The ‘Imperial Diversions’ of Gervase of Tilbury

Summary

Gervase of Tilbury (c.1155–c.1234), was a widely travelled cleric and lawyer whose career in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries took him to the most glittering courts in Europe. In the 1180s, Gervase was a confidant of Prince Henry, the eldest son of Henry II of England, before moving to southern Italy and the court of William II of Sicily. During the last decade of the twelfth century, he took service with the Emperor Otto IV of Brunswick and was rewarded by being made an honorary marshal of Arles, one of the Emperor's domains on the river Rhône. There he wrote the Otia Imperialia, the third part of which consists of a collection of legends, marvels and anecdotes which no doubt provided fuel for speculative discussion about theology and philosophy at the imperial court. Like Giraldus Cambrensis, Gervase places his accounts of supernatural events in the context of the fantastic and the exotic. He attempts to divert his imperial patron with chapters devoted to the phoenix arising from the flames, and to women with boars’ tusks and men with eight feet and eyes. In the extracts that follow, all of which relate to events which Gervase heard about in the region of Arles, the accounts of ghosts and the activities of the dead, and of apparitions and fairy creatures from ‘parallel’ worlds, correspond to the definition of Mirabilia which Gervase gives in the preface to his work (see p. 46). The following stories relating to water-sprites, and to the marvellous self-propulsion of the funerary barges approaching the cemetery of Aliscamps, are obviously based on local folklore relating to the river Rhône, while Gervase's account of the mischievous activity of lamias or the spectres of the night is perhaps linked with Walter Map's more bloodthirsty tale about the demon at the cradle. The last two stories, about the spirits of the recently deceased, most closely correspond to the modern notion of a ‘ghost story’. The account of the Ghost of Beaucaire, in particular, which attached itself invisibly to a young girl and provided a succession of visiting church dignitaries with insights into the nature of the afterlife, is one of the most celebrated of all medieval reports of returning spirits.