ABSTRACT
One of the most seemingly intractable and long-running problems in the study of the contemporary historiography of the First Crusade has been the relationship between two of the so-called “eyewitness” accounts of that expedition, the anonymous text generally known as the Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum (hereafter GF) and the Historia de Hierosolymitano Itinere attributed to a priest, probably from Civray in Poitou, named Peter Tudebode (hereafter the text that bears his name will be referred to as PT).1 Within the tangled and still imperfectly understood web of relationships between the many histories of the First Crusade that were written soon after the event, both the eyewitnesses and what might be termed the “second generation” texts, the nexus between the GF and PT is self-evidently the single closest. Lexically, syntactically, substantively in terms of the propositional content of each text, and globally in their respective plot architectures, a particularly close affinity is immediately evident. Although each text contains passages absent from the other – this is more the case in PT, which is generally the more expansive – sequences in which there are close correspondences predominate. In the closeness of the two texts something more is at stake than the patterns of borrowings and influences that can be detected between other narratives of the First Crusade. More particularly, the relationship between the GF and PT differs from those between the GF and its adaptations by Robert the Monk, Guibert of Nogent, and Baldric of Bourgueil, who were able to express the GF’s plot content in more elevated literary registers.2 In contrast, the difference in the historiographical ambitions evidenced by the GF and PT in those portions in which they directly overlap resides very precisely in what might sometimes appear to be trivial lexical preferences and
1 GF; Peter Tudebode, Historia de Hierosolymitano Itinere, ed. John H. Hill and Laurita L. Hill (Paris, 1977). Although the edition of the GF bears Rosalind Hill’s name, the editorial work on the manuscripts and Latin text was largely carried out by one of the general series editors, Sir Roger Mynors, in line with the then standard practice of the Nelson (subsequently Oxford) Medieval Text series.
