Godfrey of Viterbo and his Readers

This is an unusually coherent collection of essays. It aims both to stimulate further research on the works of Godfrey of Viterbo and to contribute to wider attempts to understand how contemporary and later readers made use of medieval texts. The attention paid to surviving manuscripts, including their decoration and marginal annotations, is a very welcome feature of a number of the essays and a very effective way of demonstrating that medieval readers’ enthusiasm for Godfrey’s works stands in stark contrast to the dismal regard in which this author was held by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians and philologists. In his introduction, the editor, Thomas Foerster, compares the fortunes of the historical works of Otto of Freising and Godfrey, pointing out that, while Otto remains a darling of modern scholarship, Godfrey still tends to be seen as unreliable and a mere propagandist for the Hohenstaufen emperors. However, in terms of medieval readership, while around fifty manuscripts containing works by both authors survive, Otto’s works circulated exclusively in Germany and mostly in monasteries, whereas Godfrey’s works are found all across Europe. It is this European dimension that gives this collection its focus

Art · Audience measurement · Enthusiasm · Feminism · Literature · Philology · Political science · Scholarship · Classics · Historical and Archaeological Studies · Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy