Robert Stein argues that it had a political and ideological purpose: to show the superiority of government by one possessing both spiritual and temporal authority, i.e., a prince bishop.
Laurent Jégou argues that it was written to enhance Gerard's spiritual authority to compensate for his temporal weakness.
[9] Georges Duby likewise sees it as designed to enhance the bishop's prestige after the death of his protector, Emperor Henry II, in 1024.
[10] Theo Riches argues that the intended audience of the Deeds was essentially local, and that its text could have been used in the future as an archive to buttress Cambrai's property claims.
[9] According to its English translators, the Deeds is also a royalist text, emphasising the right of the king to invest bishops and abbots and the royal authority over the use of military force.
[11] The autograph manuscript of the Deeds, known as the Codex Sancti Gisleni, survives in The Hague (MS Den Haag KB 75 F15).
A separate tradition derives from the now lost 12th-century Codex Sanctae Mariae Atrebatensis, which contained a complete copy of the autograph.
A further 16th-century copy in Brussels (KBR 7675–82) represents a third manuscript tradition, but is missing chapters 52 and 60 of the third book, Gerard's sermon on Peace of God movement and his letter to the Emperor Henry III, respectively.
The second and most recent, by Ludwig Konrad Bethmann [de] for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in 1846, is the basis for the modern English translation published in 2018.
His emendations take the form of erasure and overwriting, marginal notes and additions on separate pieces of parchment sewn into the manuscript.
[17] He was probably the author of a biography of Gerard's successor, Lietbert (died 1076), which bears many stylistic similarities with the last ten chapters of the third book of the Deeds.
there is nothing here other than what we have found in annals, or the histories of the fathers, or in the deeds of kings, or in the documents that were in the archive of this church, or what we have learned from certain witnesses through what they saw or heard.
That this is a conscious decision is clear from the author's knowledge of Cicero's De inventione and probable familiarity with a competing contemporary Ciceronian tradition represented by Richer of Reims, which held that the historian must fill in gaps in his story to meet rhetorical standards.