A psycho-historical source: the Memoirs of Abbot Guibert of Nogent

Medievalists turn to Guibert of Nogent's Memoirs (1116) for the account of the Laon uprising they contain. And yet this account is poor history. It is didactic and self-righteous in tone; one senses that the writer consistently sacrificed historical truth to the moral point he was trying to make. Scratch this twelfth- century ‘historian’ and you will find underneath a guilt-ridden cleric, haunted by vivid sexual reminiscences of his mother and by the terrible chastening reality of the Virgin Mary. A sensitive reading of the confessional sections of the Memoirs may yield up crucial unconscious impulses in a medieval man's psyche: his ‘masculine’ ambitions for glory, his need to prove his manhood, and yet also his ‘feminine’ desire for selfless submission to God, and his need to achieve a kind of passive holiness and innocence. These opposing impulses may account for the ‘demon’ that tortured Guibert of Nogent.After isolating certain psychological themes in the Memoirs it is possible to relate these themes to various nuances in the psychological ‘milieu’ of twelfth-century France. It is also possible to relate some of these themes to a ‘milieu’ not altogether different from that of twelfth-century France — twentieth-century southern Italy. For in southern Italy, we find that the psychological relationship between masculinity and femininity and (perhaps as a result of this relationship) the prominence of the Virgin Mary in the lives of the people corresponds closely to the situation in twelfth- century France. But this cross-cultural analysis is meant only to illuminate some of the possibilities of psychohistory. At the very least, a psychohistorical consideration of a text such as Guibert of Nogent's Memoirs should reveal some useful correlations between the single psychological current and the larger tides of cultural history.