The <i>De Gestis Herwardi </i>as a Crusade Text

Outremer. Studies in the Crusades and the Latin East · 2022

• Philosophy

War

2019-01-01

2 The Second Crusade: The De Expugnatione Lyxbonensi and Odo of Deuil’s De Profectione Ludovici VII in Orientem

Boydell and Brewer eBooks · 2018-12-31

Eyewitness and Crusade Narrative

Boydell & Brewer eBooks · 2018-09-01 · 5 citations

Eyewitness and Crusade Narrative: Perception and Narration in Accounts of the Second, Third and Fourth Crusades

2018-09-21

The idea of what an "eyewitness" account is here scrutinised through examination of key Crusading texts

Eyewitness and Crusade Narrative

Boydell and Brewer eBooks · 2018-12-31 · 3 citations

4 Geoffrey of Villehardouin’s and Robert of Clari’s Narratives of the Fourth Crusade

Boydell and Brewer eBooks · 2018-12-31

Eyewitness and Medieval Historical Narrative

2017-01-01 · 1 citations

Historians routinely make judgements about sources according to whether or not they are ‘eyewitness’. But this is a category that has received little scholarly attention, a surprising omission given the emergent interest in historical experientiality, as well as in light of the research undertaken into eyewitness perception and memory by cognitive and social psychologists. This paper examines the interest in autopsy demonstrated by ancient historians, and then assesses the extent to which medieval writers’ approaches to eyewitness evidence matched those of their classical predecessors. The paper concludes with an analysis of two eyewitness texts—Robert de Clari’s account of the Fourth Crusade, and Francesco Balbi di Correggio’s history of the Great Siege of Malta—in order to consider the role that eyewitnessing could play as a plot device within a narrative, and the manner in which an eyewitness author might situate his autoptic status relative to other validating strategies.

The Relationship Between the Gesta Francorum and Peter Tudebode’s Historia de Hierosolymitano Itinere: The Evidence of a Hitherto Unexamined Manuscript (St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, 3)

2016-08-12 · 1 citations

Jeanette Beer. <i>In Their Own Words: Practices of Quotation in Early Medieval History-Writing</i> .

The American Historical Review · 2016-12-01

Jeanette Beer’s In Their Own Words: Practices of Quotation in Early Medieval History-Writing is a welcome addition to an expanding field. Her approach in this study of various medieval historical works dating from between the ninth and thirteenth centuries involves a series of case studies foregrounding texts that broke, or appear to have broken, new ground substantively or stylistically or both: Nithard’s Historiae de dissensionibus filiorum Ludovici Pii, which contains the first extant sequence of vernacular French in the form of the famous Strasbourg Oaths; the Gesta Francorum, the earliest eyewitness account of the First Crusade (although this is a status that has been problematized in recent research); Geoffrey of Villehardouin’s and Robert of Clari’s accounts of the Fourth Crusade, the first prose histories written in French; and Li Fet des Romains, an early-thirteenth-century prose compilation and translation of all the materials that were then known concerning the career of Julius Caesar, which Beers argues is the first work of ancient history, and the first biography, to appear in French. The book’s central argument is that a close examination of each text’s practices of quotation—which can assume many forms, from the rendering of ipsissima verba to free indirect discourse, literary quotation, citation, allusion, and self-referencing—is an optimal route into an understanding of medieval historiographical practice and the influences upon it of both inherited classical forms and contemporary vernacular poetics. In so arguing, Beer sets her face against positivist minings of such texts for serviceable historical data. The point is well made, although there may be an element of pushing at an open door in light of the recent expansion of scholarly understanding of the complexity of medieval historiographical culture, in particular with respect to its regimes of truth.