Robert of Gloucester (historian)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Robert of Gloucester wrote a chronicle of British, English, and Norman history sometime in the mid- or late-thirteenth century. The Chronicle survives in some 16 manuscripts, ranging in date from the early fourteenth to mid-fifteenth centuries, and was of considerable interest to contemporaries and antiquarian scholars. It was not until after the editing of the text by William Aldis Wright that its neglect - "worthless as history" and "verse without one spark of poetry" according to its editor - became widespread.
Historically, the text is of interest primarily for materials relating to the Second Barons' War, to which the author (or an author of a portion of the text) seems to have been a witness. The first part of the Chronicle translates materials from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae, narrating fabulous British history. The majority of English/Anglo-Saxon history is compiled from the works of Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury, and the post-Conquest portions are translated from numerous sources densely interwoven with original text.
[edit] Bibliography
- Anonymous. "Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle." Gentleman's Magazine (Nov. 1834): 470-77.
- Edward Donald Kennedy, ‘Gloucester, Robert of (fl. c.1260–c.1300)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 4 Aug 2008
- Wright, William Aldis ed., The Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester. 2 vols. Rolls Series 86 (London, 1887).
[edit] External links
- Robert of Gloucester at The Columbia Encyclopedia.
- Works by or about Robert of Gloucester (historian) in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
