oa Copyists and redactors

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This is a textual and literary discussion on the four surviving versions of a history of the First Crusade, composed within a few years of the Christian capture of Jerusalem in 1099. The best-known of those four texts is Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum, today one of the most widely read medieval histories. In contrast, one of the versions, Peregrinatio Antiochie per Vrbanum papam facta, has never been published in print. This paper attends to the question of priority in transmission, a challenging conundrum as none of our four texts is identifiable as patently authorial. Rather than seeking to propose precisely how the four texts are related to one another, I attempt to identify editorial strategies that may account for divergence between them. What follows is, then, a methodological essay on textual criticism and a case study of how medieval readerships engaged with historical writings.