The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the Crusades

Abstract

The crusades gave rise large to an unusually large and varied body of written chronicles. Some chronicles are in Latin, others vernacular; some are written by members of the clergy, others by laymen; some of their authors were participants in the events that they described, others wrote centuries after the fact; some chronicles come down to us in a single manuscript, others survive in dozens of copies; some are unadorned, others are richly illustrated.Until relatively recently, historians tended to study chronicles of the crusades primarily as a means to reconstruct the course of events. They have since begun to redress the balance and to pay more attention to the texts themselves. Several approaches have been particularly fruitful. First, historians have turned their attention to chronicles that have hereto been set aside as unreliable or derivative. Second, they have begun to treat chronicles not as fi xed entities, but as works-in-progress with a centuries-long history, spanning from the time when material began to be collected to when the last manuscript copy was produced (and beyond, to modern editions and translations). Third, they have set out to tackle the problem of the functions that the memory of crusades performed. Finally, they began to pay close attention to the intertextuality of the chronicles.Chronicles have a lot to offer both to scholars working on crusades and to those with only a passing interest in the subject. The study of the chronicles makes possible not only a better understanding of how medieval thinkers perceived crusades at various points in time, but also of how they conceived of history in general. Both because of their unusually large number and variety and because of the originality of approaches to historical events that many of them display, chronicles of the crusades are of great -but not yet fully appreciated -importance to the study of medieval historiography.The earliest chroniclers of the crusades probably began writing when the First Crusade was still in progress. They were pathbreakers: theirs was the fi rst attempt to write a narrative of a military campaign since antiquity. 1 Eventually, the First Crusade went on to become the most frequently ELIZABETH LAPINA