THE PRESENT CHAPTER IS CLOSELY circumscribed by a crucial topic, belief in divine intervention and its consequences for medieval views of social action; in addition, the second part of the chapter deals with self-fashioning and the link between identity and agency. Divine providence takes centre stage in historians’ discussion of agency in a medieval context, but this is largely on the basis of normative theological sources. The present approach is different: it brings into focus the views of individuals highly familiar with religious doctrine, but who nevertheless were not theologians. The general background for the two texts analysed here is the revival of the self-narrative beginning with the twelfth century, but while well-known to medievalists, the texts analysed here are not among the canonical and well-studied examples of twelfth-century autobiography, notably by Abelard, Suger, and Guibert of Nogent. Both texts are examples of history-writing in which self-referentiality and autobiographical episodes found their way; it should thus come as no surprise that both are hybrid texts that defy the conventions of medieval literary genres. They are approached as ego-documents because the individual writer and his lifeworld feature in both – ostensibly in the late-thirteenth-century chronicle of world events into which its author, Salimbene de Adam of Parma, saw fit to insert several autobiographical episodes; and more timidly in Galbert of Bruges's earlier experiment in eyewitness reporting, his account of the events surrounding the assassination of Count Charles the Good of Flanders (1127). As much as the reality of social interactions, the texts reflect the authors’ notions of human agency, but since neither Galbert (a notary) nor Salimbene (a rank-and-file Franciscan friar) seem exceptional for their circles, the case can be made that they reflect worldviews shared more broadly in the urban milieu. While certainly well educated, neither author was a high intellectual.

The assertion of the auctorial self in twelfth-century culture has captured the medievalists’ imagination because in a field concerned above all with historical and literary texts it represents a highly visible sign of the affirmation of the individual. What is indeed remarkable is that this self-assertion happened despite genre conventions and a Christian ethos of humility and self-denial. (That Salimbene's narrative self-assertion required careful handling through a series of textual strategies – as discussed below – is a clear indication that this ethos continued to shape cultural expectations).