3 - Scripting the National Past: A Textual Community of the Realm

Summary

Recent scholarship has advanced our understanding of how text and reader, in a process scripted by the author, create layered meanings in The Bruce. This chapter foregrounds one particular aspect of this, namely how Barbour applies rhetorical conventions of medieval historiography to persuade his audience to embrace particular political choices. Addressing the claim that modern historians display ‘a lack of sensitivity to those genres used by medieval authors to convey to posterity their attitudes to the past and their understanding of memory and its uses’, the chapter thus seeks to persuade ‘Scottish historians with their apparent deep-seated antipathy towards the history of ideas, not to mention their fixation upon the empirical approach’ – if such still exist – to treat The Bruce as a ‘work’ and not a ‘document’, that is, as a structured text rather than a repository of information.

Rhetoric, as defined in the medieval period, was the art of speaking well, that is, of using language to instruct, move and provide pleasure in such a way that, rather than just convincing an audience intellectually that what was being argued was true, it persuaded that audience into wishing it to be true, and to act on that wish in thought, word or deed. Historiography was taught as part of the trivium, the core medieval academic grounding in grammar, rhetoric and dialectic, and had therefore become imbued with rhetoric. Consequently, the writing of historiographical texts was based on their need to teach, move and please – the key rhetorical formula – and a complex set of conventions had been established for writing about the past along these lines. To achieve their objectives, such rhetorically ‘wired’ texts (at a level of textual complexity beyond annalistic compilation) sought the discovery or ‘invention’ of an argument, that is, the inclusion of true or plausible material which made a narrative of deeds done in the past more convincing or probable. This constitutes ‘a process of reasoning which provides proof, creating belief (fides) in something which is a matter of doubt on the basis of something which is not in doubt, namely from what is, or seems to be, true’. What was communis opinio; natural to law and custom; or shared through authoritatively narrated exempla had as much evidential authority as logical reasoning or even witnessed fact.