The murder in the church of St Donatian of Bruges of Count Charles “the Good” of Flanders (1119-1127) by members of the powerful Erembald clan, carried out in the early morning hours of March 2, sent tremors across northwestern Europe like few other events of its time. Heightening the shock, Charles was assassinated while in prayer, as he dispensed alms to the poor. Following the death of the childless count, the perpetrators ransacked his house and barricaded themselves inside the church and its adjoining tower. A bevy of descendants from the comital line--the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of earlier counts--surfaced to contend for the throne and a siege ensued, soon joined by King Louis VI. Eventually the defense broke, and the king and new count, William Clito, meted out justice and reprisals to the malefactors. Even as the events unfolded, scribes took up their pens to record what they were witnessing. The most famous of these to modern scholars was Galbert, a notary of Bruges and an eyewitness. Galbert’s journalistic De multro, traditione, et occisione gloriosi Karoli comitis Flandriarum remains one of the best-known and most gripping historical narratives of the central Middle Ages. Yet Galbert was hardly alone in his enterprise. Charles’s murder was recounted years later by the abbots Herman of Tournai and Suger of Saint-Denis, a host of local chroniclers and poets, and by Walter, an archdeacon of Thérouanne who, at his bishop’s request, wrote a vita of the count. Those medieval observers have been joined by an even larger host of early modern and modern editors (including Henri Pirenne), translators (in Dutch, French, and English, the latter by James Bruce Ross), podcasters, and at least one Victorian playwright (George William Lovell, “The Provost of Bruges: A Tragedy. In Five Acts” [1836], based on the fictionalized historical account of Leitch Ritchie, “The Serf,” published in 1831) [1] in bringing the texts which relayed the count’s murder and its aftermath to scholars and students.
Among modern commentators, Jeff Rider is perhaps the foremost working today. Rider has published critical editions of both Galbert and Walter’s histories in the medieval continuation of the Corpus Christianorum series (CCCM 131 and 217), along with a monograph, edited volume, numerous articles, and translation of Galbert’s De multro. [2] To these he has now added, in the present companion volume, translations of Walter of Thérouanne’s vitae of Charles and Bishop John of Thérouanne (1099-1130), together with an array of shorter texts that touch on the murder, the comital dynasty of Flanders, and contemporary events in Flanders connected to the count and bishop. With these translations, Rider has made accessible to English-language readers nearly the entire corpus of texts stemming from Charles’s murder. Walter composed his account of Charles’s life and death at the request of his bishop and the dean of the chapter of Thérouanne. He completed most of it, it seems, either before mid-summer 1127 or during a trip to Rome later that year, for he heard there an anecdote about Charles from Pope Honorius II (1124-1130) that he then incorporated into his vita; but he does not mention the formal inquest into the murder that took place in Bruges in September 1127, nor the succession struggle that ensued in 1128 after Thierry of Alsace challenged William Clito for the county (52-53). In a similar fashion, Walter began John’s vita roughly nine months after the bishop’s death on 29 January 1130, though Rider believes he may not have completed the work before his own death two years later, in January 1132 (54-55).
Rider esteems the literary qualities of Walter’s vitae of Charles and John (55). That said, few would deny that Walter’s vita of Charles suffers a bit from comparison to Galbert’s in-the-moment, blow-by-blow chronicle. Walter holds more closely to the conventions of hagiography than Galbert; he was not, as was Galbert, a direct eyewitness to the scene of the crime (though he was present at some of the events both before and after it), and he concludes hisvita before the political denouement marked by the civil war and the fall of William Clito in 1128. He lingers over the conspirators’ fates, the better to illustrate God’s just judgment at work (cc. 38-43, 51-53), and in doing so adds details not found in Galbert. But the immediacy and level of detail that Galbert lent to his narration--including his vivid account of the siege--are largely absent.
Nor is Walter’s life of John overly prolix, or at any rate, it tells modern readers much less than we would like about the events and encounters of the influential prelate’s lifetime. Walter dwells at greatest length on the period leading up to John’s election (cc. 1-8) and on the bishop’s death (cc. 16-23, roughly one-third of the text). He reserves the middle portion (cc. 9-15) for an encomium to the bishop’s virtues and a rapid description of the bishop’s recruitment of clerical leaders and reform of the religious institutions of his diocese, though he eschews describing the actual processes involved. [3] Like many other twelfth-century episcopal vitae, John’s personal virtue made the case for his holiness. The two moments where Walter implies that divine intervention saved John’s life--a failed assassination attempt and his survival of a bridge collapse--he does not even qualify as “miraculous.” [4] What commends John of Thérouanne to Walter and his readers is the totality of a life lived piously and well, the bishop’s labor on behalf of institutional reform, and ultimately his beatific death which, thanks to Walter’s attachment to his subject and presence in the prelate’s final days, is rendered in exquisite detail.
The sources that emerged after the count’s murder are fairly consistent in their interpretation of the conspirators’ motives and condemnation of their actions. Indeed, as Rider points out, certain details of the story are repeated consistently enough across different texts, including several post-mortem poems, that it is reasonable to conclude that “a common semi-official oral account of...events formed fairly quickly and was disseminated throughout Flanders and the surrounding regions” (200). The more complex reality behind the semi-official narrative of the murderers’ motives is thus difficult to detect, though Rider skillfully introduces readers to the aristocratic opposition party, including the Erembalds, in his detailed introduction to Walter’s works (15-40, esp. 15-19). Walter’s Latin can be challenging at times. [5] In the translation itself, Rider charts a middle way between maintaining fidelity to the cadences of the Latin and making the texts comprehensible to non-Latinists (57). This he generally achieves, though it requires a few concessions, including rendering the Latin poems in prose and the transformation of expressions such as Sed haec hactenus (something like, “But these things will suffice for now”) into “And so this adventure came to an end” (171). Many readers will prefer the latter, even as it embellishes on the original. In at least one place, I felt the Latin was softened a bit too much (at 159, where, in a passage on the rampant simony afflicting church offices in eleventh-century Thérouanne, Pudet me quod sentio dicere becomes “I am reluctant to say what I think,” rather than the stronger “I am ashamed” of pudet). I caught only a few typographical errors (e.g., at 161, where “council” becomes “counsel” in three places; faulty dates at 253, note a) and the odd word choice (“hiddenly,” 227) in an otherwise well-edited text.
In sum, then, Rider achieves his stated goal in producing fluid and readable translations of Walter’s vitae, to which he has added the sizeable bonus of a number of shorter works that instructors can profitably assign. While it is doubtful that Galbert’s De multro will be displaced on reading lists by Walter’s Vita Karoli, it is now possible, thanks to Rider’s many labors, to compare the two in translation, which, accompanied by the other works presented here, would make a delightful theme around which to organize a seminar.
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Notes:
1. I thank Dr. Sara McDougall for bringing Lovell’s work to my attention.
2. Jeff Rider, God’s Scribe: The Historiographical Art of Galbert of Bruges (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2001); Jeff Rider and Alan V. Murray, eds., Galbert of Bruges and the Historiography of Medieval Flanders (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009); Galbert of Bruges, The Murder, Betrayal, and Slaughter of the Glorious Charles, Count of Flanders, trans. Jeff Rider (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
3. As Rider notes in his edition of the Vita Ioannis (CCCM 217, p. 122), chapter divisions do not appear in the manuscript used as the exemplar of the surviving copies.
4. By contrast, Walter does not shy away from referencing miracles in the Vita Karoli (cc. 31-32, 41, 47-48).
5. This reviewer immediately empathized with Rider’s struggle to render Walter’s Latin in his account of the ill-fitting sarcophagus in the Life of Lord John (c. 21, here at 177), a passage which he and Anna Trumbore Jones simultaneously published in translation elsewhere.