Orderic Vitalis was not a particularly influential historian during the Middle Ages, but for modern scholars his vast, detailed, and often idiosyncratic history is a crucial source for studying Western Europe, particularly Normandy and England, in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. As Amanda Jane Hingst's clever title indicates, her book focuses on place, space, and geography in Orderic's work.
In her first chapter, Hingst explores Orderic's view of the Norman monastery he called Ouche (generally known today as Saint-Évroul) where he spent most of his life after being sent from England as an oblate at the age of ten. In particular Hingst shows how Orderic viewed Ouche as a holy site, less because of the relics of its patron saint, most of which had been lost during the Viking period, than Saint Evroul's choice to live there. Orderic's Ouche was thus somewhat unusual in being holy because of its remembered past in an age that normally placed more value on tangible remains.
The second chapter places a much studied subject, Norman identity, in a geographic framework. Classical geography had tended to create a static geography of ethnicity. Earlier medieval historians had disrupted this pattern by celebrating the migration of medieval peoples, including the Normans, in various origin myths, but nonetheless retained the static classical model in geographic prefaces. Orderic dispensed with any such preface and disrupted the pattern still further by emphasizing the scattering of the Normans to Southern Italy, England, and elsewhere, but stressing their continuous ethnic ties across long distances. He thus created an unusual model of a geographically dispersed but united people.
In chapter 3, Hingst argues that Orderic transformed classical geography in another way, by describing the northern world much more fully than classical geographers had. Both chapters raise interesting questions, and it is worth wondering about the degree to which Orderic was simply reacting to the specifics of his subject matter and to what degree he (and perhaps other medieval writers) were consciously reshaping classical geography.
Chapter 4 is a very nice study of Orderic's use of the term “Albion.” Hingst herself shows that Orderic was something of a dead end in this respect; most other historians of the time eschewed the term, which became important only in the early modern period. Orderic, however, used it extensively, and in a good piece of detective work, Hingst shows how he drew on the term's use in real and forged Anglo-Saxon royal charters, examples of which the historian could have encountered at the monastery of Crowland in England. Hingst then makes the plausible suggestions that Albion was a useful name because it avoided ethnic terms in describing an ethnically diverse island and that it may also have expressed a hegemonic view of Anglo-Norman kingship that reflected the earlier claims of overlordship over Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon kings.
In chapter 5, Hingst uses Orderic's demonstrable familiarity with a manuscript containing Byrhtferth of Ramsey's work to read his history in the context of Byrthferth's diagram, the computus, world maps, and Christian cosmology. Orderic's description of the dead riding in Hellequin's hunt is one of the most famous episodes in his history, and in the sixth chapter Hingst employs it to discuss the intersection of the worlds of the living and dead in his work. In particular, she argues that the realm of the dead was intensely local and that conversely Orderic ruptured and expanded local space through his discussions of this realm.
In the last chapter, Hingst begins with Orderic's account of the eucharistic controversy between Lanfranc and Berengar and goes on to draw links between the body of Jesus, the Eucharist, Jerusalem, altars, and local regions. Hingst also argues that the emphasis of historians on materiality was directed against the dualism that was implicit in Berengar's concerns about God and the Eucharist.
Overall, Hingst presents a series of reflections, based on reading Orderic in conjunction with thinking about space and geography, rather than an overall thesis. The book is unusually well written; indeed, I would describe some passages as beautiful. This is an impressively interdisciplinary work. Hingst naturally draws heavily on the theory and history of geography and her last chapter also draws on theology. In some ways, however, this work of history seems most influenced by literary studies. In recent years, various Anglo-Norman historians have received a surprising amount of attention from scholars of literature or from historians who focus primarily on the histories as texts. Though Hingst explicitly argues for looking beyond Orderic's text to studying it as a “relic” of his world, this is very much a work based on close reading and textual analysis. I found Hingst's arguments consistently thought provoking. Her book again and again places Orderic's work in interesting and original perspectives and contexts. Whether Hingst's arguments are always convincing is another matter, though I must stress that when she failed to convince me, my judgment was often the Scottish verdict “not proven” rather than a conviction that Hingst was simply wrong. Hingst sometimes builds heavily on slender connections. Take, for instance, her argument that Orderic and other historians were implicitly challenging dualist ideas by focusing on the material world. This is certainly possible, but history by its nature focuses on the material world. Orderic's record of Lanfranc's attack on Berengar's views of the Eucharist could indicate a concern with dualism, but Orderic may simply have been trumpeting the most famous intellectual “victory” of a churchman associated with his homelands of Normandy and England. Hingst's allusive, often intertextual connections work well in a reading of Orderic's text as text, but as a historian who, like Hingst, would like to see Orderic's text also as a relic of his world, I sometimes wanted stronger proof that Hingst's arguments reflected Orderic's own worldview or the broader mentality of his period. In moving beyond the obvious, however, we are always left with some degree of uncertainty, and I think many of Hingst's suggestions are worth considering not just for Orderic but for other medieval historians as well. Whatever reservations I may have about some of Hingst's conclusions, her fascinating work enriches our understanding of an important medieval author and will also open up new avenues into thinking about place and geography in medieval writings.
