This article edits and analyses the Acta archiepiscoporum Rotomagensium. Written by an anonymous clerk of Rouen cathedral towards , this short text was reviewed and augmented twenty years later by Theoderic, a monk of Saint-Ouen de Rouen, who used the AAR to promote an alternative history of the archbishops of Rouen.
The following not only presents the first critical edition, and an English translation, but also a discussion of the history of the text and the archdiocese which produced it. Any errors that remain, of course, are entirely my own.
Classified as a gesta episcoporum 2 , the text is the last of three historiographical works produced by the cathedral chapter of Rouen in the eleventh century, the others being a set of annals and a metrical chronicle in elegiac distiches 3. A key base resource for the history of the church of Rouen, and fundamental to our understanding of the ecclesiastical history of ducal Normandy, editions of the AAR have, until now, remained confined to scattered and outdated seventeenth- and eighteenth-century collections.
In a period infamous for its paucity of sources, especially those produced by the secular church, this apparent neglect is somewhat surprising. The AAR is one of only two works of this genre produced by a Norman cathedral chapter during the ducal period 4 , and its importance as a text means that historians both medieval and modern have relied upon it 5.
(mh=n9BzqJDV0tjTzfLL)0.jpg "Model Hooker in Cherbourg-en-Cotentin")
A new edition of the AAR , therefore, not only makes this essential resource more accessible, but an analysis of it also allows us to better understand circumstances in the archdiocese as it entered a period of reform, and the means by which it hoped to define both its own history and the religious heritage of the region. Since the AAR was also copied and augmented by a monk of Saint-Ouen de Rouen towards , it is also fundamental to our understanding of the rivalry that existed between this house and the cathedral of Rouen during the second half of the eleventh century.
