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

Many years ago, a senior medievalist recommended further investigation of Ordericus to me, given my interest in early twelfth-century historiography. This scribe/copyist/author does not disappoint; he is a fascinating and somewhat unique character (1075–1142) who spent his monastic career of some thirty years at the Norman abbey of Saint-Evroult, where he composed his principal works, the Historia Ecclesiastica and Gesta Normannorum ducum, medieval chronicles now seen as critical and vivid milestones of European historical writing. The essays here, dedicated en hommage to Marjorie Chibnall, are both retrospective and prospective, in that they consider Ordericus’s life and works, taking into consideration the disciplines of both English-language and medieval manuscript studies, archaeology, hagiography, liturgy, music, theology, and cultural memory studies, among other subjects. In the wake of the conquest, Ordericus incorporated civil war and peacetime in Normandy into his works, as Saint-Evroult was open to all the conflicts of a changing society. Consequently he saw fundamental changes in church organization, patterns of aristocratic inheritance, attitudes toward knighthood, and Christian militancy toward non-Christians.

The introduction, by Charles C. Rozier and Daniel Roach, takes us on a brief tour of the life of the author, a superb narrator whose accomplishments are paralleled by such peers as William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, and Robert of Torigni, responsible for the “outpouring of historical writing, ca. 1090–1140,” as R. W. Southern put it. (How ironic that the subject of history as such was never taught in the medieval era.) Ordericus wrote in “persuasive Latin prose and verse,” we are told, revealing competency in “language, moral philosophy, theology and exegesis” (6). This child oblate from a village near Shrewsbury, brought to St. Evroult monastery in 1085, became an amazing student of the past, his work a virtual world history that combined as well eschatological and didactic readings of the human past. His work made an impact far and wide, from Wace’s Roman de Rou to sixteenth-century echoes in English politics.

It falls to Elisabeth van Houts (“Orderic and His Father Odelerius”) to detail first the autobiographical features of the Historia Ecclesiastica, which she links to the rise of twelfth-century self-examination as penitential process. Childhood memories prevail: plopped down at St. Evroult at age ten by a father guilty of philandering, the oblate was meant to share in his father’s penance, though a weeping septuagenarian Ordericus still felt parental rejection in his final pages. Codicological and paleographic concerns next take Jenny Weston (“Following the Master’s Lead: The Script of Orderic Vitalis and the Discovery of a New Manuscript [Rouen, BM, 540]”) to scrutinize Ordericus’s particular handwriting (with illustrations) in an attempt to show precisely how he interacted, in seesaw fashion, as master scribe of St. Evroult, with assistants—as revealed exceptionally in the previously unknown Rouen manuscript. “Enthusiast of the past” (76) is one way Charles C. Rozier characterizes him in “Orderic as Librarian and Cantor of Saint-Évroul.” The author brings together a great deal of evidence to demonstrate how Ordericus performed his community roles of armarius and cantor. Daniel Roach, in “Saint-Évroul and Southern Italy in Orderic’s Historia ecclesiastica,” explores the evidence in Books III and VII of the Historia Ecclesiastica for a growing milieu of secular and ecclesiastical affairs that stretched well beyond Normandy—all the way to southern Italy and Sicily. Roach gives a fascinating account of the importance of relics and other physical objects in the Historia Ecclesiastica as links to the history of St. Evroult, which must have impressed the monastic community.

Among the many contributions, allow me to highlight just seven outstanding essays. In “Orderic and English,” Mark Faulkner undertakes an analysis of Ordericus’s knowledge of English, whether learned as a child or recalled as an adult, revealing (or not) an English identity. The chapter, [End...