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 Maitland's 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