Work
The Res gestae saxonicae are significant historical accounts of the times of Otto the Great and Henry the Fowler, modelled on the works of the Roman historian Sallust and the deuterocanonical Books of the Maccabees. Widukind wrote as a Saxon, proud of his people and history, beginning his narration not with the Roman Empire but with a brief synopsis derived from the orally-transmitted history of the Saxons and their struggles with the Franks, with a terseness that makes his work difficult to interpret.
Widukind of Corvey starts with the wars between Theuderich I, King of Austrasia, and the Thuringii, in which the Saxons played a large part. An allusion to the conversion of the Saxons to Christianity under Charlemagne brings him to the early Saxon dukes and details of the reign of Henry the Fowler. He omitted Italian events in tracing the career of Henry, nor does he ever mention a pope, but one of the three surviving mss. of his Gesta was transcribed in Benevento, the Lombard duchy south of Rome. . The second book opens with the election of Otto the Great as German king, treats of the risings against his authority, again omitting events in Italy, and concludes with the death of his first wife Edith of England in 946.
A manuscript of Res gestae saxonicae sive annalium libri tres was first published in Basle in 1532 and is today in the British Library. There are two other surviving manuscripts. The best edition was published in 1935 by Paul Hirsch and Hans-Eberhard Lohmann in the series Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum editi. A German translation appears in the Quellen zur Geschichte der sächsischen Kaiserzeit published by Albert Bauer and Reinhold Rau in 1971. An English translation is found in an unprinted doctoral dissertation: Raymond F. Wood, The three books of the deeds of the Saxons, by Widukind of Corvey, translated with introduction, notes, and bibliography (University of California, Los Angeles, 1949).
Widukind is also credited with a vita of St Paul and St Thecla doubtless based on the 2nd century Acts of Paul and Thecla, but no traces of it now remain.
Read more about this topic: Widukind Of Corvey
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