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A twelfth-century view of the historical church: Orderic Vitalis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Marjorie Chibnall
Marjorie Chibnall*
Affiliation:
Clare Hall, Cambridge
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Extract

When Eusebius set out to write an Ecclesiastical History he claimed to be ‘the first to undertake this present project and to attempt, as it were, to travel along a lonely and untrodden path’. The claim was justified: there had been little room for religious history, even the history of pagan religions, in the works of classical historians and their imitators. Following the rules laid down by Thucydides, they concentrated on the political life of the present and its military consequences; they preferred oral to written sources, provided the historian had either been present at the scene of action or had heard reports from eyewitnesses. Both in method and in content Eusebius was an innovator. Since his starting point was ‘the beginning of the dispensation of Jesus’ he was entirely dependent on written sources for more than three hundred years; and, innovating still more, he introduced documents such as letters and imperial edicts into his narrative. Far from being political and military, his subject matter was primarily the history of the apostles, the succession of bishops, the persecutions of Christians, and the views of heretics. He was widening the scope of historical writing and using the techniques previously employed in the biographies of philosophers. It is not surprising that, once his work had been translated into Latin and extended by Rufinus and Jerome, it became the starting point for writers on ecclesiastical history for generations to come.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 33: The Church Retrospective , 1997 , pp. 115 - 134
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1997

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References

1 Eusebius, , The Ecclesiastical History, ed. and trans. Lawlor, H. J. and Oulton, J. E. L. (London, 1927), I, i, 3.Google Scholar

2 See Momigliano, A. D., Studies in Historiography (London, 1969), pp. 214–18.Google Scholar

3 Eusebius, I, i, 1–2.

4 The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans. Chibnall, Marjorie, 6 vols, OMT (Oxford, 1969-80) [hereafter OV]Google Scholar.

5 Classen, Peter, ‘Res gestae, universal history, apocalypse’, in Benson, Robert L. and Constable, Giles, eds, Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), p. 390.Google Scholar

6 For Orderic’s life and studies see OV, 1, pp. 1–6, 14–29; Chibnall, Marjorie, The World of Orderic Vitalis (Oxford, 1984), pp. 1–16, 33–4, and ch. 5.Google Scholar

7 OV, 1, pp. 130–4; 3, 4–9.

8 Classen, ‘Res gestae’, pp. 388–9.

9 The ‘Gesta Normannorum ducum’ of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis and Robert of Torigni, ed. and trans. Elisabeth M. C. van Houts, 2 vols, OMT (Oxford, 1992–5), 1, pp. lxvi-lxxvii.

10 OV, 2, pp. 2–189, especially pp. 104–5.

11 Rouen, Bibliothèque de la Ville, MS 1343.

12 OV, 1, pp. 25–6.

13 Ibid., 2, pp. 186–9.

14 Ibid., 2, p. 188.

15 Ibid., 2, pp. 4–5.

16 Ibid., 1, pp. 143–4.

17 Ibid., 6, pp. 554–7; Chibnall, World, p. 224.

18 Gesta Normannorutn ducum, I, i (ed. van Houts, 1, pp. 10–11).

19 OV, 1, pp. 134–50; Augustine, , De consensu evangelistarum libri quattuor, ed. Weihreich, F., Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum, 43 (Vienna, 1904)Google Scholar.

20 Rouen, Bibliothèque de la ville, MS 1343, pp. 23–33.

21 Acts 8.13-24.

22 Eusebius, II, xiii, xiv. For the growth of legends about Simon Magus see Cowdrey, H.E.J., ‘Simon Magus in South Italy’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 15 (1993), pp. 77–80 Google Scholar; Cross, F. L. and Livingstone, E. A., eds, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1983), p. 1277.Google Scholar

23 OV, 1, p. 166, ‘Simon autem apostoli dicta paruipendens recessit, et apostata factus innumeris sceleribus iram Domini diu exacerbauit.’

24 Ibid., 1, pp. 174–5, 178–9 and passim.

25 Ibid., 1, p. 190 and n.2; Duchesne, L., ‘Saint Martial de Limoges’, Annales du Midi, 4 (1892), pp. 289–330.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 Alençon, Bibliothèque de la ville, MS 26.

27 Ibid., fo. 185.

28 OV, 1, pp. 164–200.

29 Ibid., 3, p. 46.

30 Ibid., 3, p. 36 and n.4.

31 Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques, 14 (Paris, 1960), pp. 263–5; Duchesne, L., Fastes épiscopaux de l’ancienne Caule, 3 vols (Paris, 1894-1915), 2, pp. 464–5.Google Scholar

32 OV, 3, pp. 46–7.

33 Ibid., 4, pp. 310–11.

34 Ibid., 4, pp. xl-xlii, 310–35.

35 See Halphen, L., ‘La vie de Saint Maur; exposé d’une théorie de M. Auguste Molinier’, Revue historique, 88 (1905), pp. 287–95.Google Scholar

36 OV, 3, pp. 260–4.

37 Gen. 14. 21–4.

38 Bede, Libri quatuor in principium Genesis usque ad natiuitatem Isaac et eiectionem Ismahelis adnotationum, ed. Ch. Jones, W., CChrSL (Turnhout, 1969), pp. 192–3 Google Scholar. For tithes see ibid., pp. 189–91.

39 Chibnall, World, pp. 101–5; OV, 1, App. II (pp. 204–11); 3, App. I (pp. 263–4).

40 Ibid., 3, pp. 338–43.

41 Ibid., 3, pp. 265–303.

42 BN, MS lat. 6503, fos. 61–70; the legend of a group of Saxon dancers who had profaned Christmas night with their songs and dances in a churchyard, and were condemned to continue dancing day and night for a year without rest. A pilgrim who claimed to be one of the dancers had visited a number of Norman abbeys, including Mont-Saint-Michel, carrying letters authenticating the miracle (litterae nimio sudore et uetustate corruptae) (L. Delisle, Preface, in Jules Lair, ed., Matériaux pour l’édition de Guillaume de Jumièges [Paris, 1910], pp. 18–19 and PI. 3).

43 OV, 2, pp. 284–93.

44 Ibid., 5, pp. 18–21.

45 Ibid., 5, pp. 14–17.

46 Ibid., 6, pp. 260–5.

47 Moore, R. I., The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Oxford, 1987), p. 24 Google Scholar, comments on ‘the contrast between the years up to 1140 or thereabouts, when the episcopal response to heretical preaching was piecemeal, ad hoc and often mild, and the increasing determination to deal severely with it which became evident after that time’.

48 Chibnall, World, pp. 163–4.

49 The Letters of Peter the Venerable, ed. Giles Constable, 2 vols, Harvard Historical Studies, 78 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 2, pp. 275–8.

50 OV, 5, pp. 4–7.

51 Baldrici episcopi dolensis historia ierosolimitana, in Recueil des historiens des croisades, 16 vols (Paris, 1841–1906), 4.

52 OV, 5, pp. xvi-xviii.

53 Ibid., 3, p. 218 and n.3. The Vita seen by Orderic was probably composed c. 1122.

54 Ibid., 6, pp. xxii-xxiii; Chibnall, World, pp. 203–7.

55 OV, 3, pp. 284–5.

56 Ibid., 3, pp. 286–7, 156–7. Some of the stones from the sarcophagi at Saint- Céneri still survive, built into the foundations of the Romanesque church.

57 On the borders of the Bayeux Tapestry see H. E. J. Cowdrey, ‘Towards an interpretation of the Bayeux Tapestry’, Anglo-Norman Studies, 10 (1988), pp. 49–65, at pp. 54–6, 62; H. Chefneux, ‘Les fables dans la tapisserie de Bayeux’, Romania, 60 (1934), pp. 1–35, 153–94.

58 See below, pp. 130–2.

59 OV, 4, pp. 162–5.

60 Ibid., 6, pp. 274–5.

61 For the influence of Augustine, Origen, and Boethius on medieval ideas on time and creation see Sorabji, Richard, Time, Creation and the Continuum (London, 1983), especially pp. 115–24 Google Scholar. As Sorabji warns, however, ‘Many of the authors cited, especially those from the Judaeo-Christian tradition, did not achieve consistency in their accounts of eternal being’.

62 OV, 1, pp. 132–3.

63 Bede, Libri quatuor in principium Cenesis, p. 3, ‘Creationem mundi insinuans scriptura diuina apte primo statim uerbo eternitatem atque omnipotentiam Dei creatoris ostendit, quern enim in principio temporum mundum creasse perhibit, ipsum profecto ante tempora eternaliter extitisse designat.’

64 OV, 1, p. 134. This was in fact a date frequently chosen as a starting point by writers of universal chronicles; see Timothy Reuter, ‘Past, present and no future in the Regnum teutonicum’, in Paul Magdolino, ed., The Perception of the Past in Twelfth- Century Europe (London and Rio Grande, 1992), pp. 15–36, at p. 33.

65 OV, 1, pp. 132–3.

66 Ibid., 4, pp. xxxviii-xl, 236–51.

67 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, sa 1127; Map, Walter, De nugis curialium, ed. James, M. R., rev. Brooke, C. N. L. and Mynors, R. A. B., OMT (Oxford, 1983), pp. xxxix, 26–31, 370–1 Google Scholar; Peter of Blois, Epistola 14, in PL, 207, cols 42–51.

68 Alexander Murray, ‘Confession before 1215’, TRHS, ser. 6, 3 (1993), pp. 51- 81; Le Goff, Jacques, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (London, 1984), pp. 213–16.Google Scholar

69 OV, 6, pp. 292–3.

70 Ibid., 4, pp. 240–1.

71 Jotsaldus, De vita et virtutibus Sancti Odonis, PL, 142, cols 878–9, describes how Odilo instituted the commemoration of all the dead at Cluny as the result of a vision; see also Peter Damiani, Vita Sancta Odilonis, PL, 144, cols 935–6.

72 Petri Cluniacensis abbatis De miraculis libri duo, ed. D. Bouthillier, CChrCM (Turnhout, 1988).