Chronicle of the Third Crusade. A Translation of the Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi by Helen J. Nicolson (review)

108BOOK REVIEWS abroad,foreigners in England, and pilgrimage within England and Scotland,with some excellent, lively material. Webb introduces each chapter with a helpful summary, setting the scene and referring to some of the excerpts to follow. Chapter 4, "Help and Hazard: The Pilgrims' Experience," is particularly interesting , touching upon some often-ignored aspects of this commonplace of medieval life, including one case that resembles a modern lawsuit for false advertising (pilgrims who had unwisely relied upon Rome's "proclamation of safe-conduct" [p. 106]). The next brief chapter, too, is one of the more engaging : "Remembering Pilgrimage: Souvenirs," contains apposite authorial comments , and sources, for the trinket business in its technical as well as tawdry aspects. The professional medievalist will probably enjoy this collection, which is a convenient teaching tool, as a stimulus to reflection rather than research. (Though most of the excerpts are in print, Webb includes some unpublished material from Italian archives.) Since the intended audience seems to be the student interested in this facet of medieval life, one hopes that a paperback edition will be forthcoming, given the price of the hardback. One might add, to Webb's extensive bibliography of sources, source collections, and secondary works, Brian Spencer's Pilgrim Souvenirs & Secular Badges: Salisbury & South Wiltshire Museum Medieval Catalogue, F'art 2 (Salisbury, 1990), and Linda Davidson and Maryjane Dunn-Wood's Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages: A Research Guide (NewYork, 1993). Diana Webb is to be thanked for combing a great deal of printed (and some archival) materials in an imaginative fashion with an eye to the ordinary as well as the unusual, and in providing succinct, well-crafted introductions to each of the chapters in her enjoyable, and useful, book. R. C. Finucane Oakland University, Michigan Chronicle of the Third Crusade. A Translation of the Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi. By Helen J. Nicolson. [Crusade Texts in Translation 3] (Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing. 1997. Pp. ix, 409. $72.95.) This excellent translation of Stubbs's Rolls Series edition (1864) of the most comprehensive, near-contemporary history of the Third Crusade will be an immense boon to all students of the crusade and of the crusading movement in general. It has long been accepted that the history, though strictly speaking anonymous, was compiled c. 1220 by Richard de Templo, prior of the Augustinian priory of Holy Trinity, London. In 1962 Hans Eberhard Mayer showed that it was an amalgam of two eyewitness narratives: the first a Latin history, which Mayer called IP 1 (Itinerarium Peregrinorum I) of events up to the death of Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury (November 19, 1 190)—a date which, curi- BOOK REVIEWS109 ously, is nowhere mentioned by Dr. Nicolson in her otherwise very helpful notes—and the second, IP 2, based on the Anglo-Norman Estoire de la Guerre Sainte by Ambroise. In deciding to translate Stubbs's edition she took the simplest and most sensible course since he had taken as his base manuscript an expanded text, including some matter from Howden and Diceto which was tacked on later in the thirteenth century. Here then we have the most complete version of the chronicle in readily accessible form. Dr. Nicolson has successfully achieved her aim of producing readable modern English while staying close to the original Latin. Just occasionally she has amplified in ways which could mislead . For example, the addition of the word 'Europe' when it is not there in the Latin (Book I, cc. 10 and 11) might deceive those studying ideas of Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. My one regret is that the opportunity to provide a full translation of IP 1 , as well as of Richard de Templo's text, was not quite grasped. This would have required no more than to give the former in the footnotes on those rare occasions, as in Book I, cc. 11, 25, 33, and 40, when Richard de Templo altered IPl 's words. Dr. Nicolson has provided an admirably lucid introduction, discussing the relationship between Richard de Templo's text and its sources—though without considering Hannes Möhring's suggestion that IPl could have been written as late as early 1 194, nor using...