VIBERT OF NOGENT°

VIBERT OF NOGENT° (Guibert of Nogent (1053–1124), French Benedictine author and abbot of Nogent-sous Coucy, France. Vibert wrote a well-known history of the First Crusade – the Gesta Dei per Francos – and was a theoretician of preaching and the first critic of the traditional hagiography. His treatise De incarnatione contra Judaeos was addressed to both the count of Soissons, whom Vibert reproached for his close relations with the Jews, and to the Jews themselves. In referring to the Jews, his tone is extremely vehement. In his autobiographical work, De vita sua, Vibert reports the anti-Jewish persecution of rouen at the time of the preaching of the First Crusade and the forced conversion of a Jewish child who, having become a monk himself, wrote an anti-Jewish treatise. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: PL, 156 (1880), 489–528, 837ff. (texts); J. de Ghellinck, L'Essor de la littérature latine (1946), index; P. Browe, Die Judenmission im Mittelalter (1942), index. (Bernhard Blumenkranz)