Two texts both titled Siege of Jerusalem shadow each other across six centuries

Evidence

The Siege of Jerusalem is based on several sources, the most important of which is Josephus’s Bellum Judaicum. Yet it also has a curious analogue, a kind of shadow text that corresponds to it in many ways, and that also circulated under the title “The Siege of Jerusalem.” The Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum of William of Tyre, completed in 1183, includes a history of the Holy Land from antiquity, a comprehensive account of the First Crusade, and a chronicle of the early years of the First Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Written originally in Latin, it was translated into Old French by 1225, and circulated widely in the vernacular (more so than in the Latin original). It was translated back into Latin in the thirteenth century, as well as into other vernacular languages. In what follows, as I point out some correspondences between the Siege of Jerusalem and its “shadow text” of the same name, I shall quote from the late fifteenth-century English translation printed by William Caxton, and shall refer to it as the “Caxton Siege of Jerusalem” in order to distinguish it from the alliterative poem. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 238

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the shadow-text method: a vernacular prose chronicle that mirrors an alliterative poem and can be cross-read against it.