Truth, plausibility, and the virtues of narrative at the millennium Justin C. Lake * Department of European and Classical Languages and Cultures, Texas A&M University, 205 Academic Building, 4215 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843-4215, USA Keywords: Richer of Saint-Re ´mi Dudo of Saint-Quentin Adalbero of Laon Plausibility Invention Rhetoric Gerbert of Aurillac Reims abstract While it is widely understood that medieval historiographers employed the techniques of rhetorical invention in their work, less attention has been paid to the way in which the standard of plausibility, upon which rhetorical invention was premised, could be reconciled with the historian’s traditional obligation to tell the truth. This paper examines the ways in which the rhetorical doctrine of narratio probabilis was understood and put into prac- tice by three authors active around the turn of the millennium: Richer of Saint-Re ´ mi, Dudo of Saint-Quentin, and Adalbero of Laon. All three had been trained in the schools of northern Francia in the late tenth century and all reveal a sophisticated understanding of the doctrines of Ciceronian rhetoric, according to which plausible inventions were not seen to be incompatible with historical truth. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction The boundary between truth and fiction in medieval historiography is notoriously hard to define. 1 While medieval authors universally accepted the idea that history should recount what was true, what * Tel.: þ1 11 832 671 9466; fax: þ1 11 979 845 0823. E-mail addresses: justinlake@tamu.edu, justin.c.lake@gmail.com 1 This topic has been the subject of a number of important studies in the last three decades. See, for example, Jeanette M.A. Beer, Narrative conventions of truth in the middle ages (Geneva, 1981); Suzanne Fleischman, ‘On the representation of history and fiction in the middle ages’, History and Theory, 23 (1983), 278–310; Ruth Morse, Truth and convention in the middle ages. Rhetoric, representation and reality (Cambridge, 1991); Monica Otter, ‘Inventiones’. Fiction and referentiality in twelfth-century historical writing (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996); Peter Johanek, ‘Die Wahrheit der mittelalterlichen Historiographen’, in: Historisches und fiktionales Erza ¨hlen im Mittelalter, ed. Fritz Peter Knapp and Manuela Niesner (Berlin, 2002), 9–25. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Medieval History journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ jmedhist 0304-4181/$ – see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jmedhist.2009.05.003 Journal of Medieval History 35 (2009) 221–238