The Old French William of Tyre and its Continuations

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This three-year project will produce the first modern critical edition of the medieval narratives known as the Continuations of William of Tyre and the Chronicle of Ernoul and Bernard the Treasurer. The project team, consisting of the PI, a full-time postdoctoral researcher and a project student, who will investigate the Old French translation of William of Tyre, will be based at Cardiff University, and will draw on existing resources and expertise in the Cardiff School of History and Archaeology.Archbishop William of Tyre (1175-1185) wrote a history of the crusades and the Frankish states in the East covering the period from the First Crusade (1095-99) to 1184. At some point in the early thirteenth century it was translated from the original Latin into French, and at various points later in that same century various French-language additions (the Continuations) were appended so as to bring the story up to date. The anonymous text, known from its nineteenth-century title as the Chronique d'Ernoul et de Bernard le Trésorier, is an independent work in French covering the period from the First Crusade to 1229 or, in some manuscripts, to 1232; for the period 1184-1232 a version of this text formed the basis for the composition of the Continuations. The importance of the Continuations and Ernoul-Bernard is considerable. Together they constitute the fullest narrative for the events from 1184 until (in the case of one manuscript) 1277 in the territories in the Levant ruled by the crusaders, and they are the most significant historical works composed in the Latin East to describe these years. The interest of these texts lies partly in the historical information they contain, but also in their capacity to mirror the political and cultural preoccupations of the authors and the original audience. All historians of this period use the nineteenth-century editions these texts, and there is widespread agreement that a modern, scholarly edition is a major desideratum. Fifty-one manuscripts of the French translation of William of Tyre dating from before 1500, forty-five of which contain Continuations, and eight manuscripts of Ernoul-Bernard survive, but the earlier editors utilized only a few of them, selected, so it would seem, largely at random. The editors had little idea of the stemma and no appreciation of how the texts developed.The large number of manuscripts are in themselves a pointer to the importance of these texts in the middle ages, but their sheer bulk has hitherto deterred scholars from undertaking a project of these dimensions. These are substantial texts: Ernoul-Bernard is around 85,000 words long; the French translation of WT (to 1184) is somewhere in the region of 290,000 words, whilst the Continuations vary considerably in length with the longest amounting to ca. 120,000 words. The projected edition together with the PhD research on the text of the translation, a closely related but discreet topic, will form a natural extension of the PI's research into the French vernacular literature produced in the Latin East; in recent years this has included a preliminary investigation of the French translation of WT's Latin history, and the preparation of critical editions of the legal treatises by the thirteenth-century writers, John of Ibelin and Philip of Novara. This new edition will be used by historians of the crusades, by historians of medieval mentalités and societies, and by specialists in Old French vernacular literature. It will also be of interest to specialists in Old French linguistics and philology.