The Norman kingdom of Sicily has an assured place in the teaching of medieval European history in this country. All teachers of it are, nevertheless, unhappy about the limited amount of reading they can recommend to students who cannot understand books in foreign languages. This has very unfortunate consequences. Since few of the original sources in Latin, let alone Greek or Arabic, have been translated, the student cannot form an impression of them at first hand. Moreover, the main preoccupations of the ample scholarly literature in Italian, French and German, as well as some other languages, cannot be grasped from what writing is available only in English. The problems of modern British students are compounded in other ways too. They inevitably approach the subject with established convictions about the Norman monarchy in England. These shape their expectations of what to expect and how to interpret what they find in southern Italy. The Norman monarchy in England may now be made to acknowledge what it owes to its Anglo–Saxon predecessor, but no one doubts that under the Normans the monarchy was powerful, authoritative and exceptionally centralised for its date. In addition, the development of political authority in the modern English state is assumed to have been continuous since at least the Norman Conquest. The southern Italian monarchy is quite another matter.