Orderic Vitalis: Life, Works and Interpretations ed. by Charles C. Rozier etal. (review)

The editors of Orderic Vitalis: Life, Works and Interpretations divide the book into three sections based on general approaches to Orderic and his writings. The first five investigate elements of Orderic's life. Elisabeth van Houts offers details found in Historia Ecclesiastica about Orderic's childhood and father, Odelarius of Orleans. She concludes that medieval people were aware of and concerned about participating in multiple communities. Orderic felt abandoned by his father, and raised questions about the duties of Odelarius as both a cleric and father. A married cleric was an untenable dual role in the late eleventh century and, according to Orderic, part of his father's penance to correct this sin was to give his son to the Church, which placed Orderic at the monastery of Saint-Èvroul. Orderic, though a child of English and French heritage, was raised in England, and struggled to find his place in a new community. As Daniel Roach shows in the next article, Orderic attempted to define community boundaries as a method of introspection about his own place in the world. He links the monastic community of Saint-Èvroul to a network of Benedictine houses using detailed descriptions of material culture in Historia Ecclesiastica. The circulation of these artifacts, whether physical or textual, was a way for Orderic to display and assert the boundaries of an extended monastic community.

This type of analysis is often overlooked in traditional scholarship, which usually emphasizes the importance of the oral nature of the information Orderic offered his audiences. As other contributors later suggest, Orderic's repeated emphasis on ritualized objects is evidence of the liturgical function he gave historical texts and, subsequently, the importance of recording these acts and objects for posterity. This perspective supports arguments by Michael Clanchy and others that medieval communities regularly used objects, such as Stephen of Bulmer's knife at Durham Cathedral and the St. Alban's whip handle, as memorial artifacts and extra-textual narrative objects. As Charles Rozier and Jenny Weston argue, Orderic's various roles at Saint-Èvroul made him a central figure in preserving and shaping the institutional memory of his house and its wider monastic network. Mark Faulkner contends that Orderic's consistent use of English place names and personal names shows his desire to stay connected with the English community personally and, professionally, to connect his Norman network of Benedictine houses with their English counterparts. Using artifacts to communicate culture and the attempt to maintain a sense of Englishness through language places Orderic in the middle of modern scholarship on medieval England as a multi-lingual and multi-cultural area (see e.g. The French of England project at Fordham University, and the work of Jocelyn Wogan-Browne).

Orderic's use of sources is the focus of the second section of articles. Thomas Roche investigates Orderic's use of charters, carefully woven into the narrative of Historia Ecclesiastica. His integration of charters gave them a textual "afterlife" that preserved the community's shared, codified memory in an accessible form with relevant context. William Aird and Véronique Gazeau survey the secular and sacred figures Orderic described in a similar way. They were the custodians of community values. His overarching theme that personal morality leads to effective administration belied a resignation that his role as record keeper seemed only to recount the inevitable sinful nature of the world around him. The epitaphs surveyed by Vincent Debiais and Estelle Ingrand Varenne reinforce the figures audiences should be paying attention to and the lessons they ought to have learned from them, whether as a cautionary tale or great deed. This leads Emily Albu to conclude Orderic's dark, quasi-apocalyptic tone was not showing monastic devotion, as the standard interpretation set by Marjorie Chibnall does, but was a personal reaction to the events he had the unfortunate displeasure of relating to audiences. She notes the personal, emotional language he...