Conclusion: The Rhetoric of Discontinuity

Summary

Historiographical varietas grew in popularity across the long twelfth century for several reasons. As a rhetorical idea, it resonated with the intellectual climate of the twelfth century; as a way of normalizing historical discontinuity, it appealed to historians who (for whatever reason) felt uncomfortable with the historical record; and as a political metaphor, it provided a framework for thinking about the relationship between Britain's many peoples and between Britain and Europe more broadly. Yet by the middle of the fourteenth century, varietas, for the most part, had lost its grip on the historiographical imagination. In this concluding reflection, I will offer some reasons for that decline. My comments must necessarily be limited; no single chapter can offer a full reckoning of the reasons behind centuries’ worth of changing historiographical tastes, or account for every factor that influences historical culture, and it would be foolhardy to try. I therefore provide in these final pages not a comprehensive argument, but rather a series of observations and speculations about late medieval shifts in historians’ understanding of continuity and how to create it. Still, I hope that even this brief examination of the reasons for varietas's decline will help crystallize what twelfth-century varietas can teach modern scholars about the medieval past.

Losing the thread

I begin by returning to Mannyng's Story. In the previous chapter, I showed how Mannyng employs the practices of both classical and Christian varietas, while showing little interest in the philosophical perspectives that undergirded those practices in earlier historians’ works. Here I will go further, and suggest that Mannyng's decoupling of formal practice and historiographical philosophy is a sign that varietas has lost some of its grip on the British historiographical imagination. It may seem strange to realize that the Story's union of classical and Christian varietas should result in the elimination rather than the amplification of varietas's philosophical underpinnings. Yet varietas is full of such paradoxes, and Mannyng was writing for a very different audience than his predecessors had been.