Jeanette Beer. In Their Own Words: Practices of Quotation in Early Medieval History-Writing .

Abstract

Jeanette Beer’s In Their Own Words: Practices of Quotation in Early Medieval History-Writing is a welcome addition to an expanding field. Her approach in this study of various medieval historical works dating from between the ninth and thirteenth centuries involves a series of case studies foregrounding texts that broke, or appear to have broken, new ground substantively or stylistically or both: Nithard’s Historiae de dissensionibus filiorum Ludovici Pii, which contains the first extant sequence of vernacular French in the form of the famous Strasbourg Oaths; the Gesta Francorum, the earliest eyewitness account of the First Crusade (although this is a status that has been problematized in recent research); Geoffrey of Villehardouin’s and Robert of Clari’s accounts of the Fourth Crusade, the first prose histories written in French; and Li Fet des Romains, an early-thirteenth-century prose compilation and translation of all the materials that were then known concerning the career of Julius Caesar, which Beers argues is the first work of ancient history, and the first biography, to appear in French. The book’s central argument is that a close examination of each text’s practices of quotation—which can assume many forms, from the rendering of ipsissima verba to free indirect discourse, literary quotation, citation, allusion, and self-referencing—is an optimal route into an understanding of medieval historiographical practice and the influences upon it of both inherited classical forms and contemporary vernacular poetics. In so arguing, Beer sets her face against positivist minings of such texts for serviceable historical data. The point is well made, although there may be an element of pushing at an open door in light of the recent expansion of scholarly understanding of the complexity of medieval historiographical culture, in particular with respect to its regimes of truth.