Memory and Forgetting

 Like modern people, medieval people worried about forgetting important things.  Such important things included wars, the deaths of kings, disease outbreaks, healings by saints, the foundation of monasteries, and pious gifts.  Like modern people, medieval people wanted important things written down.

Writing has a real advantage over stories and accounts passed orally in that it doesn't change, and people not yet born when you die may read something you wrote and know what you were thinking.  An important event in the past, one that people had stopped talking about, if recorded in writing can be remembered once again.  A written record from the time can also help resolve arguments in the future about whether something really happened.

Memory was especially important at monasteries, because they were officially undying bodies.  A gift of property made in the seventh century should still belong to the monks in the twelfth century.  Similarly, a particularly holy or at least effective abbot (or bishop) deserved to be remembered as a model for later generations to seek to emulate.  Thus it was important to get as many memories in writing as possible.

The problem of course was that these written records could be lost.  Before the eighth century those in the West preferred to write on papyrus, rather than on parchment (sheep skin), and papyrus disintegrates if not kept dry.  We have extremely few surviving original documents from the beginning of the Middle Ages, even though there is plenty of evidence of widespread literacy and record-keeping then, even notaries and public archives where important documents could be stored.  Most of what we know about these centuries from written evidence comes from copies made later, when delicate records were copied onto parchment.

Parchment however does not mean that a record is now preserved forever.  Since there was only the one copy, it could become lost, nibbled by mice, burned in a fire, have ink spilled on it, stolen, become too faded to read.  And this was during the Middle Ages.  The early modern and modern periods, from the sixteenth-century wars of religion to the upheavals of the French Revolution to the twentieth century's world wars, have destroyed far more.

And even copying was an issue.  Late Roman cursive, such as used in a lot of papyrus documents, was nothing like the Caroline book-hands used in the ninth through eleventh centuries, the great age of document copying.  Scribes must have looked at what was in front of them and made their best guesses as to what the words were.

Sometimes even when they could read what was written it still didn't make sense.  There were a lot of changes during the eighth century as Europe began recovering from the population loss of the sixth and seventh centuries (on which see more here), as new population centers started being established, often in different places than the late Roman ones, and as Latin was being replaced by the earliest versions of today's European languages.  Scribes of the ninth century and later could barely recognize their monastery in its earliest records, where places had different names, people lived in different places, and rules and customs were different.

Similarly, holy figures of late antiquity behaved differently than their successors half a millennium later.  Tenth- and eleventh-century monks and cathedral priests were shocked to find an abbot or bishop who had been married, or whose version of  proper behavior included dressing in rags and going barefoot.  The "life" of an early holy bishop might have to be rewritten so that the wife who appeared with him was actually a "bride of Christ" or perhaps someone to whom he had been unwillingly betrothed by his parents before entering the church.

If something was just too weird it could be deliberately forgotten.  All it took was an early, disintegrating document not to be copied for it to be lost forever.  But the past itself could not be dismissed.  After all, tradition legitimates.  "We have always done this" or "We have always been here" are still powerful.  Thus past events could not all be swept away.  Rather they had to be reconfigured into what historians call a "useful past," one which gave legitimacy to the present.  Medieval scribes explained that the past valued the same things they valued, even while hoping that no one would change the memory of the great deeds and people they recorded for their own posterity.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on the early Middle Ages and medieval records, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.