William of Malmesbury

While 'the search for the Anglo-Saxon oral poet' has sometimes been characterized as a quest for a chimera (and while sometimes it has been no more than that), there is abundant evidence for the existence of practicing oral poets in the pre-Norman period. Likewise there is evidence that literate Anglo-Saxons themselves cultivated the image of the bard (or Germanic 'scop') in a number of their writings, from Bede to the late tenth century, perhaps in a spirit of nostalgia for the native roots of their culture in a world of simpler ethical imperatives. The idea of oral poetry thus served both the Anglo-Saxons and their Norman successors as a kind of myth, helping to validate a desired social order through glimpses of an imagined past.

The substance of this article was reworked as chapter 4 (pp. 141-187) of my book 'Old English Heroic Poems and the Social Life of Texts' (2007).

This paper was presented at the 43rd annual Mid-America Medieval Association Conference (14 September 2019), whose theme was "What Lies Beneath."

This paper provides a brief overview of post-Norman Conquest interpretations of the life, personality, and activity of Æthelred II "the Unready" of England, comparing them to what contemporary Anglo-Saxon sources say about the king. Numerous unflattering legends surrounding King Æthelred can be traced to the 12th century historian William of Malmesbury, while material from John of Worcester's 12th century chronicle will also be examined. In addition, popular interpretations from the 19th and 20th centuries show how Æthelred's unenviable reputation has progressed into the modern era. These interpretations are then compared to Anglo-Saxon sources for the activity and behavior of Æthelred. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for example, portrays the king more favorably-as a relatively typical, if unlucky, Anglo-Saxon king-and the Life of Oswald, while not an unbiased source, casts doubt on his supposed personality flaws. By revisiting these earliest sources, this paper argues that many of the commonly-repeated legends about Æthelred the Unready do not comfortably align with the earliest sources for the reign.

Harold Godwinson's journey to France, depicted on the Bayeux Tapestry, is nowadays mostly regarded as rather reckless attempt to free two hostages in Normandy. It is a curious incident, interrupting Harold's ascent to power in his homeland. William of Malmesbury's description of it as a fishing party has always been dismissed as a silly explanation. This article connects Malmesbury's phrase 'commentum' ('pretext') with other sources on the expedition. This comparison shows that Harold's boat trip and his intended diplomacy in France were not an interlude in his policy, but formed a continuation of his cautious, calculated manoeuvres towards possession of the English throne.

WILLIAM IX THE TROUBADOUR (1071-1126) AND ISLAM

The first troubadour, whose songs are preserved, was as duke of Aquitaine the most important French prince around 1100. His military activity was, at least three times, directed against the Muslims. Her aunts and sisters were married to Iberian Christian kings, whom he defended against Almoravid invasion. In 1100-1102, he participated in Holy Land to a failed crusade. During these expeditions, he had several contacts with Arab courts, in particular with Imâd al-Dawla,  the last emir of Saragossa of Banu Hudi dynasty, expelled of his capital by Almoravids. They were together in the troupe of the king of Aragon fighting them in Cutanda battle (1120). Imâd gave to him the so-called “Vase d’Aliénor d’Aquitaine”, his grand-daughter. It was preserved in Saint-Denis abbey and is nowadays in Louvre Museum. This precious crystal and silver object is not the only gift William IX received from a Muslim prince. At least one of his poems (V, Pasero ed.) seems to contain some Arabic words. Other elements show a possible influence of Hispanic-Arabic poetry in his own work. They nourish the debate on the ‘origins’ of Courtly Love. ‘Origins’ is not probably the good word, but better ‘polygenesis’ or Michel Foucault’s ‘conditions of possibility’. Thus, the study of the relations between William IX and Islam has to be done in an interdisciplinary way, which takes account of political and social history, of art history or of literature and linguistics.

This paper examines the accounts that describe the death and burial of three successive kings: William the Conqueror, William Rufus, and Henry I. The manner in which the monarch died, and the later treatment of his corpse, provided the opportunity for authors to critique the deceased's reign and present their assessment of his legacy. The conflicting accounts show how authorial biases owing to theological affiliations shaped the expressed view, affecting which details were recorded and which were omitted, and how biblical, historical, and literary allusions were employed to shape historical events into a religious exemplum.

The article brings to the attention of the scholarly world a hardly known medieval source Gesta Regum Anglorum written by William of Malmesbury. Who was an early 12th century English benedictine monk from Malmesbury in Western England. The article revolves around the outmost relevance of William of Malmesbury to the study of pre-christian Slavic religion, and provides two interpretations of William's account.

This Element is a contribution to the ongoing debate on what it meant to publish a book in manuscript. It offers case-studies of three twelfth-century Anglo-Norman historians: William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and Geoffrey of Monmouth. It argues that the contemporary success and rapid attainment of canonical authority for their histories was in significant measure the result of successfully conducted publishing activities. These activities are analysed using the concept of a 'publishing circle'. This concept, it is suggested, may have wider utility in the study of authorial publishing in a manuscript culture.

Follow the link (DOI) to access the publication.

Gesta regum Anglorum, written by William of Malmesbury in the twelfth century, is a key source for the life of the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon king, Æthelstan (924–939). Contemporary narrative histories provide little detail relating to Æthelstan’s kingship, and the account of Gesta regum Anglorum purports to grant an unparalleled insight into his life and reign. William’s abbey at Malmesbury had a unique connection to Æthelstan—the Anglo-Saxon king had gifted the abbey lands and relics in life, and in death had been laid to rest there. Thus, two-centuries after his death, Malmesbury was perhaps the most likely region in England to retain an affection for Æthelstan. However, due to this regional affinity with the Anglo-Saxon king, William’s narrative must be viewed with some suspicion, designed as it is to emphasise Æthelstan’s connection to Malmesbury and eulogise the abbey’s Anglo-Saxon benefactor. It is a complex literary construction that at times demonstrates an historian’s concern for the veracity of sources and the integrity of their interpretation, while at others is wont to delve into hagiographical hyperbole. This paper undertakes to examine critically William’s historiographical methodologies as identified within his life of Æthelstan, thereby exposing the intrinsic interrelation between source documents, local tradition, material history, and authorial invention in his construct of the Anglo-Saxon king.

This paper examines William of Malmesbury's  (c.1090—c.1142) detailed description of ancient Roman remains at Carlisle in northern England. This remarkable passage features in his 'Gesta pontificum Anglorum' (Book III ch. 99) and has been much commented upon by previous scholars as an instance of personal observation.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, to indicate the pervasive influence of textual sources that mediated William’s description of these Roman ruins. Second, to demonstrate how William carefully projects his own 'romanitas' (Romanness) onto his description of these archaeological remains. Through close textual reading and literary analysis it is shown that this scene is not a straightforward example of antiquarianism based upon personal observation, but instead a complex passage of literary inclination which indicates the wider cultural associations of Rome and 'romanitas' within William of Malmesbury's historical writings.

(Note that the PDF includes the first pages only.)

This essay explores how female characters in historical literature written in high to late medieval England shape land claims, political history, and genealogy through their acts of childbirth. Recent scholarship has shown how medieval writers frequently imagined virginal female bodies – religious and secular – in relation to land claim, but less work exists on how they also used the non-virginal bodies of mothers and vivid descriptions of childbirth to assert rights to land and lineage. This essay examines three birth stories associated with conquest or claims to contested lands from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum Anglorum, and the anonymous ancestral romance Fouke le Fitz Waryn. In these principally high medieval texts, there is little of the squeamishness around parturition sometimes found in later French and Middle English romances. Rather, female characters give birth outdoors, underground, on contested borders, and accompanied by visions of conquest. The writers attribute the women with effort, activity, and political astuteness, as these political and figurative acts of childbirth shape the women’s relationships to land and those of their descendants.

Presenting a stemma for the descendants of Wien, Öster. Nationalbibl., 189 (V) in Cicero’s Lucullus sheds light on the history of the tradition and reveals the importance of Saint-Omer, Bibl. Munic., 652, not yet identified as a gemellus of Cambridge, Univ. Libr., Dd.XIII.2, both the result of unusually intensive work done on the text by William of Malmesbury in the 12th century. Thanks to four major
lacunae (§§ 28, 28, 106, 144), the manuscripts are assigned to four classes and those manuscripts picked out that can serve alongside Paris, B.N.F., lat. 17812, the only one cited in Plasberg’s apparatus, for reconstructing in §§ 104-48 the missing text of V as corrected by V2.

For centuries medieval English depictions of "Viking" invasion and settlement of England vacillate between positive and negative appraisal of Anglo-Scandinavian relations. While this vacillation operates at times through distortion of the historical record, English national identity emerges as distinct from its northern neighbours, in particular the Danes. Over this longue durée, authors process the complicated English relationship to the Danes who had settled in England and those who remained a threat abroad by employing a troped and racialized figure of the Dane, from early chronicles like William of Malmesbury's Gesta regum Anglorum, to the romances King Horn and Havelok the Dane, and in later, popular chronicles like Robert Mannyng's Story of England and the fifteenth-century Prose Brut. By turns viewed with fear and nostalgia, the Danes are definitively cut off from England in the Prose Brut, wherein the successful repelling of an imagined fourteenth-century Danish invasion offers a final fantasy of closure to this facet of English ethnogenesis.

*Published in Discovering William of Malmesbury, ed. by Rodney M. Thomson, Emily Dolmans and Emily A. Winkler (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2017), pp. 129–38.* As Professor Rod Thomson noted in 1997 ('William of Malmesbury, Historian of Crusade', Reading Medieval Studies 23 (1997), 121–34), William of Malmesbury’s account of the First Crusade in his Gesta regum Anglorum has often been overlooked, thanks to its relatively late date of composition, and William’s reliance on other written sources to piece together his narrative. But in addition to the unique information William conveys about the expedition, and his interesting perspective on the crusader leaders and their knightly conduct (Thomson, 1997), William’s history also deserves attention in a study of health, medicine and the crusades. The experience of crusading took a physical toll on participants, whether due to the privations of the march, the risks of infectious disease in a siege context, or the dangers of an unfamiliar climate and hostile weather. A self-professed student of medicine, William’s history of the First Crusade (1095–99), and the subsequent expedition of Sigurd Jorsalfar (1106/08–10) is marked out from other accounts of the crusades by William’s evident interest in medical matters and his inclusion of vignettes which illuminate aspects of contemporary medical theory and the physical experience of crusading. This paper situated William’s crusading narrative in the context of contemporary medical theory and understanding in order to contribute to our understanding of William of Malmesbury as an historian of the crusades, the use of chronicles as a source for medical history, and ongoing work on the experience of illness and medieval perceptions of health in a crusading context.

The Battle of Brunanburh, 937AD, was said at the time to be the bloodiest battle ever. Athelstan, King of England, led a force of mainly West Saxons and Mercians against a coalition of Irish Vikings, Scots and Strathclyde Welsh. It was a battle for the very existence of England and yet its location has been lost in the mists of time. Many potential locations have been proposed. This paper evaluates four of the leading contenders-Bromborough in the Wirral, Burnswark in Dumfries and Galloway, Lanchester in County Durham, Burghwallis in South Yorkshire-using contemporary and 12thC sources. It concludes that the most likely of these to be the site of the battle is Burghwallis.

Special Number of Romanic Review, devoted to dialogues between medieval literature and An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013) by Bruno Latour (in which the ecological and network theorist turns to metaphysics).


The first half of my article stages an encounter between, on the one hand, Latour’s account of the interaction between two of his ‘modes of existence’, ‘REF[erence]’ (broadly, scientific knowledge) and ‘FIC[tion]’ (broadly, art) and, on the other, a series of meta-historical anecdotes in William of Malmesbury’s 12th-century Latin chronicle of the English kings. The second half focuses on the brackets that mark verse form in some medieval English manuscripts, confronting these with more of Latour’s ‘modes’ and with his own graphic practice. In each case, I argue that studying the medieval artefacts allows us to extend and refine Latour’s account, thus furthering his political and philosophical project.

Special issue of The Journal of Religious History, Literature and Culture 5/2 (2019).

This article explores the gendered presentation of the First Crusade and the establishment of the Latin East in Book 4 of William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum. Building upon the seminal work of Kirsten Fenton, it argues that William’s preoccupation with masculinity, and specifically his intention of pitching the First Crusade as a model of male fortitude for future generations, had a far greater impact on his account of events in Outremer than has yet been acknowledged. The use of gendered language in Book 4 of the Gesta regum is considered first, before exploring two ways in which this concern for gender shaped William’s portrayal of events in the East: namely, the paucity of references to both deserters and instances of Latin fear. The article ends with a comparative case study, analysing how William approached his principal source for King Baldwin I of Jerusalem’s career to determine whether his omission of Latin fear was a deliberate narrative strategy. In so doing, this article seeks to advance our understanding of William’s account of the First Crusade and the early years of Latin settlement, which remains relatively understudied due to his lack of eyewitness credentials, and to contribute to the growing corpus of scholarship on the gendered presentation of crusading in historical narratives.

My paper will analyse a hitherto unnoticed borrowing from Vegetius’s De re militari in William of Malmesbury’s account of Urban II’s sermon at the Council of Clermont. Scholars have long recognised that the various reports of Urban’s sermon are as much literary constructs, reflecting their authors’ personal views of the crusading movement, as they are reports of the pope’s actual words or sentiments. My paper will compare the text from the Gesta with Lincoln College, Oxford MS lat. 100, which contains Malmesubry’s autograph copy of De re militari, to show how Malmesbury wove material from Lucan and Vegetius into his text to create a uniquely ‘secular’ version of Urban’s sermon, one that appealed as much to his audience’s sense of honour as their Christian piety. Malmesbury drew on Vegetius as a Classical authority to demonstrate that the Turks were inherently poor fighters, on account of their native climate, and that Westerners should feel ashamed that they, as hardy inhabitants of a more temperate region, had allowed Christian lands to be conquered by such an unmanly race. In this, Malmesbury reflected not only Classical theories about race but also his own well-documented prejudices against the barbarian and the other, whether they be Welsh, Scandinavian or Turkish.

This paper provides a close study of references to different aspects of material culture, as detailed in the chronicles of twelfth-century English historians. Scholars have long been aware of the materiality of the medieval world and the field of Anglo-Norman studies has also begun to recognise that the ‘visibility of the past’ is an important theme in English and Norman historical writing which is deserving of greater study. This study contributes to this developing area of research by drawing attention to the nature of such references and their significance to twelfth-century historical writing. The twelfth century was a vibrant period for historical writing in England, in which some of the most important narrative Latin histories of the medieval period were written. Though the frequency and type of references to aspects of material culture differs from chronicle to chronicle, close study of a broad range of texts reveals a number of recurring themes which, taken together, display the rich and multi-faceted relationship between material culture and historical writing in twelfth-century England. Particular attention will be given to William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, as well as to a number of other contemporary and near contemporary chronicles written across England. Crucial to these histories was the claim that such objects were still in existence at the time of writing and so could be seen by the author and his readers. Such references reveal the extent to which these narratives were so often underpinned and, at times, even given their overall shape by physical objects and highlight the importance of material culture to twelfth century English historical writing.

This essay analyses a hitherto unnoticed borrowing from Vegetius's De re militari in William of Malmesbury's account of Urban II's sermon at the Council of Clermont. Scholars have long recognised that the various reports of Urban's sermon are as much literary constructs, reflecting their authors' personal views of the crusading movement, as they are reports of the pope's actual words or sentiments. It demonstrates how Malmesbury wove material from Lucan and Vegetius into his text to create a uniquely 'secular' version of Urban's sermon, one that appealed as much to his audience's sense of honour as their Christian piety. Malmesbury drew on Vegetius as a Classical authority to demonstrate that the Turks were inherently poor fighters. In this, Malmesbury reflected not only Classical theories about race but also his own well-documented prejudices against the 'barbarian' and the other, whether they be Welsh, Scandinavian or Turkish.

The article argues that medieval glosses and commentaries on historical writings are of significant interest for the history of historical scholarship. Four types of comments that witness elements of a critical historical approach are discussed in detail: first, comments on technical terms, which stimulated discussion of different aspects of past societies; second, comments on toponyms, which explored both continuity and change in toponomy, topography or the political affiliation of a given place; third, comments providing supporting or conflicting evidence for certain facts. The fourth group of commentaries presupposes that medieval glossators were able to deduce from the text the evidence of past phenomena that were only implicitly present in the narrative. Some cases of early modern readers of medieval glossed historical manuscripts, discussed at the end of the article, offer an invitation to consider the role that medieval commentaries might have played in the development of modern critical method of historical research.

The modern distinction between the genres of history and hagiography is not easily applied to written narratives in the medieval West. Chroniclers frequently inserted hagiographical material and supernatural elements into their historical accounts, and saints’ Lives and miracle stories often contained historical matter. Medieval writers happily mixed and matched what we would consider factual history and semi-fictional hagiography to the extent that some modern commentators have included saints’ Lives under the rubric of ‘history’.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the relationship between history and hagiography in William of Malmesbury’s ‘Gesta Pontificum Anglorum’. It asks how and why William employed hagiographical elements in what was ostensibly a work of history, and argues that hagiographical motifs had various narrative applications for William, such as lionising his favourite religious heroes. Focusing on William’s penchant for recording miracle tales, the chapter also suggests that miracles served as a vehicle for the transmission of historical knowledge in the Middle Ages.