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Pomona
History Professor Completes First English Translation of
Key Historical Account of the Norman Conquest of Muslim
Sicily.
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Kenneth Wolf, professor of history at Pomona College, has
published the first English translation of the principal
account of the Norman conquest of Muslim Sicily. The account
was written by Geoffrey Malaterra, a monk who was installed
in Sicily towards the end of the conquest, and until now it
has only been available in Latin.
Sicily had been controlled by Muslims since the 9th Century,
and in about 1060 the Normans began their effort to take it
back, though it took about 30 years before the island was
again in Christian hands. The conquest came roughly between
Christian efforts against Muslims in Spain, known as the
Reconquista, and the first Crusade.
“No one has ever really had access to a translation of this
account between the two,” Wolf said. “It, in many ways, is a
natural hole that needs to be filled.”
The Deeds of Count Roger and of His Brother Duke Robert
Guiscard is valuable from a historical standpoint – it’s
a detailed account of the conquest. But what’s especially
interesting to Wolf is that while Malaterra seems in many
way to be glorifying the deeds of Count Roger he also seems
to be undercutting the motivations of the conquest. Wolf
wrote an essay to accompany his translation that explores
these dual aspects of the text.
It’s an “equivocal text,” Wolf said. “One in praise of Roger
and one saying that Roger, like any other ruler is motivated
by base human desires to conquer.”
In the past few decades there’s been much more attention to
trying to “read between the lines” in historical writing,
Wolf said. “This book is a good example of what I would do
in a classroom – looking at the text and trying to unpack
the information that the author is not necessarily trying to
get across.”
The notion that military conquest was evidence of God’s
blessing was a popular one for a time, but Augustine, in the
5th century, observed that the newly Christianized Roman
empire was crumbling just as the pagan regimes had.
Wolf's translation of The Deeds of Count Roger and of His
Brother Duke Robert Guiscard is published by
University of Michigan Press. |
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