Scripta Mediaevalia 10
Appendices: ‘Colonel Sexby's advice on foreign policy’ and ‘Extract from the trial of Jacques Filhot, related by himself in his diary’.
This book contains two stories. The first one is told by Joachin Hane, a German engineer in the English army. It is the mysterious narration of a frantic wandering in Guyenne just after the Fronde. Travelling through this region for unknown reasons, Hane found himself chased by several Frenchmen. He was arrested several times, remained confident in God, and finally safely found his way back to England. He then wrote what may be a journal of his escapes, or a report: a text which was carefully copied and archived.
Hence the story of this manuscript, embedded in archives, with a history of its own. “Travelling” from a classification to another, it was ultimately extracted and published in the early 20th century as the report of an English spy sent to France by Oliver Cromwell. Just as exciting as the first one, this second story deals with the transmission of a written piece and its invention as a document. In it, the reader witnesses the work of a historian who is forced to face a garrulous yet silent piece of writing emerging from the past. The historian’s curiosity extracts the text from oblivion only to abandon it once again to its irreducible otherness.
On the same subject
Scripta Mediaevalia 22
Publication date :01/09/2012
Scripta Mediaevalia 20
Publication date :01/01/2012
