The History of the Holy War

Volume i: Text. Edited by Marianne Ailes and Malcolm Barber. xv+211 pp. Volume ii: Translation. Translated by Marianne Ailes. Notes by Malcolm Barber. xix+214 pp., 3 maps. Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2003. Hb £75.00; $125.00. This scholarly edition benefits from a fertile collaboration between a crusade historian and a specialist in medieval philology and literature. Based on editorial principles which are conservative but not unduly so, it supplants the only previous published edition of the complete text by Gaston Paris in 1897 and an unpublished American Ph.D. thesis of 1965, drawing on Martin Colker's 1992 edition of the single leaf fragment t for lines 11725–72. Its major value lies in its narrative of Richard I's crusade. The literary and historical context are amply explained, with a detailed Index and useful presentation of other relevant sources. The authors overturn Paris' view of Ambroise as a simple jongleur and highlight the sophistication of his rhetoric in comparison with that of other early vernacular chronicles, seeing him as a cleric at least in minor orders, who may have been in the service of King John and have sung at his second coronation. From a careful analysis of the language they consider him to have probably come from the Evrecin region of Normandy, his language being Norman with some overlay from an Anglo-Norman scribe, and they date the text to the end of the twelfth century, after the release of Richard from captivity in 1194 and before his death in 1199. It would hence have been written within a few years of the events it describes. As other vernacular epic chronicles, Ambroise's poem combines epic style with serious history, here authenticated by the teller's status as eyewitness and participant. His audience would have consisted of knights and their followers, perhaps including men who had fought in the Holy Land. The translation, which has benefited from dictionaries not available to previous translators, aims primarily at accuracy, and this is achieved with the occasional slip (on p. 143, line 12, ‘forty’ should read ‘fifty’; in 8299, le barat appears not to have been translated). It is also designed to retain a number of rhetorical devices, including puns and word-play, that ‘show the contrived nature of the text’. As the authors freely concede, this produces some laboured results, sometimes more so than the original (‘This then is the truth: the Lombards went out, saying to the kings that it was to appease the trouble, but they lied. It was for nothing but to cause trouble. Jordan del Pin and Margaritone — may ill-fortune attend them — these two stirred up bad trouble’, 666–74), but at least this is a reminder of the original's stylistic pretensions. This will undoubtedly be the standard edition for many years to come, an essential source for any historian of the Third Crusade

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