Anglo-Norman Autograph Manuscripts and the Material Production of Historical Thought

Date of Award

Fall 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Medieval Studies

First Advisor

Freedman, Paul

Abstract

Anglo-Norman Autograph Manuscripts and the Material Production of Historical Thought explores the historical thought and practices of authors writing in Northern France and England during the twelfth century. To do so, I analyze a unique corpus of evidence yet to be the focus of sustained study within the field of historiography: autograph manuscripts. Autographs, manuscripts written by the hands of the text’s original author, emerge not just as a site in which to scrutinize the history of the texts they contain, but as complex records of a material philosophy of history at work. Through close attention to palaeographic and codicological details in these manuscripts, I argue that autography be seen as a central means of understanding ways of thinking about the past in the manuscript episteme. This dissertation focuses on a series of case studies representing examples of forms of autographic historical authorship to address the question: What does autography do to historical thought? In the first chapter, I consider the work of two writers (Orderic Vitalis and Robert of Torigni) who redact the same text, the Gesta Normannorum Ducum, and demonstrate the ways in which the divergent scribal strategies employed in the execution of their manuscripts reveal attitudes towards the production of historical texts Subsequently, my analysis of the idiosyncratic text and manuscript of Richard of Devizes’ Chronicon engages with theories of media to expose the medium-specific play with historical narrative enabled by the autographic author’s collaboration with his codex. To conclude, I interrogate how William of Malmesbury’s autograph manuscript of his Gesta Pontificum Anglorum reveals historical work as intimately reliant on the author’s own living within time. Together, I engage with these case studies through a diverse, interdisciplinary set of questions and methods to argue for the autograph manuscript as a site in which we understand historical thought as process, always still unfolding in the material traces of the author’s act of writing.

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS