Baldric of Bourgueil's Historia Ierosolimitana is a fascinating examination of the history and meaning of the First Crusade, written around 1105 with engaging style and verve, by the abbot of Bourgueil, who later became the archbishop of Dol. The Historia was last edited and published in the middle of the nineteenth century as part of the Recueil des historiens des croisades. The editor of that edition made use of just seven manuscripts to produce it, which seems to suggest that the Historia was not a ‘popular’ version of the history of the First Crusade in the Middle Ages, especially when compared with, for example, the prodigious number of copies of Robert the Monk's Historia Ierosolimitana. The work undertaken to produce this new edition has revealed a very different picture, with the number of known and extant copies or fragments of Baldric's Historia now standing at twenty-four, of which twenty have been used to create the edition. It has been thought for a number of years that Baldric's Historia was a more popular text than the Recueil editor seemed to suggest; this edition confirms it.

The Historia is a Latin prose history of the events of the First Crusade, beginning with Pope Urban II's sermon at the Council of Clermont in November 1095, and ending in the aftermath of the capture of Jerusalem and the defeat of a Muslim army at Ascalon in August 1099. It begins with a prologue, followed by four books, containing, in total, around 36,000 words, a structure agreed by all extant copies. Baldric tells us in the prologue that he was ‘almost sixty-years-old’, paene sexagenariam, at the time he took up his pen to write the Historia.