>Discovering William of Malmesbury
>William of Malmesbury: Medical Historian of the Crusades
Discovering William of Malmesbury
Preface and Acknowledgements
Discovering William of Malmesbury: The Man and his Works
Gesta Pontificum Anglorum: History or Hagiography?
William of Malmesbury and Civic Virtue
The Ironies of History: William of Malmesbury's Views of William II and Henry I
William of Malmesbury and the Jews
Advising the King: Kingship, Bishops and Saints in the Works of William of Malmesbury
Roman Identity in William of Malmesbury's Historical Writings
William of Malmesbury and the Chronological Controversy
William of Malmesbury and Durham: The Circulation of Historical Knowledge in Early Twelfth-Century England
William of Malmesbury as Librarian: The Evidence of his Autographs
William of Malmesbury: Medical Historian of the Crusades
German Emperors as Exemplary Rulers in William of Malmesbury and Otto of Freising
Lector amice: Reading as Friendship in William of Malmesbury
William of Malmesbury's Historical Vision
Verax historicus Beda: William of Malmesbury, Bede and historia
William of Malmesbury and the Britons
Words, Words, Words . . .
Epilogue: The Rediscovery of William of Malmesbury
11 - William of Malmesbury: Medical Historian of the Crusades
Joanna Phillips
Rodney M. Thomson ,
Emily Dolmans and
Emily A. Winkler
Book 5 chapter 410 of William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum Anglorum, which describes the mostly forgotten crusade of Sigurd, co-king of Norway, in 1106/8–10, contains a curious vignette about the emperor's sojourn in Constantinople:
In that same city his men began to die like flies, and he himself [Sigurd] thought out a remedy, making the survivors drink wine more sparingly, and not unless mixed with water. Such was his penetrating intelligence: he put a pig's liver into the unmixed wine, and finding it soon dissolve away in the harsh liquor, he first foretold that the same thing would happen in the human body and then obtained visual confirmation by post-mortem examination of one who had died.
Although at first one might pass over this passage as an oddity, the fact that it is only found in William's text encourages closer examination. Sigurd's crusade is mentioned – very briefly – by only two other Latin chroniclers, Albert of Aachen and Fulcher of Chartres, but this episode is absent from their histories. Moreover, it is not described in the vernacular sagas that record Sigurd's crusade in detail; these concentrate instead on Sigurd's good relations with the Byzantine Emperor, Alexius Comnenus. Sigurd's crusade has been mostly forgotten since its military impact was fairly limited, and indeed William does not dwell on Sigurd's sieges of Tyre and Sidon. How and why, then, did this episode make its way into William's text, and how should we interpret it? If we consider William as an historian of crusading, the twelfth-century medical context in which he wrote, and his other discussions of medical incidents occurring during the crusades, we will see that he was a chronicler with a very keen interest in medical experiences, whose discussion of them could contain subtleties relating to the importance of leadership, place and the crusading endeavour.
William has been somewhat overlooked as an historian of the crusades because of the relatively late date of the composition of the Gesta Regum in relation to other narratives of the First Crusade, and William's reliance on other written sources. However, recent trends in the study of medieval chroniclers, including those narrating the crusades, suggest that these reasons for excluding William from crusading scholarship are no longer valid, if indeed they ever were.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781787440869.012[Opens in a new window]
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
By Joanna Phillips
Edited by Rodney M. Thomson, Emily Dolmans, Emily A. Winkler
Book: Discovering William of Malmesbury
Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781787440869.012