History, Memory and Community in Cistercian Normandy (12th–13th Centuries)

Abstract

While the textual production of Normandy’s Cistercian abbeys has not lacked for scholarly attention, a detailed study of Cistercian historical writing in the duchy remains to be written. This article looks in small part to fill this historiographical gap by examining those historical works produced in and copied by the Cistercian abbeys of Normandy between the beginning of the 12th and the end of the 13th centuries. In doing so, it aims to shed new light on the sorts of historical texts copied or written by Normandy’s White Monks. It contextualises these works within the historiographical culture of both the duchy itself and the wider Cistercian world, and shows how the Cistercians of Normandy played a distinctive role in the transmission of key historical texts, among them the universal chronicle of Sigebert of Gembloux (c. 1030–1112) and Einhard’s Vita Karoli Magni. It includes a ‘reconstruction’ of the so-called Chronicon Gofferni.