Representations of authority in twelfth -century Anjou ideology and narrative in “The Chronicle of the Counts of Anjou” (1107–1155)

This dissertation is an analysis of narrative and ideology in the Chronicle of the Counts of Anjou, a Latin history of the Angevin counts written between 1109 and 1155. The text is treated as evidence for the history of society, institutions, discourse and ideology in twelfth-century Anjou, engaging an historical context in which the rise of seigneurial feudalism posed a serious challenge to the development of Plantagenet comital administration. For its period, the chronicle represented a conservative attempt to limit the claims to authority of the seigneurial nobility, and a progressive acknowledgment of the utility of knighthood as a social category. It provides evidence for a double-bind in which assertions of comital power over regional nobles were discursively vulnerable to assertions of royal legitimation, and, conversely, claims for comital autonomy from the kings left open ideological avenues for noble opposition. The chronicle gestures towards a resolution of the counts' predicament by defining a sphere of agency in which the Angevin counts, acting as principes, could claim a privileged relation to the populus in order to transgress established seigneurial jurisdictions in the name of the common welfare. On the other hand, a close literary and anthropological reading discloses how internal narrative ambiguities, inconsistencies and contradictions complicate the text's semiotic efficacy as a representation of the counts' authority and implicate the problematic authority of textuality as a contemporary social practice. The thesis argues for the importance of performative strategies of political practice as a mode of overcoming difficulty in coherently narrating the legitimization of comital rule. The chronicle nevertheless concludes with a depiction of comital misrule that threatens to unravel its construction of comital authority, but through rhetorical assertions of history-writing as a truthful practice, it circumvents the potential damage to the counts' legitimacy by figuring itself and its writer(s) as delegated agents of institutional rule. In treating the chronicle as text, social act and historical event, the dissertation concludes by suggesting the possibilities for and the constraints on the creation of an Angevin Empire in the second half of the twelfth century.