L’Estoire de la guerre sainte ed. by Catherine Croizy-Naquet (review)

The two editions of this text produced in recent years (see also The History of the Holy War: Ambroise’s ‘Estoire de la Guerre Sainte’, ed. by Marianne Ailes and Malcolm Barber (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003)), more than a century since the last major edition by Gaston Paris (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1897), suggest that this important contemporaneous verse chronicle of the Third Crusade is at last receiving the critical attention it merits. The latest edition has all the qualities expected in the Classiques français du Moyen Âge series; the publishers are particularly generous in the space allowed for the Introduction. This includes a useful summary of contemporary vernacular, Latin, and, more unusually, Arabic historiography, but is otherwise largely aimed at the littéraire and philologue, with much historical detail left for the notes at the end of the work. The Introduction shows a real appreciation of the qualities of the text. There is also a discussion of the nature and status of the author, and of the relationship between this French text and the closely related Itinerarium peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi (pp. 32–50 and 83–92), largely following the hypothesis of Françoise Vielliard (see ‘L’Utilisation de l’itinerarium peregrinorum par L’Estoire de la guerre sainte: traduction et adaptation’, in Par les mots et par les textes: mélanges de langue, de littérature et d’histoire des sciences médiévales offerts à Claude Thomasset, ed. by Danièle James-Raoul and Olivier Soutet (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2005), pp. 807–18). Another section of the Introduction examines the way in which the chanson de geste is used as an intertext in the Estoire. The language of the text is discussed in depth, with some focus on dialectal features, but, disappointingly, with no discussion of rhetoric and word play. There is a comprehensive bibliography divided into sections, as is the norm in this series, although the nature of the material makes the separation of historical and literary studies artificial. The principles for the transcription and edition of the text are laid out in detail. The edition itself corrects for sense but not syllable count, and retains a number of the corrections made by Gaston Paris; these are assiduously acknowledged, and as are some corrections suggested by Paolo Rinoldi in his review of the Ailes and Barber edition (Revue critique de philologie romane, 10 (2009), 3–81). The line numbering is the same as that of the Paris edition. Variants of the Tokyo fragment (which corresponds to ll. 11758–11805 of this edition) are given in the apparatus at the foot of the page, but, although its existence is signalled in the Introduction (pp. 198–99), no variants are given from the recently discovered fragment now in Trinity College Library, Dublin. The glossary is based on that of Gaston Paris, tidied up: for example, infinitives are given consistently for verbs that in the text occur only in the past participle. The few additions made to what is essentially Paris’s glossary appear to consist of words less common than in 1897, or are concessions to a less philologically trained generation (for example, acostumer); a few added terms supply disambiguation (martir meaning martyr is added below martire meaning suffering). The Estoire de la guerre sainte is a text of great importance to both historians and literary scholars, and this meticulously prepared edition should be welcomed by both.

doi:10.1093/fs/knw015