The World of Orderic Vitalis

Orderic vitalis, born near Shrewsbury in 1075 and sent as a child oblate to the Norman abbey of Saint-Evroult, wrote one of the most vivid and important medieval chronicles. His world encompassed Shropshire in the aftermath of the Conquest, Normandy in civil war and at peace, and, briefly, the wider French perspective of the priory of Maule. Saint-Evroult was open to all the cross-currents of a changing society, and Orderic witnessed fundamental changes in church organisation, patterns of aristocratic inheritance, attitudes towards knighthood, and Christian militancy towards non-Christians. This book is concerned with monastic life and culture and its interaction with the life of courts and thus with the Norman families who established branches in England, Normandy, southern Italy, Constantinople, Spain, and the Holy Land, and moved easily between them. It also describes the life of Orderic himself, and gives a translation of his own moving account of his life, an epilogue to the Historia.

Marjorie Chibnall