Trickster, Convert, Martyr, Saint: Four Ways of Dying in Dudo of St. Quentin’s History of the Normans

Trickster, Convert, Martyr, Saint: Four Ways of Dying in Dudo of St. Quentin’s History of the Normans

Thompson (Whitworth), Victoria

Paper given at the International Congress on Medieval Studies

Abstract

The subject of this paper, Dudo of St Quentin, wrote his History of the Normans — the earliest narrative source for Norman history — at some point between 996 and about 1020. It is a long work — nearly 200 pages in Lair’s edition of 1865-72 — and divides into four books, each longer than its predecessor, each with a different protagonist. The main narrative is told in prose, interspersed with numerous poems, and it covers the years between the later ninth century and the death of Duke Richard I in 996.

Dudo is notorious for frustrating historians of early Normandy. There he was, a highly educated canon of St Quentin, acquainted with Duke Richard I from 987 to 996, drawing up charters for his successor Richard II: if ever anyone were in a position to write a solid, reliable historical work, Dudo was, surely, the man. And yet he ignored this opportunity, in order to produce a very different kind of work, one that seems wilfully to ignore anything that might be termed ‘data’, ‘evidence’ or ‘historical fact’. Where his accounts of the earlier Norman leaders are concerned, we might ascribe this to ignorance, lack of sources, but even in the case of Richard I, Dudo mentions almost nothing — no battles, no treaties, no land grants, no councils — that happened between 965/6 and Richard’s death thirty years later – the very period of Dudo’s own lifetime, the last decade of which he spent at least partly at Richard’s court.

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