Dudo of Saint-Quentin’s Historia Normannorum

This book by Benjamin Pohl offers a detailed study of the surviving manuscripts of the earliest history of the Normans. As the author points out, the content of Dudo’s text has attracted a much greater degree of attention than have the manuscripts, and yet their dates, form and layout, and their influence on later writers have much that is new to tell us about its purpose and reception. Initially, the text was copied in Normandy in a stand-alone form, arguably with the intention that it should be disseminated among the leading monasteries of the duchy. One early eleventh-century manuscript (R) from the abbey of Jumièges includes no fewer than twenty-seven spaces intended for a programme of illustration. The illustrations, as much of important contemporary figures such King Louis IV as of the Normans themselves, were intended to show the latter interacting on terms of equality with neighbouring leaders. Manuscript R was a status symbol which could be displayed in ‘a context of collective self-representation and ritual’ (p. 254). It included the poems which, it is argued here, were part of the author’s original plan for the work, rather than a later addition. Prosimetrum, the combination of poetry and prose known in classical times, had been revived under the Carolingians and, though its use was still relatively unusual, it gave an author the chance to display his literary skills. The poems were intended to point up key passages and, in conjunction with the illustrations, meant that manuscript R could be deployed in an aural as well as visual context. Explanatory rubrics in several eleventh- and twelfth-century copies, too, reinforce the text’s performative character

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