The Chronique d'Ernoul and the Colbert-Fontainebleau continuation of William of Tyre (Review)

Review(s) of: The Chronique d'Ernoul and the Colbert-Fontainebleau Continuation of William of Tyre, by Edbury, Peter, and Massimiliano Gaggero, eds, I (The Medieval Mediterranean, 135/1), Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2023; hardback, pp. ix, 569; R.R.P. 124 euros.00; ISBN 9789004209930.

Few, if any, sources about the Crusades and the Latin East have a textual
tradition as complex as that of the various Old French narratives associated with
the enormous history of the First Crusade and the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem
written by Archbishop William of Tyre, who died in obscure circumstances in
the period leading up to Saladin’s conquest of Jerusalem in 1187. William’s Latin
text was later rendered into the vernacular, most likely during the reign of King
Louis VIII of France (r. 1223–26). Not long afterwards, an anonymous compiler
took a separate vernacular narrative of events in the Latin East known to scholars
as the Chronique d’Ernoul et de Bernard le Trésorier (‘Chronicle of Ernoul and
of Bernard the Treasurer’), excised that text’s material from the period before
1184 (where William’s original account breaks off), and then welded its post-1184 content onto the end of the Old French translation of William of Tyre. The product of this textual fusion underlays a rich series of entangled continuations that extend into the final decades of the thirteenth century and are attested in various forms across dozens of surviving manuscripts from before 1500.