The Written World

This delightful book offers a fresh perspective on Orderic Vitalis’ great work, the Ecclesiastical History. Orderic began by writing a history of his own monastic community at Notre Dame de Saint-Évroult, or Ouche, as he himself preferred to call it. He then expanded his agenda to cover the new monastic orders, the history of Normandy, the conquest of England, the first crusade, and in later years wrote an unparalleled account of Norman history between the Conqueror’s death and 1141 when he finally laid down his pen. Amanda Jane Hingst argues that the organising principle of his work was historicised geography, and that by reading his work closely we see how past and place intermingle in the ‘written world’ of her title. A series of interlinked essays follows. She begins with Orderic’s own community in southern Normandy, and moves on, in the second chapter, to his view of the Norman people. She argues that his omission of a geographical introduction was deliberate: he realised the irreconcilable tensions between a static portrayal of the world such as physical geography provides, and the restless movements of the Normans. Nevertheless, he also believed that wherever the Normans went they remained part of a single people or gens, a view which, the author suggests, may have had more credence among his contemporaries than historians have commonly supposed, or than the limited circulation of manuscripts of his work in the middle ages indicates

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