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Holy War, Roman Popes, And Christian Soldiers: Some Early Modern Views OnMedieval Christendom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2016

Christopher Tyerman
Christopher Tyerman*
Affiliation:
Hertford College, Oxford Harrow School
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Extract

Some time in 1608, there arrived at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge a distinguished foreign visitor who, through the good offices of the Chancellor of the University, Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, and of Merlin Higden, a Fellow of Corpus, had been given permission to examine a manuscript in the college library. The visiting scholar had secured access to the library through a network of contacts that included his friend, a naturalized Frenchman and diplomat working for Cecil, Sir Stephen Lesieur, and a Chiswick clergyman, William Walter. What makes this apparently unremarkable (and hitherto unremarked) incident of more than trivial interest is that the industrious researcher was Jacques Bongars, veteran roving French ambassador in Germany and staunch Calvinist, and that his text was William of Tyre’s Historia Ierosolymitana.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History Subsidia , Volume 11: The Medieval Church: Universities, Heresy, and the Religious Life , 1999 , pp. 293 - 307
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1999 

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References

1 MS letter of William Walter, minister of Chiswick, pasted into the Bodleian Library, Oxford copy of the Gesta Dei Per Francos E.2.8. Art Seld. after foL 6; cf. Gesta Dei Per Francos (Hanau, rtìir), Contents item n where Bongars thanks Higden and Lesieur, although not Walter. For Lesieur’s contacts with Cecil, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Third Report (London, 1872), pp. 172, 175 (letters of 1607 and 1609); there are numerous other examples of the Lesieur correspondence in the Cecil papers.

2 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 95; James, M. R., Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (Cambridge, 1911-12), pp. xxxiv, 182–3.Google Scholar

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21 Chronicon Hierosolymitanum, 2, fol. 2v.

22 Chronicon Hierosolymitanum, 2, fols. Ir-7v.

23 Ibid., 2, fol. 7r.

24 Ibid., 1, Introduction; bis main publishing activities of texts date from the last fifteen years of his life, while he had made his reputation as a scholar of, in particular, Ancient Greece at Wittenberg and Leipzig in the 1570s.

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31 Vatican Codex Reginae Cristinae 548.

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34 ‘Periculosissimis ita gloriosissima expeditionibus’, from the dedicatory Preface to Part i.

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43 On a personal, tiny, and random sample there exist or existed until recently two copies in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and copies in the college libraries of New College, Queen’s and All Souls’; there was also a copy at Castle Howard.

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