Edward Roberts. Flodoard of Rheims and the Writing of History in the Tenth Century.

Abstract

In this impressive debut monograph, Flodoard of Rheims and the Writing of History in the Tenth Century, Edward Roberts revisits the life and works of Rheims-based canon, archivist, and historian Flodoard as a vehicle for studying the writing of history in “a period that is increasingly being understood as a critical phase in the transformation of the Carolingian world and the rise of the Latin West” (1). The book’s opening pages contain a formidable mission statement that captures the essence—and the considerable ambition—of Roberts’s undertaking. We are told that “Flodoard’s histories have seldom been considered in the context of his personal life and political career” (1), which is why he remains, in Roberts’s words, “one of the least understood and most objectified authors of the early Middle Ages” (1). This, then, is the status quo this new study seeks to address by arguing that Flodoard “far from being an unassuming or ‘objective’ writer … was in fact a highly creative and careful shaper of his material” (1). But this is not the full extent of Roberts’s ambition. What is more, he seeks something of a rehabilitation of the tenth century as an era of low reputation with regard to historiographical production. Building on important groundwork laid in the 1970s and 1990s, Roberts’s book considers Flodoard’s historiographical oeuvre in its entirety, including, for the first time, a substantial—this reviewer is inclined to call it near comprehensive—discussion of his Annales.