Hagiography is by definition about measuring the distance between the human and the sacred: the saint's own distance, but also the hagiographer's and ours. Reginald of Durham's late-twelfth-century life of Godric of Finchale, begun during the saint's lifetime and finished not long after his death, probes all sorts of distances. It is no accident that many of Godric's feats and miracles involve clairvoyance and its auditory equivalent: feats of overcoming spatial or temporal distances in one's seeing and one's hearing. The Vita has a precise sense of place, centered on Godric's cell in the forest, but within a concentric circle of larger and larger horizons: the region, the territory of Durham, the sea shore, the ocean, Jerusalem; for Godric was a seafaring merchant before he became a hermit, and also a Jerusalem pilgrim who lived in the Holy Land for several years.

There is not very much scholarly literature on Godric, but interest in him has been constant. There is even a modern novel about him. Historians have long recognized the Vita's value as testimony to many aspects of medieval culture that are rarely illuminated by the narrative sources of the period. It is a life of a man of the people. Pirenne drew attention to Godric's early life as a merchant, as an international trader, and as a man of relatively humble origins working his way up by engaging in trade. Tom Licence and Susan Ridyard have studied him as a lay religious figure, integrated – or perhaps coopted or even coerced – by the monks of Durham into their project of possessing, controlling, and shaping their surrounding territory both economically and spiritually. The monks gained in him a hermitage, a cell with adjacent lands – but they also acquired a revered lay saint who could help their outreach to the laity of the region by modeling a spiritual life appropriate to them. Michael Clanchy has discussed Godric as an interesting example of a layman living on the periphery of monastic and literate culture.

Violent disorder broke out in various parts of England during the political turmoil of 1326–7 and included particularly severe rioting in the monastic towns of Abingdon, St Albans, and Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. In January 1327 agitators from London roused the townspeople at Bury to conspire to attack and destroy the abbey of St Edmund. An armed mob forced entrance through the gates of the abbey on 14 January and seized and imprisoned the officials of the convent and several monks. They carried away all the treasures of the abbey, including the charters, muniments, and papal bulls from the sacristy and the treasury. Accounts of the legal process that followed the riots show the magnitude of the abbey's losses: in one, the monks alleged that the rioters had carried off three copies of a charter of King Cnut in their favour and four copies of a charter in Harthacnut's name. So denuded were the archives that the abbot had to pay the king to stay a suit against him in the royal courts, since he claimed the deeds he would have used for the defence of his case had been stolen by the rioters.

Rebels targeted Bury's archives again during the Peasants' Revolt in 1381. This time, however, they sought not to destroy the deeds but rather to consult them for evidence to substantiate some of their own claims. Like the authors of cahiers de doléance produced by the third estate in France in 1789, the rebels believed that the burdens of taxation and obligation had fallen less heavily on earlier generations, and that the abbey’s earliest charters would confirm their view. They thus demanded that the monks produce, ‘in the sight of the commons’, the charters of liberty for ‘the vill which Cnut, the founder of the monastery had once granted’. The monks duly brought out before the guildhall all the charters they could find and showed them to the mayor, the aldermen, ‘and a whole crowd of villeins’. When the rebels declared themselves unhappy with the documents produced by the abbey, the monks agreed to search their charters again to find the evidence for the liberties which St Edmund’s claimed; further, they promised that if they found none, they would produce new ones to serve the purpose.

Contained in two manuscripts preserved in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana is a little-known chronicle by an anonymous writer of the mid-twelfth century which may shed more light on an epoch-making event on the eve of the Crusades: the Norman conquest of Sicily. This source, collated into a single transcription by Giambattista Caruso in 1723 and reproduced in the Rerum Italicarum Scriptores by Ludovico Muratori in 1726, is called the Historia Sicula a Normannis ad Petrum Aragonensem by Anonymus Vaticanus. Despite the fact that it is one of a very few sources to describe a seminal episode in Mediterranean history, the Historia Sicula has not been discussed in any depth for over a century. This essay seeks to correct that oversight.

In his formative work, Mohammed and Charlemagne, the great Belgian historian Henri Pirenne contended that ‘the rapid and unexpected advance of Islam’ had precipitated ‘the end of Mediterranean unity’ by vanquishing the mare nostrum of ancient Rome. The resultant loss of Sicily to the Aghlabids of North Africa in the ninth century established what maritime historian A.R. Lewis termed ‘the Islamic Imperium’ and inspired the fourteenth-century Arab scholar Ibn Khaldūn to claim that ‘the Muslims had gained control over the whole of the Mediterranean’. At the beginning of the eleventh century, the Mediterranean was, in effect, a Muslim lake with most of its major islands, including Sicily, firmly ensconced in Dar al-Islam (the ‘House of Islam’).

A string of recent publications has sought to emphasize the relationship between the memorial and the material in the medieval period. Drawing on this body of work, this essay explores the dynamic relationship between physical objects and the memories associated with them in the Historia ecclesiastica of Orderic Vitalis. Written between c. 1114 and 1141 at the abbey of St Evroul, located in the pays d'Ouche on the southern frontier of Normandy, the massive thirteen-book Historia is widely recognized by scholars as being one of the most important sources for the history of the Anglo-Norman world and beyond, and it has been the subject of much study since the 1950s. Whilst it is a well known fact that Orderic drew on a large number of written and oral sources in the writing of the Historia, the exact role played by the material and the visual in this process has remained largely unexplored. The focus of this article is thus on the way in which these objects are described in Orderic's narrative and the implications of this for our understanding of the Historia as a whole.

Leonie Hicks has recently highlighted ‘the visibility of the past’ as an important theme in historical writing, observing that for the Anglo-Norman chroniclers, ‘monuments and places … were much more than just illustrations to or diversions from the main narrative: they were in fact integral to the message they were trying to convey'. Thus, while such descriptive passages are interesting in and of themselves, the purpose of examining this largely unexplored aspect of Orderic’s magnum opus here is to highlight the textual richness of the Historia and to demonstrate what these passages reveal about the purpose of its narrative. For the more one studies Orderic, the more one notices passages concerning objects that he claimed were still in existence at the time of his writing, such as a memorial roll, a Psalter, and a stone arch.

The study of crusading religious practices has often focused on practices undertaken at home or at the beginning of a crusade, such as liturgy or the practice of taking the cross. In contrast, the religious practices performed routinely during the crusade itself have been relatively less explored. Yet, analyzing the devotional activities of crusaders while they were actually on crusade has the potential to illuminate not only the crusading movement but also points of intersection and divergence between that movement and larger cultural trends. Furthermore, although some crusading accounts admittedly provide little information on the religious practices of crusaders, others are more forthcoming. Among these, the Anglo-Norman account of the 1147 conquest of Lisbon during the Second Crusade, the De expugnatione Lyxbonensi, is a particularly rich source of information on the daily religious lives of men and women on crusade.

As I will demonstrate, religious practices in the De expugnatione Lyxbonensi resonate with ideals and themes active in both contemporary monastic reform and the development of lay piety. Furthermore, they are articulated via the social customs associated with coniuratio, a sworn, oath-bound society. A connection between crusading and monastic ideals is hardly surprising, ever since Jonathan Riley-Smith noted that the First Crusaders were in effect ‘a military monastery on the move’. For the most part, however, historians' development of this idea has understandably focused on the ways in which crusaders were like monks and/or inhabited a similar ideological universe to that of advocates of reform monasticism.

Self-flagellation in the twenty-first century seems more masochistic than religious, and spirituality today has little place for the ascetical use of a whip or other instruments of torture. Yet the practice will not quite disappear. We see it in film, and not just in medieval contexts such as Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957) or Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), but also in contemporary manifestations such as Silas, the renegade Opus Dei member in Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code (2003), or the video images of Shi'ite pilgrims flagellating themselves with chains and slashing their foreheads with swords while they commemorate 'Ashura.

Such forms of ascetic practice have long been studied in their Latin Christian context. According to the traditional narrative, which this study attempts to destabilize, self-flagellation was an ancient monastic expression of penance. How ancient has been debated, but certainly by the eleventh century it is well documented among Italian hermits. In the thirteenth century it would have entered lay society as part of the ‘monasticization of the laity’, the top-down process by which religious elites impose their values on the masses. In the words of André Vauchez, the preeminent authority on lay spirituality, ‘The confraternities of penitents and flagellants were clearly animated by the desire to appropriate the spiritual resources of monasticism…. The most telling example of this was flagellation — a monastic practice which some lay people in the thirteenth century appropriated in order to win the rewards associated with it.

The quotation will be familiar to many readers. It represents part of the famous writ of military summons directed by William the Conqueror to ÆEthelwig, the last Anglo-Saxon abbot of Evesham, in Worcestershire. The full text reads as follows in translation in volume II of English Historical Documents:

William, king of the English, to Æthelwig, abbot of Evesham, greeting. I order you to summon all those who are subject to your administration and jurisdiction that they bring before me at Clarendon on the octave of Pentecost all the knights they owe me duly equipped. You, also, on that day, shall come to me, and bring with you fully equipped those five knights which you owe me in respect of your abbacy. Witness Eudo the steward. At Winchester.

As is well known, much was made of this little document by J.H. Round back in 1895, and many other scholars have followed in his wake. It is the only scrap of record evidence to suggest that servitia debita were established early in the Conqueror's reign, and it has been made to bear an enormous burden of proof for the so-called introduction of ‘feudalism’ into England. The chaotic cartulary in which it survives has never been published in full, and the Latin text that most historians appear to have used is that produced by Round. Yet, in the five-and-a-half lines it occupies in the 1964 reprint of Feudal England, Round succeeded in introducing not only feudalism but also no fewer than twenty-five errors and misimpressions in his transcription.

Over the seventy-five years since its publication, scholars have continued to adjust and refine Professor Charles Haskins' classic historiographical label ‘Renaissance of the twelfth century’. Nevertheless, the concept remains a useful springboard with which to approach, understand, and explain the cultural changes, the accelerations, and the innovations that took place in Western Europe in the course of the twelfth century. Yet, like any other conceptual tool, it has limits in scope that confine its utility geographically and chronologically, as well as qualitative limitations in terms of the particular events and achievements that are its raison d'être. Defining events, such as the flowering of dialectic or the coming of age of the study and production of canon law, coincided with each other only in certain places and at given times. Portugal is one place where such a conjunction of events and achievements never occurred. Portugal, in other words, did not have a Renaissance in the way imagined by Haskins for medieval Europe.

This fact should be of some consequence for Portuguese history, since the twelfth century is the country's century of birth. To be born in the age of Abelard, Gratian, or Azo might be auspicious, were it not for the fact that all three — as well as every major intellectual figure of the twelfth-century Renaissance — led their lives and produced their works far from Portugal and without any attestable connection to it. Of course, their work and the work of other leading figures of the Renaissance of the twelfth century did reach Portugal, but it did so unevenly and piecemeal. Gratian’s magnum opus was known in Portugal by the second half of the twelfth century, as was the theology of St Bernard and Hugh of St Victor, but it is highly doubtful that Abelard’s ever was.