In a poststructuralist study of thirteenth-century French historical texts, Gabrielle Spiegel investigates the reasons for the rise of French vernacular prose historiography at this particular time. She argues that the vernacular prose histories that have until now been regarded as royalist were actually products of the aristocracy, reflecting its anxiety as it faced social and economic change and political threats from the monarchy.

Gabrielle M. Spiegel is Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-Denis (1978).

"A stimulating survey that admirably combines insights derived from literary scholars with a sound historian's tenacity and judgment."—Michael Jones, Times Literary Supplement

“This is a lucid, carefully argued, well written, and important book, of interest to historians and specialists in literature alike. This is a volume that deserves to be—and surely will be—widely read and regularly consulted by medievalists.”—French Review

“Spiegel, who is an excellent writer, formulates [her thesis] well, and her romancing of the past is ‘a good read.’”—American Historical Review

“Spiegel has crafted a passionate yet coolly scientific analysis of a significant phase of medieval French vernacular literature and its historical background. She argues cogently and persuasively for the importance of prose historiography in the development of monarchical power and in the decline of aristocratic influence in the early 1200s. This ground-breaking work explores how the past was exploited, and ‘romanced,’ by French aristocrats—as patrons of a new form of historical writing, the prose chronicle.”—The New Historicism

"Reading Spiegel's book is like seeing the scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle of history and literature suddenly assembled in a dazzling new image, a picture that could not have been made without the master piece, the manuscript that Professor Spiegel was the first person in almost 800 years to read and interpret. Her effort is a tour de force of no mean proportion."—Stephen G. Nichols Jr., author of Romanesque Signs