WRITING AS SILENCE Dogood in the New-England Courant in 1722, a young Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) articulated a traditional view of historical writing as essentially a didactic genre: “Histories of lives are seldom entertaining, unless they contain something either admirable or exemplar.” While history as a literary genre by no means had shed its ostensible raison d’être by the century's end, its allure certainly was not predicated solely on its ability to instruct. Its growing popularity among American readers was concurrent with an expanding number of historical institutions (local and national) as well as a frequency of allusions to historical events and persons in both art and literature. Indeed, it has been estimated that in the first half of the nine-teenth century over one-third of all bestsellers were historical in focus, with leading magazines devoting roughly the same percentage of their space to historical content. Nevertheless, the historical bestsellers of the era—which included such popular titles as William Robertson's History of Scotland (1759) and David Hume's History of Great Britain (1754–1762)—do not suggest any special public interest in France's early medieval past specifically, or even French history in general. Among contemporary American historians too it is difficult to detect anything approaching a collective preoccupation along the lines of concurrent scholarly trends in continental Europe.

The Availability of Sources: Libraries, Reprints, and Imports

If, indeed, American readers and writers were somewhat detached from the ongoing European scholarly discourse regarding the early history of the regnum Francorum, partial blame would seem to lie with a basic lack of accessible source material, especially primary. In 1826, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story (1779–1845) delivered an oration at Harvard University on behalf of the Phi Beta Kappa Society on the theme of “Characteristics of the Age.” Bemoaning the sorry state of classical learning in his own country, compared to what could be found in European universities, Story asserted that “There is not, perhaps, a single library in America sufficiently copious to have enabled Gibbon to verify the authorities for his immortal History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” While Story exaggerated slightly the sorry state of America's libraries, which numbered more than seven hundred at the time he delivered his oration, his observation vis-à-vis primary sources was not entirely unjust.