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This book provides the first English translation of the Chronicle of the city of Genoa by the thirteenth-century Dominican Jacopo da Varagine (also known as Jacobus de Voragine). While Jacopo is better known for his monumental compilation of saints’ lives, the Golden legend, his lesser known Chronicle of Genoa exemplifies the important medieval genre of the civic chronicle. The work mixes scholarly research about the city’s origins with narrative accounts based on Genoese archival sources, more didactic and moral reflections on the proper conduct of public and private life, and personal accounts of Jacopo’s own experience as archbishop of Genoa from 1292 until his death in 1298. Divided into twelve parts, the work covers the history of Genoa from its ancient origins up to Jacopo’s own day. Jacopo’s first-hand accounts of events in which he himself participated—such as the great civic reconciliation of 1295, over which he himself presided—provide a valuable contrast to the more scholarly and didactic sections of the work. Together they form an integrated, coherent approach to urban history, which illustrates some of the most important styles of historiography in the Middle Ages.
Paradoxically, Jacopo da Varagine may be one of the least-known authors of the Middle Ages. As Jacobus de Voragine —the commonest Latin form of his name 1 —the collection of saints’ lives he compiled in the 1260s, which came to be known as the Golden legend ( GL ), became one of the great medieval ‘bestsellers’. The work was translated into most of the European vernaculars, survives in
Jacopo da Varagine’s prologue to his Chronicle of the city of Genoa explains his reasons for undertaking the work and provides a summary of the work’s contents.
. 181 The aforesaid ambassadors humbly requested that the supreme pontiff condescend to give them an archbishop according to custom. The supreme pontiff wished to agree to their petition, so he provided fully and honourably for this patriarch, and gave the city of Genoa an archbishop. Chapter eight: Regarding Brother Jacopo, the eighth archbishop. Brother Jacopo da Varagine of the Order of Preachers, eighth archbishop
GL , pp. 556–7, regarding the city of Berith, Syria, in 750; Aron-Beller ( 2017 ), esp. pp. 218–20. 67 Probably a miscopied reference to the 773 Synod of Geneva: Mansi/Labbe ( 1901 ), 12.857. The transposition of Geneva to Genoa both here and in the DGA suggests either that Jacopo da Varagine adopted this detail