Signs and Things: The ‘Vita Heinrici IV. Imperatoris’ and the Crisis of Interpretation in Twelfth-Century History

Abstract

Universus enim mundus iste sensibilis quasi quidam liber est scriptus digito Dei, hoc est divina creatus, et singulae creaturae quasi figurae quaedem sunt non humano placito inventae sed divino arbitrio institutae ad manifestandam invisibilium Dei sapientiam.Hugh of St. Victor, Eruditionis didascalicae liber septimusIpsa tamen veritas connexionem non instituta sed animadversa est ab hominibus et notata ut eam possint vel discere vel docere: nam est in rerum ratione perpetua et divinitus instituta. Sicut enim qui narrat ordinem temporum, non eum ipse componit.St. Augustine, De doctrina Christiana 2.32The Vita Heinrici IV. Imperatoris, composed by an unknown author probably around the turn of the twelfth century, is an old-fashioned imperial life which raises serious interpretive questions in a period of social and cultural transformation. There are certain cultural moments characterized by the absence of an interpretive consensus, when older patterns of interpretation no longer seem adequate to experience. Criticism has looked to the work of the imaginative artist at those moments, on whom typically devolves the task of representing experience and rendering it coherent in expression. This is a task at which the artist must necessarily fail insofar as the representation is true to the sense of experience which has left behind available interpretive categories. But what of the historian whose work is necessarily rooted directly in the social transformation ? In what follows I want to consider the peculiarities of historical narrative at one such cultural moment. The Vita Heinrici provides an example of singular narrative power and singular clarity.