English-born author of the Historia Ecclesiastica, a work that occupied some forty years of his life (until 1141) as a monk of St. Evroul in Normandy. Orderic’s outstandingly important Latin chronicle, chiefly dealing with the history of the Normans, gives invaluable insight into the society that produced the crusades.
Fair-minded and compassionate, Orderic handled both written and oral sources scrupulously, though he was capable of embroidering in the tradition of the chansons de geste (epic poems). His account of the First Crusade (1096-1099) is borrowed wholesale from the Historia lerosolimitana of his friend Baldric of Bourgueil. It also provides additional material gleaned from the accounts of eyewitnesses (some of whom clearly knew the Chanson d’Antioche), including, probably, his account of the speech of Pope Urban II at Clermont. Particularly interested in the history of the principality of Antioch, Orderic followed events in Outremer down to Prince Raymond of Poitiers’s submission to Emperor John Komnenos in 1137. His account is especially valuable for his knowledge of Breton and Norman participants who are lost to other crusade sources. He also wrote knowledgeably about Norman exploits in Moorish Spain from 1104 to 1134.
-K. S. B. Keats-Rohan
Bibliography
Chibnall, Marjorie, The World of Orderic Vitalis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984).
Delisle, Leopold, Materiauxpour I’edition de Guillaume de Jumieges preparee par Jules Lair (Nogent-le-Rotrou: Imprimerie Daupeley-Gouverneur, 1910).
The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969-1980).
Keats-Rohan, K. S. B., “Two Studies in North French Prosopography, 2. Wigan the Marshal, alias Guigan Algason and Other Bretons in Orderic Vitalis’s Ecclesiastical History,” Journal of Medieval History 20 (1994), 30-34.
World History
