The Written World: Past and Place in the World of Orderic Vitalis (review)

Modern historians have certainly made up for the neglect that the Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis suffered among the medieval churchmen for whom he originally wrote. The mighty six-volume edition published by Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford, 1962-72) has seen to this, turning his work into an essential resource for scholars tackling topics ranging from Norman politics to monastic foundation, gender history to medieval historiography. And yet for all the combing of Orderic's copious words, relatively few historians have reflected on the thought-world of the man himself and the strategies he used to craft his chronicle. Amanda Hingst sets out to remedy this situation. In The Written World, she examines a particular strategy in Orderic's writing: his use of geography as an organizing principle for historical narrative. Beginning, as her subject did, with the monastery of St. Evroult, Hingst suggests that here, in Orderic's own house, he formed distinctive ways of thinking about past and place that informed his later writing. Orderic did not confine himself to the story of St. Evroult—far from it. His horizons expanded to encompass the story of the Normans, the history of Western Europe more generally, and ultimately the history of Christendom itself. Hingst's subsequent chapters explore these themes. The second suggests that narrating the story of the Norman "diaspora" forced new ways of thinking on Orderic about past and place. Classical traditions, in which geography was sketched out first as the unchanging stage on which history unfolded, would not do for the story of restless Normans who were responsible for remaking the political geography of significant parts of Western Europe. The Norman phenomenon also obliged Orderic to reconsider the maritime world, shifting the center of his writing northward so that the islands of the north Atlantic were embraced as well. A third chapter burrows into language to explore Orderic's representation of Norman rule in England, focusing particularly on his revival of the ancient name of Albion as a means to assert continuity with the Anglo-Saxon past and hint at a kind of power that extended more generally within the British isles. Later chapters shift attention from what might (loosely) be thought of as political geography to sacred geography. Again, Hingst explores how Orderic wrote on varied scales, from his evocation of the dead in a "haunted" landscape around St. Evroult itself to the ramifications of crusade and the place of Jerusalem as a pivot around which history and geography turned. In all this, she reveals the connectedness of microcosm to macrocosm, of the immediate story of St. Evroult to the larger unfolding of Christian history.

The Written World is a thoughtful book. More connected essays than a comprehensive treatment of its themes, it inevitably leaves much ground unbroken. In particular, a fuller comparison of Orderic with his peers would have helped make some of Hingst's claims stick, especially in the final chapter where, toward the end, more general conclusions about twelfth-century historiography are ventured. Nonetheless, this is a useful contribution to our understanding of Orderic and a stimulus to further study of an important chronicler who, as Hingst rightly observes, warrants further attention in his own right.