Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History

A brilliant work which synthesizes the immense technical skills Landes has acquired with his talent as an historian. Because Ademar left so many manuscripts in so many fields of endeavor and because he was so thoroughly a part of the major historical movements in Aquitaine during the first third of the eleventh century, Landes is able to break new ground in a methodological sense with regard to the writing of various aspects of the social and religious history of the French kingdom in pre-Crusade Europe. Particular emphasis here is given to popular religion, the peace movement, apocalyptic thought and social patterns. Relics, Apocalypse, and the Deceits of History, moreover, is at once an intellectual biography, a personal biography, and a social history. Thus, Ademar the man, Ademar the monk, Ademar the scholar, Ademar the Christian, and Ademar the public figure are all thoroughly integrated in Landes' remarkable study. -- Bernard S. Bachrach, University of Minnesota Landes convinced me without any qualms of the importance of his approach. He is absolutely right to stress the importance of Ademar's corpus, substantial portions of it autograph. It is not just that Ademar is an important source for our writing and history. As Landes says, the fact that Ademar wrote and revised so much allows us to see into the creative process of a single man who lived at a watershed. We can see into his mind. And because Ademar was tortured and flawed, we have, as Landes also points out in a wonderful phrase, 'the autograph record of a man going mad.' Uncommon enough for any period, this is a motherlode for the middle ages. -- Geoffrey Koziol, University of California at Berkeley

Landes traces the life and career of Ademar of Chabannes—a monk, historian, liturgist, and hagiographer who lived at the turn of the first Christian millennium. Using over 1,000 folios of autograph manuscript that Ademar left behind, Landes has been able to reconstruct in great detail the development of Ademar’s career and the events of his day.

This unusual biographical work traces the life and career of Ademar of Chabannes, a monk, historian, liturgist, and hagiographer who lived at the turn of the first Christian millennium. Thanks to the unique collection of over one thousand folios of autograph manuscript that Ademar left behind, Richard Landes has been able to reconstruct in great detail the development of Ademar's career and the events of his day, and to suggest several major revisions in the general picture held by current medieval historiography.

Above all, the author's research confirms and elaborates the realization (first articulated over sixty years ago by the historian Louis Saltet) that in 1029 Ademar suffered a humiliating defeat at the height of his career and spent his final five years feverishly producing a dossier of forgeries and fictions about his own contemporaries that has few parallels in the annals on medieval forgery. Not only did that dossier of forgeries succeed in misleading historians from the twelfth century right up to the twentieth, but few historians have been willing to explore the implications of so striking a revision in Ademar's biography. Richard Landes is the first to systematically examine the evidence and the implications for our understanding of the period, and he offers an explanation of how these remarkable developments might have occurred.