Gerald of Wales, describing his journey through Wales on the archbishop of Canterbury's crusade-preaching mission, paused to explain how greed among invasive religious orders had overrun borders in southern Wales. In his view the victim was Llanddewi Nant Honddu (Llanhonddu), known in ‘corrupt’ English as ‘Llanthony’; the aggressor, the Cistercians. This monastery, almost straddling the Anglo-Welsh border, had a daughter-house in Gloucester in neighbouring England. Gerald, born at Manorbier in Norman-controlled Dyfed, had received his early religious instruction at Gloucester. In keeping the Welsh placename of a place he likely knew from his youth, Gerald clung to the Welsh side of the linguistic divide. When writing, he was living at Llanddew near Brecon, not far from Llanhonddu. He wrote with fervour about this part of Wales because it was his home. Here, he felt oppression deeply. He judged that the greatest danger in forcing boundaries beyond their rightful lease was ending up alone.

After listing the assaults on Llanhonddu, and indicting greed with classical maxims, he shifted to the present tense for the passage quoted above. Here he changed the register of his narrative from a single, sad history, to a tale of general truths about relations between those who take and those who dwell. The biblical language evokes sexual aggression: ‘conjugatis’; ‘copulatis’. Isaiah lamented that the trappings of civilisation – homes and fields – were predatory if born of a desire to have more. Such transgressive force assaulted the integrity of other people's homes and fields.

The reign of King Roger II of Sicily (1130–1154) marks one of the most significant periods for cultural and religious interaction in the medieval world. At the heart of the Mediterranean, this Norman kingdom became a cultural nexus point, a society characterized by the assimilation and fusion of Latin-Christian, Arab-Muslim and Greek-Orthodox traditions under royal patronage. In order to consolidate royal power, the Norman administration promoted an image of the king as a multicultural ruler with ‘respect for all customs and faiths of his kingdom’. Under royal patronage, various aspects of Greek, Latin and Arabic traditions were appropriated in art and architecture to help disseminate the ideological and political messages of the royal state. But what became of these visual stories in the hands of their creators and in the eyes of their viewers?

This book examines the creative forces alive in, and in dialogue with, the medieval kingdom of Norman Sicily, through a wide variety of visual media: churches, mosaics, coins, illustrated manuscripts, tabulated manuscripts, textiles, artefacts, frescoes, together with the diverse products of archaeological survey and excavation. Rather than looking at art and architecture in terms of genre and form, we examine visual stories as evidence for the interplay of dynamic forces in history. The term ‘designing’ in our title expresses the agency of creators and interpreters of visual messages and stories in the medieval kingdom of Norman Sicily, as well as to enable readers to consider how subsequent generations of scholars, antiquarians and artists have designed and perceived their own stories about the image of this medieval kingdom. The collected essays, themselves a product of cross-disciplinary research and transnational collaboration, reflect on the idea of visual culture – both as it operated at the time, and as it reveals itself to us today.

This book makes the case for treating this culture as a cohesive Mediterranean visual language that is culturally distinct from the three ethnic groups that made up the ‘populus trilinguis’. It argues that the material and visual culture of Norman Sicily was more coherent than syncretic. To say that it resulted from the influences or elements of disparate cultures, including Islamic, Byzantine and Norman, tells only part of the story – the part that goes in one direction (looking backwards to see how things came about).

William of Malmesbury wrote his Gesta Regum ‘out of love for his homeland’ (‘propter patriae caritatem’). But what was William's patria? It was not England alone, as James Campbell has suggested – that English polity with clear territorial boundaries, formed of the united Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Rather, it was a far greater thing: the continuum of British, Roman, English and Norman history on the island of Britain. What he loved was the history of that island's people, including those who lived prior to the advent of the English kingdoms.

It was in many ways a challenging affection to sustain, because Britain's history of contest and conflict had tested the endurance of the island's peoples, their memory and their honour. William admired the Roman past, and he emulated its style and its attitudes towards history. He valued the continued legacy of the Roman past in Britain – the survival not only of Roman buildings, but also of Roman values and practices. He wanted to praise both the ancient Britons and the Romans in the Gesta Regum, but in doing so, he had to admit that the Romans decisively defeated the Britons. Or did he?

It was for love of his patria that William sought ‘to redeem the broken chain of our history’ (‘uoluntati fuit interruptam temporum seriem sarcire’). The word ‘sarcire’ is often rendered as ‘to mend’ or ‘to restore’, which can imply a routine or reconstructive task, not a creative one. But the word also means ‘to redeem’,5 and this was a central purpose of the Gesta Regum. William sought to redeem those people in Britain's distant past who, by many accounts – those of Bede, Gildas, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and even Caesar himself – surrendered without honour to the Romans, the Irish and the Picts, and the Germanic tribes.

William endeavoured to restore honour to the Britons in Britain's remote past by minimising their subjection to these foreign invaders. He appropriated Roman imperial claims to represent the Britons as a people of strength, pride and authority in their own right, not merely as inhabitants of an oppressed frontier province and victims of invasion. In this respect he shared a renewed interest in the British past with his contemporaries Henry of Huntingdon and Geoffrey of Monmouth.

Around the turn of 2013–14 Rodney Thomson began to think about a conference with William of Malmesbury as its theme. He did so for at least three reasons: firstly, there had never been a conference devoted solely to William, and the time seemed ripe for one; secondly, Michael Winterbottom would turn 80 on 21 September 2014, and a conference seemed an appropriate way of honouring his long and fundamental service to William studies; and finally, Rodney and Michael had in hand a new edition and translation of William's Miracles of the Virgin; its completion would mean that all of William's original works were now available in critical editions with accompanying translation. Publication was scheduled for the middle of 2015, and it seemed possible that it could be made to coincide with an appropriate date for a conference – in the event it appeared a little later.

Because Rodney Thomson and Michael Winterbottom were both long retired, their access to funding and other forms of institutional support was limited. RMT therefore contacted the Medieval Chronicle Society early in 2014, who quickly put him in touch with Ilya Afanasyev, then a graduate student at Hertford College, Oxford. Ilya had been responsible for organising a conference of the Society held in Oxford in 2012, in which Rodney Thomson had played a marginal role. Ilya was willing to put together a team, and the conference began to take shape. From the ground in Oxford, Ilya, Emily Dolmans and Emily Winkler organised and managed the programme on the theme of ‘William of Malmesbury and his Legacy’, held on 3–5 July 2015. What the conference revealed is that the true extent of William's legacy is still beyond our grasp. There is much more to learn, and to discover.

The conference was an impetus for the volume, but this book is also an endeavour in its own right. It includes papers not delivered at the conference, and covers a wider range of material. It does not purport to represent the full range of scholarship on William of Malmesbury, but rather to show that such efforts are very much alive. It is our express hope that the volume will be as inspiring to others as the conference and papers were to us.

Describing William of Malmesbury, scholars have often found it appropriate to draw upon superlatives: he was one of medieval England's finest men of letters, among the most learned historians of twelfth-century Europe, and, some would argue, the greatest historian of England since Bede. In examining William's own words, however, it becomes clear that he was not a man of extremes; careful, measured, considered and erudite, William's life was devoted to grappling with the complexities of history, and reconciling his own interests and personal relationships with his quest for truth and objectivity, both historical and religious. The present volume is a celebration of his achievements, and an attempt to become acquainted with the man and his works that allows us to enjoy a glimpse into the multifaceted world of twelfth-century England. It is, however, also a celebration of a more immediate achievement: it marks the release of the edition of The Miracles of the Virgin by Rodney Thomson and Michael Winterbottom, the last of William's works to be edited and translated into modern English.

William's humble biography belies his cultural importance and the scholarly ambitions that underpinned his career. What little precise information we have has been gleaned from his own writings. Born in Somerset or Wiltshire in the last decade of the eleventh century, William was well educated and entered the Benedictine abbey of Malmesbury as a youth. At the time, Malmesbury was under the abbacy of Godfrey of Jumieges, a man committed to the education of his monks, and who established Malmesbury as a centre of learning. From around 1120, William was precentor, or cantor, of the abbey, a role which involved acting as librarian as well as the director of the liturgy; during this time, William undertook an expansion of Malmesbury's library, partially achieved through contributions of his own works. These texts ranged from the popular and ambitious Gesta Regum Anglorum, written for Queen Matilda, which details the history of England from the time of Bede to the twelfth century, and the Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, which reflected on the history of the English Church, to local histories of Glastonbury and Lives of local saints. He also produced remarkable works of religious reflection and accounts of miracles.