God's Scribe: The Historiographical Art of Galbert of Bruges (review)

Jeff Rider is perhaps the ideal reader and interpreter of Galbert of Bruges's intriguing account of the murder in the castral church of Bruges of Charles the Good, Count of Flanders, since Rider earlier published a new translation of the Latin text which is the subject of this present book. He here demonstrates the sort of mastery of the text in all its details that is the rich reward for his work of translation.

Charles the Good was assassinated in 1127 by a clique of Flemish nobles at whose center lay the Erembalds, men whom the Count had cited to his court to defend their "liberty," acting on the rumor that their aristocratic status was a fiction and their true descent not noble at all, but instead servile. Had they been determined to be of servile status, the Count was legally entitled to degrade them of their nobility and offices and retract their privileges, a process of recuperating rights over serfs that Charles the Good was pursuing throughout the lands under his control. The Erembald clan, however, resisted the Count's claims, with all the ensuing disastrous results: for Charles, his assassins, and ultimately the citizens of Flanders in general and Bruges in particular, since the murder of the Count was followed by political upheaval, killing and counter-killing leading to the death of the traitors, and civil war occasioned by two subsequent changes of regime, culminating finally in the election of Thierry of Alsace as the new count in 1128. As a secular cleric and minor official in the Flemish comital administration, Galbert was ideally situated to record these happenings and did so for the benefit, Rider argues, of his fellow citizens of Bruges. Unfortunately, his De Multro, traditione, et occisione gloriosi Karoli comitis Flandriarum, which reports the full course of these events, remained unknown in the Middle Ages and seems to have been discovered only in the fifteenth century, when a French translation was made. The only other extant account of the events reported by Galbert is that of Walter of Thérouanne's, whose contemporary Vita Karoli comitis lacks the vitality and detail of Galbert's far superior effort. Although contemporaries neglected it, modern scholars have persistently prized Galbert's text as a unique, virtually journalistic report not only of the murder of the Count, but also as the first "secular" testimony to a "feudal crisis" over status and lordship, to which it is the earliest medieval chronicle to bear witness. It is precisely this approach to Galbert that Rider's book sets out to dispute, with great precision in his marshaling of evidence and argumentation, hence persuasiveness.

Through a minute analysis of the process of Galbert's writing, from journalistic "notes" made on wax tablets during the period when the signal events occurred which derived either from his own eyewitness or from oral testimony of contemporaries; to the initial transfer of this material in written form on parchment; and then through a complex process of revision, Rider shows that the core of Galbert's work, as well as the core of his historiographical conceptions, was a theologically informed understanding of historical events, which form a Passio Karoli at the heart of his text. Thus rather than the first "journalistic" report to survive from the Middle Ages, the De multro looks like a rather traditional Augustinian text that seeks to demonstrate the overarching operation of God's justice hidden beneath the manifest activities of man, a view of history enlivened by the rhetorical skill and learning that—contrary to prevailing scholarly opinion—Rider is also able to demonstrate as central components of Galbert's "historiographical art." No mere "reporter" or "journalist," Galbert functions, in this view, as "God's scribe," a historiographically sophisticated and skilled writer whose formal treatment of historical events...