Preface
The Account-Inventory that sits at the heart of this study is a source that was put together over time and represents the work of many different individuals who listened, accounted, compiled, copied, and assembled information. In a similar fashion, this book is, and has been from the start, a work of collaborative scholarship. Collaboration guides its methodology and structures its contents. Our goal is to make accessible and legible an outstandingly complex and detailed Account and Inventory that has long been overlooked. In part this is because some scholars deem such texts to be rather dull. They offer at first glance only lists of things, one item following another, with monetary values assigned. There is no narrative momentum; no story. But as this book shows, this is not at all what we have found. Rather, it is very clear that there are many narratives and histories contained within and behind Eudes of Nevers’s Account-Inventory. Moreover, the extraordinary convergences that link the archival rolls to the poems of Rutebeuf, Eudes’s contemporary, and in turn to the wills and other extant sources produced in Outremer, allow us, and any reader, to breathe new life into this list of things. It is through working with others—our own contemporary colleagues and collaborators—and across the genres of writing, and in thinking with those who knew Eudes of Nevers and who wrote about him, that a history of his things and of the material Outremer takes shape. One of our goals is to model what such a material history and methodology looks like in practice.
This book was begun in the midst of the COVID pandemic lockdown, in the spring of 2020, when universities, schools, libraries, and offices were closed, and when no one could go to an archive and look at original documents. It was under those conditions—with an eye to creating a text for teaching medieval objects and materiality—and as an outgrowth of our work on the DALME Project, that this book first took shape. With access to the high-quality images of the Account-Inventory rolls we (Lester and Morreale) undertook a new edition of the text and the first English translation. As we worked, we soon realized that to weave a history from the detailed texts we were deciphering we would do well to ask colleagues and experts in a series of subfields and specializations to read and comment on the texts. Once we had a working draft of our source, in the spring of 2021, we convened an online symposium, and the speakers at that virtual gathering contributed the rich and insightful short essays that make up the final section of this book, essays that present, each with their own voice and emphasis, a facet of Eudes’s world.
The experience of living and dying in Outremer sits at the heart of the Account-Inventory. But Eudes died, as far as we know, without a formal testament. Nevertheless, the final moments of Eudes’s life, as he may have moved to dictate his intentions for the dispersal of his things, are paralleled in two still-extant wills also drawn up in Acre in the 1260s and 1270s: those of Hugh de Neville (dated to 1267) and Prince Edward, future king of England (1272). These are included in this book—in new editions and translations—to give further context to the composition of the Account-Inventory and to set it in conversation with the intentions of contemporaries facing the prospect of dying in Outremer. Imagining the streets and spaces through which Eudes once moved and his material world in Acre—the ways he dressed, what he ate, how he traveled, and how he prayed and formed close bonds with those around him—comes into sharper focus still through the poetic corpus of Rutebeuf. Indeed, the third collaborative venture that sits at the center of this book is the translation into English, for the first time, of seven crusade poems or “Complaintes” by Eudes’s contemporary, the mid-thirteenth-century vernacular poet simply known as Rutebeuf (fl. ca. 1250–85). He wrote a series of crusade poems in Old French that illuminate the political, cultural, and religious world around Eudes. Rutebeuf’s poems reveal a mental outlook of great devotion and practicality, both of which had come to characterize the crusade movement in the second half of the thirteenth century. The poems we have gathered and translated here resonate with and enrich our understanding of Eudes and of the world of Outremer. Rutebeuf evokes the complexity of this moment through metaphors, allusions, elaborate and evocative wordplay, and by intertwining biting satire and spiritual critique. Together, the poems exemplify the rhetorical and vernacular literate culture that was a key part of Eudes’s cultural orientation and experience in Outremer.
Finally, the volume closes with seven short essays authored by different scholars each focused on a particular set of objects, places, and experiences that emerge from Eudes’s Account-Inventory. These short essays—intellectual deep-dives as we think of them—enrich our interpretations and model the exchanges that propel research and scholarship. We hope that students and readers will turn to the essays to see how the practice of medieval history unfolds as an ongoing interdisciplinary intellectual conversation.
We hope that this book will offer a model for a new sort of book, one that is professedly collaborative and benefits from being digitally born (during the pandemic, from digital scholarship) and understood from the beginning to be used in part as a digital tool accessible through online library catalogues, especially for teaching. In this way, we envision that this book could be taken in as a whole, which asks the reader to take part in the interplay between primary text and historical reconstruction and interpretation, or it could be assigned and read in its separate parts. For example, the Account-Inventory or the poems of Rutebeuf could be extracted and read on their own, by or with students in the English translation, or coupled with a few essays. Likewise, the longer commentary in part II could stand on its own in a teaching or research context. The volume is intended to invite further collaboration with and for the reader, and to build on the conversation begun here.