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C H A P T E R 4 Jerusalem and the Ends of the Earth Alongside the year 1099 in the annals of the monastery of Ouche, Orderic Vitalis (who kept this chronological record for much of his adult life) noted three events: “Jerusalem was taken on 15 July by the holy pilgrims, the heathens who had held it for a long time having been conquered. Pope Urban died in this year; Paschal succeeded him. The church of St. Evroul at Ouche was dedicated.”1 The same items appear in Orderic’s hand, in an almost identical form, on a stray scrap of parchment bound into MS Latin 10062 in the Biblioth èque nationale in Paris, quite possibly the earliest piece of Orderic ’s historical work still extant.2 From one perspective, this entry exemplifies the apparent lack of historical scale typical of medieval annals: a local church dedication was given the same billing as an event that shook both the Christian and Muslim worlds. But such a perspective is far too narrow. These two events marked a real and potent conjunction for the monks at Ouche: the altar in the new church became, in a sense, a new Jerusalem, the place where the body of Christ was present anew in the Eucharist, in the same year that the earthly Jerusalem, the place of Jesus’s historical and bodily life, was taken by the crusaders, the “holy pilgrims.” Orderic was twenty-four years old in 1099 when the crusaders took, and the altar at Ouche embraced, the Holy City. He was becoming the historian who would some thirty-five years later claim that “never has more glorious material been provided for those who tell the tales of war than God has now given our poets and writers when He triumphed over the pagans in the East by means of a few 70 Christians.”3 Jerusalem as the City of God was the epitome of a historically meaningful place in the middle ages and was the key to finding meaning in topography, and in history, at any scale. If Ouche, with its new stone church, was the intimate landscape of Orderic’s monastic home, Jerusalem, encircled by its own stone walls, was his Christendom and his cosmos. Everything else fell in between.4 But while Orderic’s vision of Ouche can be found near the surface of the Historia Ecclesiastica , Jerusalem—and all that it implied for the relationship between space, time, and humanity—is much more deeply embedded in the narrative of Orderic’s work and in the Historia’s relationship to the intellectual world in which its author took part. Orderic was always modest when it came to his learning and his Historia’s connections to a wider philosophy of Christian life. “I see many things in the divine scriptures that when subtly considered seem similar to events of our time,” he remarked , referring to the common practices of historical exegesis that could bring Jerusalem’s scriptural meaning to bear on the events of the medieval world. “But I leave to the learned the eager probing of allegorical revelations and the proper interpretation of human ways, and I will occupy myself with bringing forth a little more of the simple history of Norman affairs.”5 Orderic declined to indulge in explicit philosophizing in his work, but he was nonetheless influenced by the body of philosophical thought, increasingly discussed in the twelfth-century schools, that gave history a prominent place in the unified cosmos of Christian life. This increasing focus on the city of Jerusalem, and the cognate images of Christendom and cosmos, were what provided Orderic with the knowledge that he was writing a Historia Ecclesiastica, a history of the pilgrim church on Earth, and that this history had a meaning beyond his local community , even at the times when it was simply a history of his local community . In the eleventh and twelfth centuries Jerusalem was the place that gave meaning to all places, from the consecrated altar in each and every church, no matter how small, to the far-off ends of the Earth. It was this synthesis of altar and city, and the intensely organic vision of geography it implied, that allowed the leap from the monastery of Ouche, where Orderic participated in the consecration of the new church, to Jerusalem, the axis mundi, the center of the world.6 Jerusalem and the Ends of the Earth 71 [3.15.6.77] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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