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  • 10 - Lives, Identities and the Historians of the Normans

  • from Part II - Historians, Lawyers and Exegetes: Writing Lives and Identities
  • Edited by Julie Barrau, University of Cambridge, David Bates, University of East Anglia
  • Book:
    Lives, Identities and Histories in the Central Middle Ages
    Published online:
    24 September 2021
    Print publication:
    07 October 2021, pp 180-202

  • Summary

    This chapter's thesis is that it is only through an analysis that integrates personal, contextual, ethical and literary factors that we can understand the place of the eleventh- and twelfth-century historians of the Normans within the identity and the history – and the identities and the histories – of the Normans. It is about the dialogue between the personal and the public. To do this, what we can know of the personal biographies, life experiences and beliefs of the historians must be combined with an analysis of genre and context. Viewed in this way the historians become the reflectors of events as well as their recorders. Cultural memory and analyses associated with the so-called 'Vienna School' are of great importance to the argument. The historians are also seen as working within contemporary forms of moral discourse that sought to make sense of, and even to improve, the disturbed and often violent world of their times. The chapter concludes with some references to interaction with contemporary historians writing in England.