The Historiography of Fleury in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries. A Study in Monastic Historiography

Abstract

The article provides an evaluation of Aimoin of Fleury as a hagiographer and historian against the background of historiographical production at the monastery of St. Benedict at Fleury, Saint-Benoît- -sur-Loire, in the ninth through eleventh centuries. Not much is known of the life of Aimoin, who must have entered the monastery between 979 and 987, and began books II and III of the Miracula Sancti Benedicti in 1005. He also wrote a Historia Francorum in four books (before 1004), the Vita Abbonis (started at the end of 2004), a history of the abbots of Fleury (now lost), and a few minor texts. On the basis of his works, it is possible to reconstruct how Aimoin used his sources. He made a clear distinction between the distant past and the past which still survived in the living memories of his contemporaries; this borderline seems to have been 987–988. For his Historia Francorum, he relied wholly on written sources, which he quotes and dates as precisely as possible. In the Miracula Sancti Benedicti, he often had to rely on oral testimony. He has no problems with testimony of miracles having occurred in his own days, for which he can find living witnesses whose testimony he can evaluate. For miracles that occurred in earlier times, he has to rely on the memory of his monastic community. Sometimes, a story he describes can be localised at a particular place within his monastery, or at a precise locality, in which case he evaluates the evidence. If relics ought to have been available where a miracle was allegedly performed, Aimoin is clearly distrustful. If he can choose between oral tradition and written documentation, he prefers the latter. We cannot know whether he decided not to include stories of miracles for which he found the evidence wanting; we do know that, to complete his collection, he elevated certain ‘events’ to the level of miracles. Aimoin had high critical standards and doubted anything he had not witnessed; when dealing with the distant past, he always gave a reference wherever possible. He was not afraid to state his ignorance about events for which he had no sources. In Aimoin, we have an example of an early eleventh-century historian who would have earned the esteem of all but the severest of his modern colleagues.