The Edition

I promised some time ago to prepare a critical edition of three ordines that came down to us from the kingdom of Roger II in Sicily. But then I postponed this task, for I was convinced that the editio minor published with my brief comments^[16] would suffice as a source for the history of the new Sicilian kingdom. In those times there were hardly any historians around who would have cared much for coronation ordines. Those who wrote about medieval Festkrönungen overlooked the one from the regnum Siciliae or did not regard it important enought to comment upon. The least "peculiar" of the three ordines that I have presented over ten years ago deserves, however, a proper edition, which I now offer in the appendix that follows.

A comparison of our text with the PRG can be made by any reader; in the notes there^[17] and in the ones added to our text (below) one will also find the immediate models for the text.

I am following the ms. C , with the exception of chapters 31 and 33–35, for which I took the text for V and M . In the few cases in which C differs from the other three or in which two codices do not concord with C and with another codex among the three, I have chosen those variants that seem to me the most "Sicilian."^[18] Orthographic variants and scribal errors have not been considered.