International Medieval Society, Paris
Société Internationale des Médiévistes, Paris

Symposium 2007 Abstracts

In investigating forgeries and historical consciousness in the European Middle Ages, this paper will consider the relation between archival memory and the perception of the past. Forgeries provide an avenue to explore medieval mentality, which supposed a radically different relation between text, memory, and the past. The paper will examine medieval forgeries from two perspectives. It will employ traditional auxiliary sciences to find, describe, and critique charters and chronicles, in order to distinguish genuine from forged, unaltered from interpolated, and tradition from invention. In addition, it will read forged and creatively invented documents as legitimate evidence of their creators’ worldview, applying recent modes of textual criticism. Thus, I seek to intervene empirically in the controversy about whether the modern historicist paradigm is adequate to explain fully the content of medieval forgeries or if they also demand postmodern textualist approaches. Ultimately, the paper will explore the nature of historical writing itself, and why medieval monastic writers were so little concerned about critical source methods that modern historians consider fundamental to their discipline.