trace of the new science which was beginning to come in through Spain; strikingly lacking also, save for a volume on Norman history, in products of Normandy itself, even in the field of theology and scriptural interpretation, where, for example, Richard abbot of Préaux had written marvellous commentaries upon Genesis, Deuteronomy, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, and the Proverbs of Solomon, and had "discoursed allegorically or tropologically in many treatises upon obscure problems of the Prophets."[1]
After all, works on the history of Normandy were the most Norman thing a Norman could produce, and it was in this field that the duchy made its chief contribution to mediæval literature and learning. All the usual types appear, local annals, lists of bishops and abbots, lives of saints, biographies of princes, but the most characteristic are the works in which the history of Normandy is grasped as a whole: the half-legendary account of the early dukes by Dudo of Saint-Quentin, the confused but valuable Gesta of William of Jumièges, at last restored to us in a critical edition,[2] the Chronicle of Robert of Torigni, and especially the great Historia Ecclesiastica of Ordericus Vitalis, the chef-d'œuvre of Norman historiography and the most important historical work written in France in the twelfth century.
Born in 1075 near Shrewsbury, Ordericus was early
