ABSTRACT
In twentieth-century German scholarship, Godfrey of Viterbo’s work has been mostly valued for his political ideology. Hence, scholars working on the political culture of the Middle Ages have focused on the imperial ideas put forward by Godfrey, whose purpose was to offer legitimization to the universal claims of the Roman-German emperors. In this light, Godfrey of Viterbo’s medieval readers were supposedly looking only for political ideas in his Pantheon. That reading has been questioned by scholars such as Loren Weber and others. As the various contributions to this volume have shown, Godfrey of Viterbo’s medieval readers understood his work in many diverse ways, of which the political interest of historical legitimacy was but one. Godfrey himself would probably have considered himself not as a propagandist of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, but much more as writer of universal history. Many of Godfrey’s medieval readers approached his work in this way – a source for good stories from the history of the world.
