In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

5 Galbert’s Hidden Women Social Presence and Narrative Concealment nanCy f. ParTner The prose narrative known to all teachers of basic university level courses in medieval history as The Murder of Charles the Good from its beloved translation by James Bruce Ross in 1959 is, according to Jeff Rider, its most recent editor, “the only journalistic history we have from Europe in the twelfth century ..... a contemporary eyewitness account of the assassination of Charles the Good, Count of Flanders,” who was murdered at prayer in the castle church at Bruges on March 2, 1127.1 The near-present-time account written under difficult conditions and under pressure of strong emotion by Galbert, a notary and bureaucrat at the administrative court of Flanders, covers events from the accession of Count Charles through his murder and the social and political chaos in Flanders for the next sixteen months, until Thierry of Alsace secured the countship in the summer of 1128. The events are dramatic: a strong and intelligent ruler of a feudal state (Charles is presented in idealized form combining every chivalric, Christian, and compassionate virtue) imposes a high standard of law and order on his state, and attempts to reduce the encroaching power of an upstart family (the so-called Erembald clan, headed by Bertulf the provost) by means of a legal demonstration of their servile lineage, and thereby provokes them to treason on a wild gamble with political assassination. The conspirators, mostly younger relations of Bertulf, slaughter Charles in full view of many witnesses, then escape to wait out the aftermath. They hope the deed will 109 1. Rider, God’s Scribe, 1. This sophisticated and nuanced study of Galbert as a writer is a model of balanced historical context with literary critical penetration; Galbert emerges from Rider’s sensitive interpretation as a man of feeling, intellect, and moral struggle. 110 nanCy f. ParTner meet with general public approval, or at least acquiescence, and the appointment of a weaker, friendlier count from among their own allies. It almost worked. Charles’s supporters were shocked and frightened; a few were murdered immediately as examples; no one knew whom to trust, and it took some time before the forces seeking vengeance and a legitimate succession got themselves organized. In the meantime, for month after month in the most urbanized feudal state in northwestern Europe, there was effectively no government, no law, and no functioning economy. We are told all this in a book constructed from the diary-like notes of Galbert the notary, an educated man, Latin-literate and pious, but urban in his practical experience , a cleric in the technical and professional sense, but close to a layman in outlook, a modern man, at least compared with most medieval historian authors, who look at politics and secular life through monastic eyes.2 This narrative record is a history that still astonishes us for what it includes . Much of it takes place in the towns of a feudal state where the author knew many people, people close to the center of commercial and political life. We have a book with scenes of mixed crowds of townspeople and feudatories looking on as a knight performs the formal ritual for breaking homage within the city walls; urban merchants doing improvised acts of collective non-noble homage; the king of France making deals over rents and tolls. We are told the names of dozens of people. Ecclesiastics and laity mix together unselfconsciously; leading townsmen are treated as the important persons they were in this society. This is a book that for once seems connected to the total undisguised reality of medieval urban life—a reality uncensored by ideological or social constraints. So much is startlingly just “there” in matter-of-fact uproarious combination that it is almost easy to overlook what should be there, had to be there, and is not: women. That absence does make this topic of the women in Galbert of Bruges’s narrative of the murder of Charles the Good one of those rare tidy research tasks whose scope and dimensions fit neatly within the confines of a single essay. There is a finite text, some 233 pages in the useful Ross translation, less in Jeff Rider’s Corpus Christianorum edition. One can comb through it line by line, making careful notes of all females detectable in any way in the text, and then organize one’s findings into a few useful categories 2. Rider, God’s Scribe, 16–28...

Share