An unrealized cult? Hagiography and Norman ducal genealogy in twelfth‐century England
This article traces the adoption and ideological uses of the image of the pious Norman dukes in four consecutive hagiographical texts written in twelfth-century England. While this is a well-known topos of the earlier Norman tradition, its reception in England has been neglected in the existing scholarship. The article also examines further evidence of an interest in pious Norman dukes under Henry II, focusing on the translation of the remains of Richard I and Richard II at Fecamp in Normandy in 1162 and discussing whether the dukes' official cult could have been established. The conclusion situates the material in the general context of the development of the cults of lay rulers in twelfth-century Europe and sheds light on the interplay between hagiography, historical memory and politics at the time.
ENTANGLED MEMORY: TOWARD A THIRD WAVE IN MEMORY STUDIES
This essay takes up the call for a “third phase” in memory studies and makes theoretical and methodological suggestions for its further development. Starting from an understanding of memory that centers on memory's temporality, its relation to language, and its quality as a social action, the essay puts forward the concept of “entangled memory.” On a theoretical level, it brings to the fore the entangledness of acts of remembering. In a synchronic perspective, memory's entangledness is presented as twofold. Every act of remembering inscribes an individual in multiple social frames. This polyphony entails the simultaneous existence of concurrent interpretations of the past. In a diachronic perspective, memory is entangled in the dynamic relation between single acts of remembering and changing mnemonic patterns. Memory scholars therefore uncover boundless cross-referential configurations. Wishing to enhance the dialogue between the theoretical and the empirical parts of memory studies, we propose four devices that serve as a heuristic in the study of memory's entanglement: chronology against time, conflict, generations, and self-reflexivity. Current debates on European memory permit us to explore the possible benefits that the concept of entangled memory carries for memory studies.
The Ghost of Nation Past
ions that are palpably idols. As Ozouf puts it, "The memory enshrined in the Pantheon is not national memory, but one of the political memories offered to the French" (pt. 1, p. 162). Would that the clear-sighted candor of that simple statement had informed the entirety of the volumes under review. Pierre Nora, like the long line of historians from which he springs, feels keenly the necessity to do his share. "Nothing equals," he writes, "the tone of national responsibility of the historian, half priest, half soldier" (pt. 1, p. xxxi). Les Lieux de me'moire, as the countless "national" works before it, thus seeks to reassign the sacred to a fluid ideological entity called "nation," an entity "which contributed to giving a society in the process of national laicization its sense and its need of the sacred." Nora's particular and quite creative angle is to project French history as a latter-day variant of the history of the Hebrews, the People of God-only "God," of course, is replaced with history and memory. "To be a Jew," he writes, "is to remember being one"; and then, doubtless feeling Foucault's breath hot on his neck, he removes everything one more epistemological notch: being a Jew is not even a matter of memory any more but, rather, "the memory of a memory."54 So, too, on his reading, the modem, disabused 52 Fustel de Coulanges's judgment of the famous epigraph of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica"sanctus amor patriae dat animum" -comes to mind: "beautiful but perhaps not suitable for a work of science"; quoted in Manfred Silber, The Gallic Royalty of the Merovingians in Its Relationship to the 'Orbis Terrarum Romanus' during the Fifth and Sixth Centuries A.D. (Beme, 1971), p. 88, n. 7. 53 I am grateful to Paul Bamford of the University of Minnesota for this insight. 54 The phrase reminds one of another Nora predecessor, Ernest Renan. Here are Renan's prescient words to the French Academy, as he sounded the death knell of the great positivist, bourgeois dream: "We are living in the shadow of darkness, breathing the perfume from an empty This content downloaded from 207.46.13.57 on Thu, 08 Sep 2016 04:58:37 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Ghost of Nation Past 319 Frenchman must, as we saw, make do with "lieux de memoire," for want of "memoire," tout court. He can nevertheless, like the agnostic Jew, try to fill the spiritual void with the reminder that his, after all, is, in Nora's words, "a sacred history because a sacred nation." He is a citizen-member not of the "people of God"archaic concept-but of the "peuple-memoire," self-ordained in their own sovereign "national" divinity (pt. 1, pp. xxx-xxxiv). Surely the first reply that springs to mind is on behalf of those of Nora's countrymen-Jews, Christians, or Moslems (and there are still some believers left, even among the elites of the sixth and seventh arrondissements)-who might well find it presumptuous, even offensive, that an editor impute to them a nonexistent spiritual malaise over a "transfer" that (for them) never took place. With some hauteur, Andre Chastel, in the essay referred to, disdains what he calls the "mediocrity" of the polemics between Catholics and laics at the time of the separation of church and state in 1905. He attributes this mediocrity to people's "incapacity" to "conceive of the sanctuaries and the wealth of the Church as a [national] heritage" (pt. 2, 2:433). I shall not resist the observation that any "mediocrity" that arises here may do so more from Chastel's "incapacity" to "conceive" that many Frenchmen, then as now, valued churches as centers of religious faith and were/are offended by a world-weary, palpably political secularism that, in seeking to "console," fails to understand. As for Pierre Nora's attempted assimilation of French to biblical history, it is a fascinating proposition, to say the very least. Yet to make it stick, he would have to amplify it with more than the few paragraphs he devotes to the notion.55 To press it home convincingly, Nora would have to produce his own prophetic gospel, not try to cobble (or squeeze) one out of the current leading scholars of the day. More than this-more, even, than a testamentary demonstration of the universal in the (French) particular-such an enterprise would have to provide, these days, a principle of self-criticism,56 and this, on my reading of Les Lieux de memoire, is not sufficiently present-not nearly. Instead, upon inquiring what au fond the French version of "sacred nation" consists of, we are left with the Gallimard editor's frank, but frankly disappointing, answer: "It is we whom we venerate through the past" (pt. 1, p. xxxi). Karl Marx's judgment springs to mind: "France is the only country of the 'idea'; that is to say, the idea it has of itself.' 57 "Nation," in short, is for Pierre Nora that vase; after us, people will live in the shadow of a shadow" (emphasis added). There is a crucial difference with the mood and tone of Les Lieux de memoire, however-the feel for irony. Renan does not take himself or his mourning quite so seriously. Thus, he adds to the above reflection, "I fear this is all a trifle frivolous"; quoted in A. Silvera, Daniel Halevy: A Gentleman Commoner in the Third Republic (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966), p. 188. '' But beware of any model, even the most consecrated: "En realite, ces apparences d'universalisme [in the Judaism of antiquity] se mettent au service du particularisme national et ne font que le renforcer"; J. Bonsirven, Le Judaisme palestinien au temps de Jesus-Christ (Paris, 1935), 1:33; emphasis added. 56 For a development of this idea, see Peter Ochs, entries on "Individuality" and "Truth" in Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, ed. Martha Cohen and Paul Mend&s-Flohr (New York, 1987), and "A Rabbinic Prmatism," in Theology and Dialogue, ed. B. Marshall (Notre-Dame, hid., 1990). 57 Quoted in M. Rubel, Karl Marx devant le bonapartisme (Paris, 1960), p. 139. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.57 on Thu, 08 Sep 2016 04:58:37 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms