About

Green children, revenants who terrorise the living and heretics who can conjure ghostly food – these are just three of a number of strange occurrences which appear in William of Newburgh’s Historia rerum Anglicarum. A broadly chronological account of events, William’s Historia begins with the Norman Conquest in 1066 and concludes with the appearance of a blood prodigy during the construction of Château Gaillard in 1198. Referred to by Richard Howlett as the ‘work of a man of unusual moral elevation, mental power, and eloquence’, William’s Historia was once regarded as a gold standard against which other works of Angevin history writing were judged. More recently, however, William’s work and historical methods have been criticised and reassessed, with scholars such as John Gillingham arguing that the essence of William’s Historia is Roger of Howden’s Chronica re-written.

This thesis will be one of the first comprehensive examinations of William’s Historia since Rudolph Jahnke’s Guilelmus Neubrigensis: Ein Pragmatischer Geschichtsschreiber des Zwölften Jahrhunderts published in 1912. Rather than focusing exclusively on William’s prologue or a small cross-section of his best known strange episodes, this investigation will examine the placement, definition and function of the miraculous, the wondrous and the strange throughout the Historia as a whole. Indeed, miracles and wonders form part of a new historical and literary tradition which developed in the period c.1150 to 1250, and are integral to this emerging literary landscape.

This investigation will consider the place and purposes of miraculous and strange events in William’s narrative and will address issues of categorisation, perception and representation in order to determine what they tell us about our author’s world views. It will consider how William deploys the astonishing as a way to rationalise his present experience and to understand the interface between the human and divine. By contextualising William’s work within Classical and contemporary twelfth century literary conventions, this work seeks to provide an insight into how his rendering of the wonderful and astonishing fits into the Angevin narratological and historiographical tradition.