Thomas Foerster, editor. Godfrey of Viterbo and His Readers

A major deterrent to studying the twelfth-century historian Godfrey of Viterbo is the lack of a critical edition of his oeuvre. He rewrote his historical narrative in a series of increasingly elaborate works, starting in 1183 with the Speculum regum and culminating around 1190 with the Pantheon, which exists in turn in multiple recensions. To complicate matters further, Gregory’s focus shifted from a Staufer panegyric dedicated to King Henry VI to a universal history dedicated to Pope Urban III, who had rejected Frederick Barbarossa’s request to crown his son as co-emperor. Georg Waitz’s 1872 edition of Godfrey’s works (MGH Scriptores 22), particularly of the Pantheon, included only those portions of the text Waitz considered historically relevant, because he shared the general nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century positivist appraisal of Godfrey as a substanceless chronicler and raconteur of legends. Paul Scheffer-Boichorst in his review of the Waitz edition for the Historische Zeitschrift described Godfrey’s writings, famously, as “a desert” with barely an inviting oasis by an author devoid of political sense “who had reworked all of world history on his poetical chopping board” (Historische Zeitschrift 29 [1873]: 441). Even the most basic facts of Godfrey’s life remain in dispute—for example, whether he was of Italian or mixed German and Italian parentage.

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