent that memory “resurrects,”“re-cycles,” and makes the past “reappear” and live again in the present, it cannot perform historically, since it refuses to keep the past in the past, to draw the line, as it were, that is constitutive of the modern enterprise of historiography.

Political Utility in Medieval Historiography: A Sketch

Historians have long recognized the importance of law and jurisprudence in shaping political life in the Middle Ages, yet relatively little attention has been paid to the political utility of medieval historiography, either as a source of political theory or as a determinant of political behavior. But history no less than law was, to borrow Maitlands phrase, the place where life and logic met, the codification of an intellectual confrontation with reality. And like law, historiography played an important role in the politics of a traditional society dependent, as was medieval society, upon the past for legitimacy. This article seeks to investigate the way medieval chroniclers at the Abbey of Saint-Denis in France viewed and used the past to explain and legitimate politics. The chronicles of Saint-Denis formed the most extensive and consistently royalist historical corpus in medieval France, if not anywhere in the Middle Ages. From the twelfth to the fifteenth century, the monks of the abbey -the Dionysian monks -were continuously engaged in writing history, producing an enormous body of historical works, both Latin and vernacular, in which they set forth the history of France from its putative Trojan origins.1 In the course of this task they became, in a very real sense, the historical voice of France. This enormous collection, so valuable for an inquiry into the historiographical mentality of medieval chroniclers has, unfortunately, never been systematically exploited. Concerned with the chroniclers as source material for other studies, both nineteenthand twentieth-century discussion of them has focused on the problems of verifying their historical accuracy or exposing known instances of distortion or outright fabrication. Indeed, it is only recently that medieval historiography in general has begun to be investigated as an intellectual tradition that demands the same sympathetic attention to its underlying beliefs and techniques of expression accorded to other genres of medieval intellectual life.2 And that effort has not yet

Above, about and beyond the writing of history: a retrospective view of Hayden White's Metahistory on the 40th anniversary of its publication

Since its publication 40 years ago, Hayden Whites Metahistory has been recognized as a foundational work for the literary analysis of historical writing. Long thought to be primarily concerned with questions of narrative, new interpretations have recently revised our understanding of Whites principal aims as a theorist and philosopher of history. What has emerged from these works is a novel view of the status and meaning of tropes in Metahistory, the underlying existentialist engagements that guided Whites thinking about them, and the ways in which both served his encompassing goal not only to critique the reigning Rankean paradigm of ‘history’ but to free contemporary historians and historiography altogether from the ‘burden of history’ for the sake of a morally responsible future. The article analyses the ways in which these new interpretations of White alter our understanding of the corpus of his work, from his early article on the ‘burden of history’ to his most recent writings on ‘the practical past’, with a principal focus on the re-readings of Metahistory itself.

The cult of Saint Denis and Capetian kingship

Throughout its history, the monastery of Saint-Denis sought to establish a tie with the ruling house, to make the abbey indispensable to the crown as the chief and privileged guardian of the royal presence. Beyond that, as the home of the principal Apostle of Gaul and the first bishop of Paris, it had a symbolic importance for the whole of France, independent of the monarchy itself. The representation of Saint Denis as a national saint, guiding, protecting, and promoting the well-being of the monarchy, was a monastic theme from the ninth century forward. The cult assumed its chief importance, however, in relation to the Capetians when, it is argued, it performed a critical function in the definition of French national identity under the aegis of the monarchy. In its importance for both France and the monarchy, the cult of Saint Denis helped make possible the fusion of two streams of national consciousness that might otherwise have remained distinct. Further, Capetian kings, by identifying themselves with ...

Pseudo-Turpin, the crisis of the aristocracy and the beginnings of vernacular historiography in France

Abstract The opening decades of the thirteenth century witnessed the birth of historical writing in Old French prose, marking a decisive evolution in the historical tastes of the lay aristocracy, whose interest in the past had until then been satisfied by chanted verse histories and chansons de geste. The earliest products of the movement toward vernacular prose historiography were the first translations of the Pseudo-Turpin chronicle, of which no fewer than six independent versions were made within the confines of the French realm between 1200 and 1230. The translation of Pseudo-Turpin , and with it the creation of vernacular prose historiography, was the work of a small group of Franco-Flemish lords circulating in the orbit of the count of Flanders. This extreme chronological and geographical concentration suggests that vernacular historiography in general, and Pseudo-Turpin in particular, addressed itself with special urgency to the needs of the French aristocracy at a moment of crisis and that historiographical innovation was, at least in part, a response to changes taking place in the social and political conditions of noble life experienced at that moment. The substitution of prose for verse, and of history for legend, would seem to be the product of an ideological initiative on the part of the French aristocracy, whose social dominance in French society was being contested by the rise of royal power during the very period which witnessed the birth of vernacular prose historiography. By appropriating the inherent authority of Latin texts and by adapting prose for the historicization of aristocratic literary language, vernacular prose history emerges as a literature of fact, integrating on a literary level the historical experience and expressive language proper to the aristocracy. No longer the expression of a shared, collective image of the communitys social past, vernacular prose history becomes instead a partisan record intended to serve the interests of a particular social group and inscribes, in the very nature of its linguistic code, a partisan and ideologically motivated assertion of the aristocracys place and prestige in medieval society.

Structures of Time in Medieval Historiography

Medieval historical texts typically deploy a variety of temporal structures that underlie their literary narratives and generate both modes of emplotment and ideological messages. There are three dominant regimes of temporality that appear in these texts, often present in conjunction with one another: a strict series of events, paratactically presented without causal connection between the events that make up the series temporum; a cyclical view of history, originating ultimately in Greek and Roman historiography; and a far-reaching typological, or as Auerbach called it figural, construction of events in which antecedent events become prophecies of later ones, which represent their fulfillment. In addition, later medieval texts tend to be modeled on genealogical patterns. This article investigates the ways in which these temporal schemes are utilized, where, despite the inherent contradictions among such temporal structures, they nonetheless appear together and collaborate in promoting a particular vision of history in the Middle Ages.

Medievalisms in the postcolonial world: The idea of ‘the Middle Ages’ outside Europe

For at least a decade now, there has been a small but fervent group of medievalists arguing on behalf of the utility of postcolonial theory for the study of the Middle Ages. The origins of this ‘school’, if one can call it that, is often dated to the publication of Kathleen Biddick’s The shock of medievalism in 1998. Other members include J.J. Cohen, The postcolonial Middle Ages, Michelle Warren, History on the edge, Allen J. Frantzen, The desire for origins, Carolyn Dimshaw, Getting medieval and John Ganim, Medievalism and Orientalism, to name only a handful of the better known, to which should be added the important article by Bruce Holisinger, on which more later. The editors of the present volume under review, Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul, have also argued forcefully that a ‘medievalist postcolonialism’ will enrich not only medieval studies but postcolonial studies as well. In the latter case, medievalists claim that their own contestation of the medieval/modern binary can serve to interrogate the parallel precolonial/colonial distinction, often figured in terms of a medieval/modern teleology that, as Patricia Clare Ingham has indicated, functioned ‘as covert justification for the colonial civilizing mission.’ It did so by equating the colonized territory and subject with the predominantly pejorative view of the Middle Ages as ‘backward’ and in need of modernization. Thus, implicated in the periodization of the medieval and the colonial, as Davis sought to show in her book on Periodization and sovereignty, is a ‘politics of time’ that an alliance between medieval studies and postcolonial studies can investigate and bring to bear on the politics and theories of their respective fields of inquiry. Clearly involved as well, as Nadia Altschul confesses in an earlier article, is an effort to make the study of the Middle Ages relevant for our times. As she states: ‘one of the functions of postcolonialism as a theoretical lens is that of a go-between which can communicate the relevance of the Middle Ages in the language of current intellectual capital.’ The need to argue for the relevance of the Middle Ages, she believes, derives from the decline of medieval studies in conjunction with what she sees as ‘the apparent demise of nation-states’ which, at least since the nineteenth Rethinking History Vol. 15, No. 4, December 2011, 617–625

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, 2001

The Medieval Academy of America held its seventy-sixth annual meeting in Tempe, Arizona, on 15-17 March 2001. Arizona State University was the host for the meeting, which was held jointly with the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Medieval Association of the Pacific. Meeting of the Corporation. The annual meeting of the Corporation was held on Friday, 16 March, at 1 P.M. Joan M. Ferrante, President, presided. The minutes of the seventyfifth annual meeting were heard and approved. Reports were delivered by the Executive Director, incoming Treasurer, Editor of Speculum, and Delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies. The following resolution, voted unanimously by Council at its meeting the previous day, was read by President Ferrante:

Foucault and the Problem of Genealogy

This essay explores the implications of Foucaults use of genealogy as the basis of his philosophical investment in history. It contrasts Foucaults reliance on genealogy as a solvent of historical continuity and linearity, and his view of genealogy as aleatory, contingent, potentially disruptive and delegitimising, with medieval concepts of lineage and genealogical legiti mation and interrogates, on this basis, the utility of Foucaults postmodern theories for the analysis of medieval genealogical phenomena. It suggests that the concepts derived from a Foucauldian analysis of genealogy are not applicable to premodern societies, given that Foucalts very notion of genea logy stipulates local genesis and definite contexts in which period-specific modalities of knowledge, power, thought, epistemologies and technologies are put into play in the societies analysed.