The Letters of Stephen of Blois Reconsidered

I owe a profound debt of thanks to Anaïs Waag, who provided useful comments and suggestions with regard to medieval epistolography and narrative, and who generously read a draft of this article. The two anonymous readers for Crusades have pushed me to think further in some areas and the article is much the better for it. Furthermore, I would like to express gratitude to Nicholas Paul, Marcus Bull, Marianne Ailes, Thomas W. Smith, and Thomas Lecaque for their comments in conversation, which all helped to shape my thinking on this topic. Zoë Thomas read the whole article, twice, and submitted herself to frequent conversation about Stephen’s letters during what was meant to be an enjoyable summer in Paris, for which I am very grateful.

Abstract

The two letters of Stephen-Henry, count of Chartres and Blois, to his wife Adela, sent back to the West from the crusader camp, have proved enduringly popular as sources for the sieges of Nicaea and Antioch, for medieval letter-writing, and for Stephen’s life and pilgrimage. Yet since Hagenmeyer’s extensive 1901 study, there has been little academic consideration of their textual tradition or their relationship to the wider historiography of the First Crusade. Building upon an updated understanding of high medieval epistolography, this article constitutes a reassessment of these letters’ relationship with the narrative accounts of the First Crusade, demonstrating that they possess very close stylistic, textual, and structural links with the early crusade histories. Investigation of the manuscript tradition, the evidence for lost letters, and what seem like prophetic hints within the two texts, suggest that their compositional circumstances were considerably more complex than had previously been admitted, raising questions about their historiographical status. Various possibilities to explain these inconsistencies and similarities with other accounts are outlined. It was perhaps the case that the letters were drawing on an early Ur-text, written while the crusade was underway. Alternatively, the letter form of these accounts could have acted as a fictive framing device for the transmission of crusading narrative – although this could have been carried out very early, with the help of eyewitness material. Regardless, manifestly close textual resemblances prohibit these letters from being considered as unproblematically valid reportage, historiographically or analytically separate from the dynamic traditions of twelfth-century crusade text formation.

Notes

I owe a profound debt of thanks to Anaïs Waag, who provided useful comments and suggestions with regard to medieval epistolography and narrative, and who generously read a draft of this article. The two anonymous readers for Crusades have pushed me to think further in some areas and the article is much the better for it. Furthermore, I would like to express gratitude to Nicholas Paul, Marcus Bull, Marianne Ailes, Thomas W. Smith, and Thomas Lecaque for their comments in conversation, which all helped to shape my thinking on this topic. Zoë Thomas read the whole article, twice, and submitted herself to frequent conversation about Stephen’s letters during what was meant to be an enjoyable summer in Paris, for which I am very grateful.