Flodoard’s Annals are a crucial source for the history of the post-Carolingian kingdoms in the first half of the tenth century. Yet in spite of the text’s importance, it has seldom been studied as a piece of historiography. Flodoard’s highly reticent prose has often been noted, but the work presents several puzzles that have yet to be resolved. Building on the findings of Chapter 1 concerning Flodoard’s political activities, this chapter considers the Annals in the context of his deep knowledge of history and the different ways it could be represented. It examines aspects of the text that were highly traditional as well as those that were exceedingly novel. While the Annals have often been interpreted as a gloomy but accurate account of tenth-century political decline, this chapter argues that this narrative of failure was a more deliberate authorial construction than has been supposed. Disillusioned by political calamities and personal disappointments, I suggest that Flodoard found in the chronicle form a vehicle for a subtle but pointed critique of the ills of his day.

From the 1980s a pincer movement on editorial prerogatives came into play. The post-structuralist movement gradually undermined the assumption that works required a single reading text based on final authorial intention. Texts were also revealed to have a social dimension, as the meanings of their versional, redesigned and reprinted forms are ‘realised’ by successive readerships. The inherited but rarely inspected work-concept was thrown into doubt.

Conscientious editors who nevertheless felt the need to intervene on behalf of a new readership seemed to be left with no ground to stand on.

This chapter argues that a failure to theorise the work-concept is at the root of the problem. It shows that we need a broader concept of textual agency and an emphasis on the role of the reader in the functioning of what may now be cast as the embodied or living work. The role of the reader applies also for the scholarly edition, which emerges as a form of argument, aimed at the reader, about the archival materials it deploys.

Other possible work-models are considered, especially those implied in the writings of Franco Moretti and Rita Felski, based on the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour.