Gesta Stephani

[1][2][3] The Gesta Stephani was first published in Paris in 1619, from a manuscript in the episcopal library at Laon which was subsequently lost.

A fuller manuscript has recently been found, and since published, in the Municipal Library at Valenciennes, having been transferred from the nearby abbey of Vicoigne.

[10] Nonetheless, he was not an itinerant, and his writing reveals little knowledge of the north or East of England or the leading baronial families in those parts of the kingdom, while he placed too much emphasis on the exploits of relatively minor barons associated with the south west, including the de Tracy family.

[11] The writer appears to have been a scholar, and his work omits dates and extraneous detail for the sake of literary effect, while employing classical terms to offices and positions rather than their Mediaeval Latin equivalents.

[20] A manuscript of the Gesta Stephani was discovered in the libraries of the bishop of Laon in the early seventeenth century, and was first printed in 1619 at Paris by the French historian André Duchesne (1584–1640) in Historia Normannorum Scriptores Antiqui.

[21] There have been two translations of the work into English, the first being by Thomas Forester in Henry of Huntingdon in 1853 and then second by Joseph Stevenson (1806–1895) in The Church Historians of England in 1858.

Mynors (1903–1989), who found it included with a version of the Gesta Regum by William of Malmesbury, catalogued in the library as MS 792.

This new text continued the history of Stephen's reign up to 1154 and filled in the damaged passages which Duchesne was unable to transcribe.