When Abbot Suger wanted the best goldsmiths for the great gold cross to stand before the shrine-altar at Saint-Denis, he found them in Lotharingia, probably the Meuse Valley. Suger's view of Lotharingia was ambivalent. Politically, he saw it as threatening. The great and sprawling Roucy/Marle family he regarded as particularly dangerous, because like the other lords of those parts, they were related to the lords of Lotharingia: the danger was their ‘lotharingorum affinitas’. A century later, in the early 1240s, Isabelle, princess of France, refused to go through with an arranged marriage to the heir of the Emperor Frederick II, and fell seriously ill. In despair, her mother, Blanche of Castile, sent for advice to a holy woman in distant Avalterre – perhaps Nivelles in Brabant, where Blanche exercised some religious patronage. The holy woman's advice was wise, though probably unwelcome: don't pressure your daughter to marry against her will.

These are two examples, a century apart, of those at the centre of Capetian France reaching out to a distant land – Avalterre, Lotharingia – for important cultural and religious capital. The term Avalterre or Avauterre occurs often in vernacular literature. It indicated the Lower Meuse Valley in northern Lotharingia, but, as in the will of Blanche of Castile's nephew, Peter of Alençon, it might encompass neighbouring Hainault and comital Flanders. The peoples of Avalterre, Hainault and Flanders were often lumped together. A contemporary Flemish account of the Battle of Bouvines talks of ‘li Hainuier et li Flamenc et li Avalois’, coming from ‘Avalterre, et de Flandre et de Hainault et d’Artois et d’Ostrevant et d’Aroaise’.

Lotharingia and Flanders were indeed hot-houses for religious, cultural and intellectual ferment and production in the High Middle Ages. They were important generators and disseminators of religious and cultural innovation, within Capetian and, indeed, Anglo-Norman orbits. Many specialists – in literature, language, art history, religious history, and chivalric culture – have investigated this rich cultural production, but the approach has rarely been interdisciplinary. Where it has been interdisciplinary, it has been limited in topographical or temporal scope, emphasizing Lotharingia around the year 1000, and Lower Lotharingia/Avalterre/Flanders in the later twelfth century. This essay explores aspects of this multifarious cultural production, and the multiple cultural connections of an area where polities were shifting and notoriously difficult to map, over the longue durée of the High Middle Ages.