Pseudo-Turpin,the crisis of the aristocracy and the beginnings of vernacular historiography in France

The opening decades of the thirteenth century witnessed the birth of historical writing in Old French prose, marking a decisive evolution in the historical tastes of the lay aristocracy, whose interest in the past had until then been satisfied by chanted verse histories and chansons de geste. The earliest products of the movement toward vernacular prose historiography were the first translations of the Pseudo-Turpin chronicle, of which no fewer than six independent versions were made within the confines of the French realm between 1200 and 1230. The translation of Pseudo-Turpin, and with it the creation of vernacular prose historiography, was the work of a small group of Franco-Flemish lords circulating in the orbit of the count of Flanders. This extreme chronological and geographical concentration suggests that vernacular historiography in general, and Pseudo-Turpin in particular, addressed itself with special urgency to the needs of the French aristocracy at a moment of crisis and that historiographical innovation was, at least in part, a response to changes taking place in the social and political conditions of noble life experienced at that moment.The substitution of prose for verse, and of history for legend, would seem to be the product of an ideological initiative on the part of the French aristocracy, whose social dominance in French society was being contested by the rise of royal power during the very period which witnessed the birth of vernacular prose historiography. By appropriating the inherent authority of Latin texts and by adapting prose for the historicization of aristocratic literary language, vernacular prose history emerges as a literature of fact, integrating on a literary level the historical experience and expressive language proper to the aristocracy. No longer the expression of a shared, collective image of the community's social past, vernacular prose history becomes instead a partisan record intended to serve the interests of a particular social group and inscribes, in the very nature of its linguistic code, a partisan and ideologically motivated assertion of the aristocracy's place and prestige in medieval society.