Richardson buries Henry and Bertha's wedding in the middle of an wandering paragraph
Needless to say, I need to learn as much as I can about Bertha and Henry, not to mention Gregory and Matilda, since I've undertaken to drive at least part of Henry's entourage, by minivan, to Canossa. I have to admit that most of my initial research, before flying over to Germany, was in, well, what you might call tertiary sources. Okay, it was Wikipedia. But I did shell out for a couple of serious scholarly books. The most important of these the is only full-scale biography of Henry in English:
Robinson, I. S. Henry IV of Germany, 1056-1106. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
That's Robinson, I. S. as in Ian Stuart Robinson of Trinity College Dublin. The book cost a ridiculously high $75, in paperback, on Amazon.com, which I take to be a reflection of the economics of limited run scholarly books. If this book could attract a general audience, the price might drop to one-half, or one-third, or even one-quarter of that forbidding seventy-five bucks. But the marketing gurus at Cambridge University Press (if they have marketing gurus at Cambridge University Press--and if they do, I'll bet they're despised by their co-workers) were absolutely right in consigning this monograph to the scholarly ghetto. There's no way this book is going to find a general readership, let alone a popular one.
So what's wrong with Richardson's opus? On a sentence by sentence level, his prose isn't that bad. But on the level of the paragraph--the level of organizing one's thoughts, leading the reader through difficult material, anticipating the reader's questions--here Richardson reveals himself to be a scholarly drone, not a congenial guide.
Take, for example, my attempt to read his paragraph on the wedding of Henry and Bertha. A little background here
pp. 60-61
The paragraph has 11 sentences, and begins with the following:
Four months after Adalbert's fall the princes in real earnest 'began to confer about the succession to the throne', not because of any conspiracy to depose Henry IV, but because of the king's serious illness.i
If we take the main clause of the first sentence as a guide, we can assume that this paragraph is going to be about princes conferring about succession. Now its true that the German princes possessed much more agency at this point of Henry's life than he himself did--the child king was undoubtedly a passive little puppet in most of these goings on--so maybe it makes sense that the princes with their concern for succession seem to be the main actors of this paragraph... (Actually, this is after the minority ended--Henry is the full king, now, though a 15-16 year old battling for his life and his job)
The second sentence:
In the middle of May, while he was staying Fritzlar, Henry fell sick, so that the physicians gave up all hope of his survival and certain princes had hopes of seizing the royal throne'.ii
Okay, this seems to be moving along in a reader-friendly fashion: The princes are concerned about succession; the young king is ill. In fact, at a particular time and place, Henry fell so ill that his doctors gave up hope and the plotting began. The first sentence introduces a situation, and the second provides some specific details and raises the stakes. So far so good.
Now we come to the third sentence:
Soon after his recovery Henry was married to the princess to whom he had been betrothed in 1055, Bertha, daughter of Count Otto of Savoy and Margravine Adelaide of Turin.iii
Here the rumblings of uncertainty begin to trouble the reader's mind. Mmmm.... isn't this kind of a big subject to be introduced in the third sentence of a paragraph? Isn't the arranged wedding of the king and the his bride (his fiancée-since-childhood) worthy of it's own paragraph? If not its own chapter? How did the young king feel about this? How did his bride react? In a few years, after all, Henry is going to make an unprecedented petition for divorce--and since that is a crucial event in his battle with the papacy, isn't the necessary precondition of that petition--his marriage--worthy of a little exploration? Who arranged this sudden wedding? How? Did his mother, who by now has apparently retired to a convent, bother to attend? Was she even invited? These are the questions that we, as readers who have skimmed the tertiary sources, now want to be answered in this, the only full-scale biography of Henry IV (HRE), in English. And to get really picky (as a good editor should have) why does the sentence end with such a precise statement of the parentage of Bertha? Does either the writer or the editor know that in good prose the last part of a sentence is a powerful place, best used to set up the next sentence, usually by mentioning something that is going to be discussed in the next sentence? On the other hand, we're willing to forgive a minor sin against the optimal flow of the prose--we know the author probably had Henry's in-laws (Otto and Adelaide) in his notes, and dropped them in here, simply because it was convenient, not because it helped the reader follow the argument. If we insisted on beautiful transitions between every sentence, we would only read The New Yorker, which would itself produce a kind of intellectual atrophy. And we also know that the documentary evidence is probably short on the details we want, so we are willing to assume that this sentence will pay off as the paragraph develops--after all the author started this paragraph talking about the conniving of princes around sickbed of a young king, or so our short-term memory reminds us, and that's a pretty interesting topic for a paragraph, and the fact of the young king being suddenly wed just might fit into the theme...
So we continue on to the fourth sentence:
The royal wedding the summer of 1066 was presumably intended to allay the widespread anxiety caused by the threat of the king's death and the uncertainty caused by the threat of the king's death and the uncertainty of his succession.iv
Well, this seems pretty good--i.e., the prose seems to be living up to its promises. The wedding does seem to have been a response to the conniving princes. There are a couple of issues, however: first, the question of who "intended to allay the widespread anxiety"--that is to say, who was making the decisions in the young king's inner circle. The other issue is the word presumably. It looks like the author has no specific source for this claim, but he is not above making what he considers to be an obvious inference. Richardson doesn't stray very far into speculative historiography; he would probably consider his inference no more suspect than a chess commentator pointing out that a certain knight's move protects the king's pawn; but it is worth noting here because it is one of the few cracks in the author's sometimes forbiddingly rigorous positivism.
We move on to the fifth sentence:
A royal diploma issued in Tribur on 13 July 1066 introduces the queen as 'intervener with the words: 'we have lawfully associated Queen Bertha with us in the kingship'.v
Huh? What does this diploma have to do with the apparent argument of the paragraph at this point--which we had taken to be, the sudden marriage of Henry and Bertha, after Henry's serious illness, as an apparent counter-move against the conniving princes? The reader pauses for a moment, then recovers: this seems to be the first non-narrative documentary evidence of Bertha's queenship. It's a little bit of scholarly showing off. As readers, for the moment, we decide to forgive the author for this little detour. After all, we are happy to know that he is immersed in the primary sources. We expect that he will return to the main argument soon.
Sentence six:
The language of the diplomas, like the double ceremony of coronation and marriage, underlines the importance of the queen's constitutional position.vi
Wait a minute! We seem to have moved on to a new topic--the queen's constitutional position. What happened to the Machievillian chess game between the conniving princes and the unnamed decision-makers of the king's court? And what's this about the double ceremony of coronation and marriage? A quick glance around the nearby pages reveals that "Bertha was crowned queen in Würzburg before being married in Tribur."--a fact disclosed in a footnote at the bottom of the previous page! Isn't the whole idea of footnotes that they contain additional and ancillary information, and that the main text can be read independently? What sort of editor lets an author get away with a callback to a footnote?
Sentence seven:
She was married to both king and kingdom.vii
Well, this is a good sentence as far as it goes, a short direct sentence, with a nice little zeugma for effect, but disturbingly, it confirms that the topic of the paragraph has changed--clearly, we are now talking about the constitutional status of the queen, not about the machinations of courtly advisors vs. conniving princes.
Sentence eight:
In the diplomas of 1066-7 Bertha is described as 'consort of our kingdom and our marriage-bed' and similar formulas appear in the diplomas of later years.viii
Uh... okay. We're still in 1066--sort of--but the events of that year are no longer the focus of our concerns. The author seems to be answering the question: What does the official paper trail of Henry's reign tell us about Bertha's role? The part about the marriage-bed seems interesting, though, considering the upcoming divorce/annulment petition--maybe the author will explore this question in...
Sentence nine:
Henry IV's mother had been identified by a similar formula in her husband's diplomas, as had his grandmother, Gisela, and likewise he last two empresses of the Ottonian dynasty, Theophanu and Conigundeix.
No such luck. It's now apparent that the author is simply not interested in the marriage of Henry and Bertha a human event with personal and psychological dimensions.
Sentence ten:
The 'concors formula' in Ottonian and Salian diplomas, by associating the monarch's consort with her husband's office and dignity, served to concentrate political authority exclusively in the imperial family.x
So now our topic is...what? How the kings used their wives' names in official documents to emphasize heritability of power?
Sentence eleven:
The wife of the present monarch, and the mother of his successor, as 'constort of the kingdom', was the guarantor of dynastic continuity, participating in the government on her husband's behalf or ruling as regent in the event of his premature death, as Empress Agnes had ruled between 1056 and 1062.xi
That's it exactly. The paragraph concludes with a summation, thorough if not eloquent, of the constitutional role of the queen.
Bibliography
Robinson, I. S. Henry IV of Germany, 1056-1106. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
iRobinson, p. 60
iiRobinson, p. 60
iiiRobinson, p. 60
ivRobinson, p. 60
vRobinson, pp. 60-61
viRobinson, p. 61
viiRobinson, p. 61
viiiRobinson, p. 61
ixRobinson, p. 61
xRobinson, p. 61
xiRobinson, p. 61
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