An examination of medieval historican writings through the prism of
violence.
The concept of medieval historiography as "usable past" is here
challenged and reassessed. The contributors' shared claim is that the
value of medieval historiographical texts lies not only in the factual
information the texts contain but also in the methods and styles they
use to represent and interpret the past and make it ideologically
productive. Violence is used as the key term that best demonstrates the
making of historical meaning in the Middle Ages, through the
transformation of acts of physical aggression and destruction into a
memorable and usable past.
The twelve chapters assembled here explore a wide range of texts
emanating from throughout the francophone world. They cover a range of
genres (chansons de geste, histories, chronicles, travel writing, and
lyric poetry), and range from the late eleventh to the fifteenth
century. Through examination of topics as varied as rhetoric, imagery,
humor, gender, sexuality, trauma, subversion, and community formation,
each chapter strives to demonstrate how knowledge of the medieval past
can be enhanced by approaching medieval modes of historical
representation and consciousness on their own terms, and by
acknowledging - and resisting - the desire to subject them to modern
conceptions of historical intelligibility.
Noah D. Guynn is Associate Professor of French at the University of
California, Davis; Zrinka Stahuljak is Associate Professor of French and
Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Contributors: Noah D. Guynn, Zrinka Stahuljak, James Andrew Cowell, Jeff
Rider, Leah Shopkow, Matthew Fisher, Karen Sullivan, David Rollo,
Deborah McGrady, Rosalind Brown-Grant, Simon Gaunt
