There’s a kind of source-critical fallacy that gets used a fair bit. In its most boiled-down form, it goes something like this: “The author of Text X wouldn’t have been able to get away with saying ‘Y’ if it weren’t true, because its audience would have known they were lying!” This is, no two ways about it, wrong. I don’t think this is particularly controversial, but today I want to talk about a particular text I’ve found illustrating that this is wrong, because it does so in a particularly interesting way that reveals an intriguing aspect of both the writing and reception of medieval texts.
There are, of course, bad-faith efforts to propagate untrue stories. Political propaganda is an obvious reason (and Dudo of Saint-Quentin naturally springs to mind as a purveyor of alternative facts that anyone in the audience would have known were incorrect even if emotionally satisfying), as is forgery over legal disputes. There’s actually a whole literature on medieval forgery I’m not going to go into here, because I want to go in a different direction. Here’s a charter:
ARTEM no. 2077 (probably c. 1100)
In the name of the holy and indivisible Trinity, Father and Son and Holy Spirit, amen.
I, Odo [II, r. 995-1037], count palatine of the Franks, and my wife Ermengard, wish to make it known to both the present and the future that we, making use of sound advice and reinforced by the salubrious example of good men, beholding that the things which are of the present world never endure in the same state and setting our eyes on the things which are to come, to wit, which are unchangeable and eternal, for the redemption of our souls and the salvation of our successors, give a part of our goods pertaining to Château-Thierry, that is, the redecimation of grain and wine and other crops, to the canons of the holy mother of God Mary and St Seneric in the same place, to increase their provisions, to be possessed in perpetual right. But that this gift might stand more firmly and never be shattered by anyone, those who were present at this our gift confirmed what we had done with their assent and presence, and damned anyone who invades or perverts this deed, whosoever they may be, with a perpetual anathema; they were: Seguin, archbishop of Sens [r. 977-999] and Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims [r. 845-882], Fulbert, bishop of Chartres [r. 1006-1028], who all came to my court.
The witnesses to this matter are: the aforesaid archbishops and Bishop Fulbert; Thierry, dean of the church; Prior Haimeric, Cantor Erlebald, Saxwalo, my seneschal; Isembard, later count [of Rosnay, fl. 1030s], Viscount Odo, Hezelin the knight, Walcher of Le Boschet and Wibald the Rich and Hagano of Meaux.
Also I, Bishop Berald of Soissons [r. c. 1020-1052] praised and confirmed under an anathema those things written above.
I, Pope Alexander II [r. 1063-1071], at the petition of the glorious Count Odo, praise this same and confirm it with my seal, and by the authority of St Peter and Paul and Ourself, henceforth forbid anyone from presuming to steal the goods of the same church.
So, as you can see from the dates of the people in this charter, the problem here is obvious: none of them lived at the same time as one another. Moreover, if you know enough about Church history to be impressed by this assemblage, you would also have known that. Whatever this author is trying to do, therefore, is saying ‘Y’ safe in the knowledge that anyone who understands the text knows ‘Y’ is untrue. Their aim, clearly, is not to convince anyone that this is factually accurate.
Instead, this is fanfiction. Very high-brow, ecclesiastical, fanfiction; but fanfiction nonetheless. In fact, it’s specifically wish-fulfilment self-insert fanfiction, with the entire community of Notre-Dame de Château-Thierry as the Mary Sue. Fanfiction Studies has some overlap the world of medieval scholarship – I’ve read a reasonable case to see Dante’s Divine Comedy as self-insert fanfic – but (perhaps unsurprisingly?) it hasn’t had much to do with diplomatic. Moreover, I’m clearly not the right person to do a full deep-dive into this, although I’d really like it if someone else did. Moreover, what the bit of literature I’ve poked around in dealing with ‘Mary Sues’ tends to do is reinterpret the character archetype as expressing the resistance of oppressed groups such as women and queer people; this resistance evidently does not have a one-to-one correspondance with the interests of a twelfth-century male monastic community.
Still, there’s some overlap between the purposes of self-insert fanfic and this charter. We tend to think of charters as being aimed at outside audiences, but recent work has emphasised the importance of forgeries for the internal identity of institutions. It’s this context which we’re dealing with here, I think. Bonnstetter and Ott have argued (in a piece whose writing style is quite annoying but which is nonetheless useful to think with) that to write self-insert characters is to create a space where one’s self ‘is accepted and acknowledged, celebrated and loved, not by strangers but by people (media characters [or in this case famous Churchmen]) [one] respects and values’. (In the article, this is framed in terms of resistance to sexist societal expectations regarding female appearance. This, again, doesn’t apply to twelfth-century canons; but the wider point works.)
The fanfic analogy, moreover, explains why this is done in a fictional context. After all, the point of forgeries is generally to be plausible and this is self-evidently not. Yet in modern times, people find personal validation from gaining the approval of people who aren’t real. There’s no reason that people in the Middle Ages couldn’t have felt the same way. We don’t know much about Notre-Dame de Château-Thierry, not enough to work out what pressures were acting upon it around 1100, but the general outline is clear enough. Even if Hincmar of Rheims and Alexander II could never have met in real life, let alone have validated the abbey, the community’s identity could nonetheless be strengthened and expressed by the story that, once upon a dream, they did.
The Historian's Sketchpad 
I think fan fiction is actually quite a useful way of looking at a lot of medieval literature and culture. Like all the Middle High German epics in which Theodoric and Attila the Hun are contemporaries m, which Frutolf of Michelsburg criticised for their historical inaccuracy (back when they were still in oral form) since any reader of Jordanes would know they were not each other’s contemporaries. Of course now, people would argue that Jordanes himself was writing a kind of fan fiction, at least for the earlier bits of Gothic history in which the Goths fight at Troy or in the campaigns of Alexander the Great. And perhaps the whole of the matter of France and the matter of Britain romance cycles can be seen as cumulative fan-fictions, headcanons and spin-offs that then find their most complete expression in Thomas Malory and Ludovico Ariosto.
But this case of a self-inset fanfic isn charter form is particularly special and fascinating, and I wonder if there are any other examples of its kind
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