Writing History for the King by Charity Urbanski

Author:Charity Urbanski [Urbanski, Charity]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Medieval
ISBN: 9780801469718
Google: KU_iAAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2013-10-15T03:34:05+00:00

CHAPTER 4

The Chronique des ducs de Normandie

Sometime around 1174, Henry II transferred the commission for a history of his Norman ancestors from Wace to Benoît de Sainte-Maure.1 Obviously dissatisfied with the history that Wace had taken almost fifteen years to produce, yet equally unwilling to abandon the project, Henry appears to have searched for a more amenable author. In turning to Benoît, Henry chose an author with notable similarities to his predecessor. Benoît was close to the Anglo-Norman court and the popularity of his previous work, the Roman de Troie, had endowed him with a certain degree of fame.2 Like Wace, Benoît had experience in adapting Latin histories for a vernacular audience and had dedicated his previous work to Queen Eleanor.3 Benoît’s Roman de Troie, a vernacular adaptation of Dares Phrygius’s De excidio Troiae historia with material from Dictys Cretensis’s Ephemeris belli Troiani, is a romanticized account of the strife between the ancient Greeks and Trojans, and modern historians have accordingly avoided it.4 Indeed, Peter Damian-Grint goes so far as to wonder why Henry would have turned to a purveyor of romances for a dynastic history. This question, however, presumes that twelfth-century audiences recognized the same generic distinctions employed by modern scholars and that their expectations of the quality and veracity of a text were dependent on these distinctions. Although the Roman de Troie is very different in tone and content from the Roman de Brut, Damian-Grint’s observation that “Benoît was not a historian at all but a writer of romance” posits a rigid generic distinction between history and romance when the late twelfth-century reality appears to have been more fluid (all of the romans antiques purport to translate authentic historical narratives).5 It is worth remembering that neither De excidio Troiae historia nor Ephemeris belli Troiani were regarded as pseudohistories in the twelfth century, and that they were preferred to the Homeric version precisely because they claimed to be eyewitness accounts.6 It would therefore be more generous, and more accurate, to say that the Roman de Troie and the other romans antiques inhabit a shadowy region between history and literature in that they purport to represent history while catering to specific literary tastes. In spite of the highly romanticized and fictionalized qualities of the Roman de Troie, it seems arbitrary to insist that the majority of its twelfth-century audience did not regard it as history in much the same vein as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae or Wace’s Roman de Brut.7 Benoît’s ability to produce a wildly popular adaptation of such material was probably the very quality that recommended him to Henry as a replacement for Wace. Benoît came to this project then in much the same way and with many of the same credentials as Wace.

In spite of the similarities between Wace and Benoît, a great deal had changed since Henry II first commissioned a history of his Norman ancestors in 1160. In 1160 Henry was still a very young king laboring to restore royal authority in England, and attempting to impose his authority in Aquitaine.

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