3 - The Manuscript as Agent: The Politics of London, British Library, Additional MS 15268 (Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César)

Summary

Introduction

The popularity of the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César is attested by its dissemination across 101 manuscripts in two major redactions, copied between the 1260s and the sixteenth century. The Histoire ancienne compiles Latin and Old French sources into a linear ‘universal’ narrative that, in the first redaction, spans the time from the Creation until Julius Caesar's campaign in Gaul, where the text abruptly stops. In some manuscripts, the Faits des Romains follows the Histoire ancienne, although it is likely that the original narrative was meant to run up to the day of its composition. Gabrielle Spiegel has located the composition of the Histoire ancienne, along with the emergence of vernacular prose historiography, in the specific geopolitical setting of early thirteenth-century Flanders. Vernacular prose historiographies, Spiegel argues, mark ‘the beginning of an overt contest over the past’, when Flemish courts, endangered by the Capetian monarchy, sought to ground their legitimacy historically. However, the wide circulation of the Histoire ancienne, with copies from the Holy Land, Italy, Flanders, and France, also suggests that the Histoire ancienne could be reused beyond its context of origin; while one might surmise that the political agenda of the Histoire ancienne appealed to all those who had it copied, one might also make the case that the Histoire ancienne was potentially repurposed by each patron for different political ends.

In this essay, I will distance myself from these claims for two reasons. First, I think that studying the politics of the patrons of Histoire ancienne copies through alleged intentions does not account for their varied reception. Although in some cases, the identity and motivations of patrons can be retraced hypothetically, it is important to keep two things in mind. On the one hand, copies were made from an exemplar, which means that they account for specific engagement with the latter and do not simply start afresh with a new intended agenda. On the other hand, the outcomes of engagement with a manuscript can vary significantly and regardless of intention, especially perhaps in the case of manuscripts that circulated in different locations. A manuscript does not absolutely determine how its readers will respond to it, not just because different readers will respond differently to the same object, but because readers play a constitutive role in defining the attributes of the object they encounter.