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

Orderic Vitalis is a figure of great significance for modern scholars, to whom he appeals as a kindred spirit in the investigation of the world around him. The Ecclesiastical History runs to six volumes in Marjorie Chibnall’s definitive modern edition, and is essential in any examination of English, Norman, or French history and culture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It must be said, however, that with the exception of Chibnall’s magisterial work on the text and, notably, the work under review, historians and critics typically mine Orderic’s prose for suitable nuggets of information and insight, or consider his work in the context of a larger thematic study. Nevertheless, given his influence on us, there is a slight irony in Orderic’s almost complete obscurity in his own time; his chief work seems not to have reached beyond the bounds of his monastery for some centuries. Orderic himself speaks of his isolation from the world, and the Ecclesiastical History’s composition was a protracted process of reconsideration of the work’s scope and ambition, which began as a modest record of the history of his monastery, and ultimately documented the history of the Normans in the wider world and the significance of that history as a microcosm of God’s universal plan for human history.

Amanda Jane Hingst’s book is an eminently readable, continually engaging account of Orderic’s understanding of the world around him, designed on the principle that geographical and topographical space was his primary mode of historical thought. This kind of spatial thinking is an increasingly popular line of enquiry in scholarship of the period, and it works beautifully with Orderic’s History, producing a series of fascinating thematic readings. The book is slightly impressionistically arranged, a feeling heightened by the use of prologue and epilogue rather than introduction and conclusion; each chapter elaborates upon a theme which resonates with all the others, demonstrating rather than developing the overall argument.

The first chapter is focused upon the monastery at Ouche, usually known as St Evroult, where Orderic spent almost all of his life. This is a fitting place to start in every sense, as it was the beginning for Orderic’s own work. Hingst illuminates the importance of precise location for the monks of St Evroult and uses this as the starting point for her argument that “Orderic Vitalis wrote in a world in which the local could possess an intrinsic identity with the universal and in an imaginative landscape in which space could stretch and fold and blend to make a forest in Normandy into a desert in Egypt and a cloister into a cosmos” (p. 17). Ouche emerges as a location in God’s Providence, as much as in geography and history; indeed, by virtue of its association with angelic revelation, it offers focus as a place in which the material world meets the eternal.

The second chapter, “Classical Geography and the Gens Normannorum,” is both interesting and problematic. In question is the relationship between the people and the place, and Hingst moves deftly between important points such as the uniquely reciprocal relationship between Normandy and the Norman identity (pp. 29–30) and yet the capacity of the Normans, contra medieval theories of character formation, to retain their identity in the many different countries in which they settled (pp. 38–40). But here Hingst is not quite open enough about the degree to which Orderic runs counter to his age. Historians agree that the strange story of Normanitas involves its apparent dissolution over the course of the twelfth century. Graham Loud, on whom Hingst is dependent for the (now uncontroversial) claim that Orderic was an inheritor of ideas about Norman identity rather than their progenitor, himself regards Orderic as a species of dead end; there is some poignancy in Orderic’s (not, indeed, always consistent) assertion of the constancy of the Norman...