Introduction

We find a striking example of such an awareness in the address of Peter the Venerable (d. 1156) to the Byzantine emperor John II Komnenos (1118–43):

Given the context, we might be tempted to view Peter’s address as no more than mere diplomatic fluff. It is a typical panegyric trope to present Byzantium, and especially Constantinople, as the centre of the world, surrounded by and holding back a raft of barbarian peoples. Even before the First Crusade, the Italian bishop Bonizo of Sutri (d. ca. 1094) contrasts Old Rome, that has fallen to barbarians, with New Rome (Constantinople), that alone still stands against Medes and Persians, barbarians and Scythians (Col 3:11), Huns and Hungarians, Goths and Northmen, Saracens and Moors.13Bonizo of Sutri, Liber de vita Christiana 7.1, ed. Ernst Perels (Hildesheim: Weidmann, 1930), 233: ‘Solum nove Rome imperium, Constantinopolitanum scilicet, in meditullio positum, de quo apostolus dicit: “Qui tenet nunc, teneat donec de medio fiat” (2 Th 2:7), Medis ac Persis, barbaris et Scytis, Vaginatis et Massagetibus, Unis et Ungaris, Gothis et Normannis, Sarracenis et Mauris usque hodie contradicit’ (Only the empire of new Rome, namely Constantinople, set in the middle, about which the apostle says: ‘may he who now holds, hold until he be removed from the middle’, up to this day opposes the Medes and Persians, barbarians and Scythians, Vagainati and Massagetae, Huns and Hungarians, Goths and Northmen, Saracens and Moors). See Walter Berschin, Bonizo von Sutri: Leben und Werk (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1972), 23, 113–14n511. We find much the same image in a didactic poem that Alexios himself wrote late in life for his son John and similar sentiments persist into the modern era, as we can see in Voltaire’s exhortation of Catherine the Great in 1768 to retake Constantinople during her struggle against the Poles and Turks.14The relevant sections of Alexios’s Muses (ed. Paul Maas, ‘Die Musen des Kaisers Alexios I’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift 22, no. 2 (1913): 348–69) are translated in Magdalino, Manuel, 27–8. Voltaire, Correspondence D15316 (ed. Theodore Besterman, Correspondence and related documents, vol. 34 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2013), 136), and see Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 209–15. Unlike Bonizo’s list of peoples, however, Peter draws upon a more general conception of the world in his gesture towards north and east. While he clarifies what he means by east, the idea of northern barbarians apparently demands no further explanation.15See the discussion below, p. 000. It may be alluding to Alexios’s defeat of the Pechenegs in 1091 or perhaps even John’s own recent struggles with the Hungarians, but the ambiguity is clearly intentional.16Magdalino, Manuel, 29, 35; Peter Frankopan, The First Crusade: The Call from the East (London: Vintage, 2013), 37–8. The north had been understood as a barbarian region since ancient Greece and Peter is drawing on this idea to present the threat of the north as a natural and persistent feature of the world to bolster his subsequent argument that John should let the crusading states deal with the east as he does the north.17See p. 000 above. On the barbarian north, see chs 3 and 5. Peter is doing more here than just drawing on well-established ideas. His analysis of space also provides a framework through which to understand contemporary events. Indeed, if we accept the standard dating of this letter, it comes just a few years before Peter’s commission of the Latin Qur’an. The suggestion therefore that history has so to speak shifted from the north to the east reflects as much Peter’s own understanding of the place of Islam in a changing world order as it does an attempt to persuade John to return a monastery near Constantinople to the Cluniac order.

Above all, Peter’s letter illustrates how space plays a constitutive role in our engagement with the world, especially when addressing it through a historical lens. Much as in the same way as we speak today about the West or a Global North and South, medieval authors drew upon widely understood spatial categories, like Peter’s northern barbarians, that not only served to describe the world historically and politically, but that also shaped their expectations about and understanding of it. Indeed, Peter’s comments are not so far removed from those of NATO Secretary General Manfred Wörner, discussing new challenges posed by a post-Cold War world in 1993:

Arguably the best-known theory for the ideological construction of space as applied to the Middle Ages, certainly in the anglophone world, is Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said’s theory involves three central historical processes: first, the emergence of the East as a coherent subject of study; second, the construction of cultural east-west binaries; and third, the emergence of western systems of thought that establish dominance over the East, above all through colonial structures. The application of Said’s work to the premodern world is fraught with difficulties, but it still remains a popular and fruitful framework through which to think about western perceptions of and engagement with the east in the Middle Ages.25Lucy K. Pick, ‘Edward Said, Orientalism and the Middle Ages’, Medieval Encounters 5, no. 3 (1999): 265–71. Medievalists have frequently focused on what Said calls the ‘Orientalizing’ of the east, considering the ways in which medieval authors constructed the east in a manner akin to Orientalism and whether these fall within Said’s structures of domination.26Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), 65–7; Kim M. Phillips, Before Orientalism: Asian Peoples and Cultures in European Travel Writing, 1245–1510 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), ch. 1; Akbari, Idols in the East, introduction. What has been less widely interrogated is the spatial framework underlying Said’s theory of a transhistorical opposition between east and west, going back to the ancient Greeks.27Said, Orientalism, 55–63. Most work on medieval Orientalism has instead been content to address a range of geographies such as Asia or India as a synecdoche for the east.28E.g., Phillips, Before Orientalism, 22: ‘Concepts of “Orient,” the “East,” “Asia,” or “India,” then, circulated in a range of European discourses, and each potentially posits an East against which the West might be set, but their generalizations deal mainly in matters of geography, climate, and marvels’. Cf. Akbari, Idols in the East, 12. One major exception is the work of Suzanne Akbari, who has devoted considerable attention to the supposed transhistorical realities of Said’s east-west opposition, arguing in particular that while an orientalist east goes back to the ancient world, its binary opposition to the west only arises in the fourteenth century in the work of John Gower.29Akbari, Idols in the East, chs 1–2; Suzanne Conklin Akbari, ‘From Due East to True North: Orientalism and Orientation’, in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 19–34; Suzanne Conklin Akbari, ‘Alexander in the Orient: Bodies and Boundaries in the Roman de toute chevalerie’, in Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures, ed. Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 105–26. Akbari’s focus on vernacular texts in the later Middle Ages can, however, be usefully brought into closer contact with the Latin discourse of the early twelfth century.

Research on ideas of the west, by contrast, is less closely tied to Said’s concept of Orientalism and has instead been addressed primarily in the context of work on medieval ideas of Europe. Two books published in 1957 by Denys Hay and Jürgen Fischer respectively remain the touchstone of contemporary research on notions of Europe in the Middle Ages.30Denys Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1968; 1st ed. 1957); Jürgen Fischer, Oriens – Occidens – Europa: Begriff und Gedanke ‘Europa’ in der späten Antike und im frühen Mittelalter (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1957). The continued influence of Hay is evident, e.g., in Shane Weller, The Idea of Europe: A Critical History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 22–5. Although Fischer addresses the interrelationship of ideas of Europe with ideas of east and west between late antiquity and the ninth century, his approach is the exception. Hay’s treatment of references to east and west as broadly synonymous with an opposition of Europe and Asia is more typical of work in this area.31Hay, Europe, 1–5, 32–3, 50–1. Said draws directly on Hay in precisely this capacity (Said, Orientalism, 7). The most comprehensive study to date by Klaus Oschema contains ample discussion of east and west and does distinguish concepts of Europe from concepts of the west, yet contains no significant examination of their conceptual relationship.32Oschema follows Fischer’s argument on the relative valuation of occidens and Europa for the Carolingian era: Klaus Oschema, Bilder von Europa im Mittelalter (Ostfildern: Jan Thorbecke Verlag, 2013), 187, passim. On the historiographical relationship of Europe and occidens, see also Wolever, ‘Post-Carolingian Geographies’, 143–6. So while Oschema, for example, includes an important discussion of the trope of ex occidente lux that, as an inversion of the traditional order, presents Christianity as spreading from west to east, the relationship that this has to perceptions of Europe are largely allusive.33Oschema, Bilder von Europa, 186–91. It is noted that Gerald of Wales mentions Europe in one use of this trope and the inversion of east and west is offered as context for the use of Europe in Crusading sources (191, 268). The difference between occidens and Europa is also briefly distinguished for certain authors, such as Pseudo-Bede, Jacques de Vitry or Jean de Roquetaillade (118–19, 188–9, 395–7). But for the most part, these are simply presented as alternative terminologies (e.g., 196, 266, 272, 280–1). There is plenty of fertile ground, therefore, to address the west on its own terms. Elizabeth Lapina and Christoph Mauntel in particular both underscore how, in the context of crusading literature, the west provided a significant locus of self-identification through its contrast with the east.34Christoph Mauntel, ‘Competing with the East: Geographic Ideas and Cultural Self-assessments of the West in Medieval Latin-Christian Thinking’, in Westernness: Critical Reflections on the Spatio-temporal Construction of the West, ed. Christopher GoGwilt, Holt Meyer and Sergey Sistiaga (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022), 11–41; Elizabeth Lapina, Warfare and the Miraculous in the Chronicles of the First Crusade (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), ch. 6. For critical remarks on the interpretation of the translatio imperii as an east-west framework in this context, see Eric Wolever, ‘The Translatio imperii and the Spatial Construction of History in the Twelfth Century’, Journal of Medieval History 50, no. 2 (2024): 247–65. While, as I have argued elsewhere, engaging with a west that is defined by its opposition to the east has a tendency to obscure as much as it reveals, this nevertheless remains a fruitful approach in certain contexts, such as among crusading sources, where the opposition of east and west is both widespread and explicit.35Wolever, ‘Post-Carolingian Geographies’, 144–5, 167–73, and Wolever, ‘Translatio imperii’, 253–7.

In comparison with the east and west, the spatial construction of the north has received somewhat more sustained attention, albeit less clearly connected to a particular theoretical framework. This has focused especially on the role of the north as a religious and ethnic boundary in the early and High Middle Ages. It has been addressed most systematically in Germany since the late 1990s, where this research has been driven by a number of major, publicly-funded projects.36On the wider context of funding from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) for these projects see Len Scales, ‘Before and After Nationes: Accounting for Medieval Peoples in Twenty-First-Century Germany’, German History 33, no. 4 (2015): 634. German scholarship in particular examined the demarcation of northern and eastern frontiers of modern Germany as a locus of identity construction.37Scales, ‘Before and After Nationes’, 633–9. The work of David Fraesdorff is relevant here, which not only focuses the concept of the north as a category of alterity in the central Middle Ages, but engages with it in an expressly interdisciplinary manner. Emblematic of this frontier-based approach, Fraesdorff focuses on canonically German authors writing from the northern frontier between 800–1200: Rimbert, Thietmar of Merseburg, Adam of Bremen and Helmold of Bosau. Situating these authors within a broader framework of the theological, linguistic and geographical reception of antique ideas about the north, Fraesdorff addresses the north as a concept within the concrete political context of the German frontier and the shifting mental maps that underlie them.38Fraesdorff, Norden, esp. 9–10, 45. This branch of German scholarship is characterised by an emphasis on frontier regions and the politics of demarcation.39Scales, ‘Before and After Nationes’, 633–4.

There has likewise been some interest in the north in anglophone scholarship. Although less unified than the German scholarship, this research has concentrated on the early Middle Ages and tended to focus on literary topoi and biblical exegesis as a way to think about the self-conception of central figures in the Carolingian and insular world. A theme is the theological import of the north as a locus of divine punishment, which has been addressed above all in the context of Carolingian theological discourse on the Vikings. Thus, for example, Simon Coupland and James Palmer both highlight how references to the north were part of a broader theology of God’s wrath against his people and in this way a single reference to the north could draw the political turbulence of the era into an intertextual web of biblical and apocalyptic literature.40Simon Coupland, ‘Rod of God’s Wrath or the People of God’s Wrath? The Carolingian Theology of the Viking Invasions’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 42, no. 4 (1991): 535–54; James T. Palmer, The Apocalypse in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), ch. 6, esp. 179–80. See also, Katharine Scarfe Beckett, Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 234–6. These same ideas find resonance with the Normans in the eleventh century: Matthew Gabriele, ‘Frankish Kingship, Political Exegesis and the Ghost of Charlemagne in the Diplomas of King Philip I of Francia’, in The Charlemagne Legend in Medieval Latin Texts, ed. William J. Purkis and Matthew Gabriele (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), 27–30. On the other hand, Robert Rix has sought to redress this negative perception of the north with a study of its more positive connotations in early medieval origo gentis narratives and their role in identity construction.41Robert W. Rix, The Barbarian North in the Medieval Imagination: Ethnicity, Legend, and Literature (New York: Routledge, 2015). There has been some interest in the idea of the north in the interactions of England with the insular world in the early Middle Ages, especially in the travel narrative of two seafarers at the beginning of the Old English Orosius.42Irmeli Valtonen, The North in the Old English Orosius: A Geographical Narrative in Context (Helsinki: Société Néophilologique, 2008); see also Helen Appleton, ‘The Northern World of the Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi’, Anglo-Saxon England 47 (2018): 289–99.

The aforementioned strands of research on the north, west and east have mostly occurred in isolation from one another. While aspects of Orientalism or discourse on Europe have been brought to bear, for example, on discussions of the north, little systematic work has been done to situate medieval engagement with the cardinal regions of the world within the wider spatial discourse of which they were a part.43Scarfe Beckett, Anglo-Saxon Perceptions; Piotr Kochanek, Die Vorstellung vom Norden und der Eurozentrismus: Eine Auswertung der patristischen und mittelalterlichen Literatur (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2004). This has resulted in an often fragmented approach to medieval conceptions of space. As these medieval notions of space do not necessarily conform to our own, such a fragmented approach can easily lead to broader misunderstandings about the medieval concepts themselves, as I argue for example in the case of the supposed westward progression of empire through the translatio imperii.44Wolever, ‘Translatio imperii’; cf. Akbari, ‘Due East to True North’; Akbari, Idols in the East, 46–50.

The one place where the cardinal points have been treated as a unified conceptual system in the Middle Ages is within the realm of theology. The only systematic study of this kind to date remains Barbara Maurmann’s Die Himmelsrichtungen im Weltbild des Mittelalters.45Barbara Maurmann, Die Himmelsrichtungen im Weltbild des Mittelalters: Hildegard von Bingen, Honorius Augustodunensis und andere Autoren (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1976); cf. Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, Fines Terrae: die Enden der Erde und die vierte Kontinent auf mittelalterlichen Weltkarten (Hannover: Hahn, 1992), esp. chs 1 and 4; while Maurmann has not yet been superseded, there has been a recent revival of interest in the cardinal points, see e.g. Mauntel, ‘Competing with the East’, 13n7, and Jerry Brotton, The Four Points of the Compass: The Unexpected History of Direction (London: Penguin, 2024). Maurmann focuses on the cosmological side of the cardinal points, considering them in the context of the winds and the relationship of microcosm and macrocosm. This is brought to bear on the intellectual context for the exegetical and liturgical writings of Hildegard of Bingen and Honorius Augustodunensis. Despite her rich treatment of this theological discourse, Maurmann’s work has not been widely read outside of the specialist literature on these specific authors. More broadly, while there has been some scholarship on the cardinal winds in the Middle Ages, outside of Maurmann’s work these have typically been addressed independently of the cardinal points.46E.g., Barbara Obrist, ‘Wind Diagrams and Medieval Cosmology’, Speculum 72, no. 1 (1997): 33–84; Bianca Kühnel, The End of Time in the Order of Things: Science and Eschatology in Early Medieval Art (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2003); Barbara Baert, ‘Wind is Wild: Pathosformel and Iconology of a Quintessence’, Mitteilungen für Anthropologie und Religionsgeschichte 22 (2015): 205–46. Cf. Maurmann’s earlier work: Barbara Bronder, ‘Das Bild der Schöpfung und Neuschöpfung der Welt als orbis quadratus’, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 6 (1972): 188–210. By bringing the processes of identity construction based on these spatial concepts into conversation with the wider systems of which they are a part, we can enrich not only our understanding of the way in which twelfth-century authors conceptualised the world historically and geographically, but also set the previously disparate research into spatial identities on a firmer foundation.

A longstanding approach to this problem has been to view history-writing, and paradigmatically history-writing in the twelfth century, as part of an unbroken continuum with theology. This approach has long been influential in Germany and is already evident in the work of Johannes Spörl in the 1930s, which was formative in establishing the study of medieval history-writing as a subject in its own right.49Johannes Spörl, Grundformen hochmittelalterlicher Geschichtsanschauung: Studien zum Weltbild der Geschichtsschreiber des 12. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Max Heuber, 1935). On the historiography of medieval history-writing, see Ray, ‘Medieval Historiography’, 33–5, and Goetz, Geschichtsschreibung, 32–4. Despite the stated focus on history-writing, Spörl addresses the theological writings of Anselm of Havelberg (d. 1158), whose Antikeimenon is one of a group of twelfth-century texts that speculates on the theological structure of the ages of the world, on par with the histories of authors like Otto of Freising (d. 1158) and Orderic Vitalis (d. ca. 1142).50Spörl, Grundformen, 15–17, at 15: ‘Die vorliegende Arbeit, die sich auf einige wichtige Geschichtsschreiber des 12. Jahrhunderts beschränkt …’ (The present work, which restricts itself to some important history-writers of the twelfth century …). On Anselm’s place within twelfth-century historical theology, see Brett Edward Whalen, Dominion of God: Christendom and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), ch. 3; Peter Classen, ‘Res Gestae, Universal History, Apocalypse: Visions of the Past and Future’, in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert L. Benson, Giles Constable and Carol D. Lanham (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 403–14. Spörl justifies this decision on the basis that earthly history was theoretically founded on salvation history in the Middle Ages and that therefore medieval historians necessarily drew upon and ideally engaged explicitly with the theological foundations of their subject.51Spörl, Grundformen, 20–1. See generally Goetz, Geschichtsschreibung, 91–7. For varied examples of this approach, see Classen, ‘Res Gestae’; Marie-Dominique Chenu, ‘Theology and the New Awareness of History’, in Nature, Man, and Society in the Twelfth Century, trans. Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 162–201; R. W. Southern, ‘Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing: 2. Hugh of Saint Victor and the Idea of Historical Development’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 21 (1971): 159–79. This approach is of course not restricted to Germany, with anglophone scholarship often drawing more closely upon mid- to late twentieth-century Catholic thought. Thus, for example, Sigbjørn Sønnesyn argues that modern historians have generally failed to appreciate the moral dimension of medieval history-writing, because they have not adequately situated it within the forms of intellectual life, such as Biblical typology or lectio divina (the practice of monastic reading and contemplation), that gave meaning to the practice of history-writing.52Sigbjørn Olsen Sønnesyn, William of Malmesbury and the Ethics of History (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012), ch. 1, esp. 15–20; Sigbjørn Olsen Sønnesyn, ‘Eternity in Time, Unity in Particularity: The Theological Basis of Typological Interpretations in Twelfth-Century Historiography’, in La typologie biblique comme forme de pensée dans l’historiographie médiévale, ed. Marek Thue Kretschmer (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 77–96, and Sigbjørn Olsen Sønnesyn, ‘In vinea Sorech laborare: The Cultivation of Unity in Twelfth-Century Monastic Historiography’, Anglo-Norman Studies 36 (2014): 167–87. History thus serves here as a sort of handmaiden to a broader theological world view. This has the advantage of understanding historians as engaging directly with theological concepts and vocabularies. In seeking a unified theological background into which the work of individual historians fits, this approach does have a tendency to create an overly homogenised view of medieval intellectual life. This runs the risk of obscuring the perspectives of individual authors.53This is what is at stake, for example, in the disagreement between Elisabeth Mégier and Hans-Werner Goetz about how to understand Orderic Vitalis’s idea of ages of the world: Hans-Werner Goetz, Gott und die Welt: religiöse Vorstellungen des frühen und hohen Mittelalters, vol. 1, bk. 2 (Berlin: Akademie, 2012), 232n341; Elisabeth Mégier, ‘Jesus Christ, a Protagonist of Anglo-Norman History? History and Theology in Orderic Vitalis’s Historia ecclesiastica’, in Orderic Vitalis: Life, Works and Interpretations, ed. Charles C. Rozier et al. (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2016), 261n4. Similar critiques have been made around the interpretation of the work of Otto of Freising: Elisabeth Mégier, ‘Tamquam lux post tenebras, oder: Ottos von Freising Weg von der Chronik zu den Gesta Friderici’, in Christliche Weltgeschichte im 12. Jahrhundert: Themen, Variationen und Kontraste. Untersuchungen zu Hugo von Fleury, Ordericus Vitalis und Otto von Freising (Frankfurt aM: Peter Lang, 2010), 40n5; Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen, ‘History, Tragedy and Fortune in Twelfth-Century Historiography with Special Reference to Otto of Freising’s Chronica’, in Historia: The Concept and Genres in the Middle Ages, ed. Tuomas M. S. Lehtonen and Paivi Maria Mehtonen (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 2000), 32–3.

Another approach to the problem of situating medieval history-writing within a wider intellectual world has focused on genre. From this perspective, the relationship of history with other fields of study is grounded foremost in genre constraints and the wider principles of classical rhetoric that govern classical and medieval historiography. The study of genres of history-writing in its traditional sense is exemplified in Herbert Grundmann’s attempt to define the scope and aims of different historical forms like world chronicles, annals or vitae.54Herbert Grundmann, Geschichtsschreibung im Mittelalter: Gattungen – Epochen – Eigenart, 3rd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978), ch. 1; see also Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, Studien zur lateinischen Weltchronistik bis in das Zeitalter Ottos von Freising (Düsseldorf: Triltsch, 1957). See generally Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis, ‘Introduction’, in Historiography in the Middle Ages, ed. Deborah Mauskopf Deliyannis (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 1–13; Guenée, Histoire et culture historique, 200–11; Ray, ‘Medieval Historiography’, 35–42. Such genre boundaries helped define the conceptual horizons of a work and its relationship with other intellectual fields. Bernard Guenée, for example, argues that the relationship of history and chronicle as two distinct historical genres helps to explain the tension that we find between the medieval historian’s desire to offer historical explanations, both naturalistic and theological, and their need to conform to the chronology of events.55Guenée, Histoire et culture historique, 207–11; cf. Ray, ‘Medieval Historiography’, 38–9, and Kempshall, Rhetoric, 441–56. Although this traditional notion of historical genres has been viewed with increasing scepticism since the 1990s as being too vague and ad hoc to be of significant analytical value, a more recent approach along these same lines is found in the renewed emphasis on the relationship between classical rhetoric and history-writing, especially among anglophone historians, such as Matthew Kempshall.56On scepticism towards historical genres, see Deliyannis, ‘Introduction’, 5–7; Goetz, Geschichtsschreibung, 110–24; Justin Lake, ‘Current Approaches to Medieval Historiography’, Historical Compass 13, no. 3 (2015): 90–2. On rhetorical historiography, see Kempshall, Rhetoric, and John O. Ward, ‘Some Principles of Rhetorical Historiography in the Twelfth Century’, in Classical Rhetoric and Medieval Historiography, ed. Ernst Breisach (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985), 103–65. This focus on rhetoric has often been framed explicitly as a response to the prior stands of scholarship on medieval history-writing that ground it in some sort of historical theology. For instance, Peter Van Nuffelen has been a particularly outspoken critic of these theologically driven approaches, which in his view misconstrue the work of the historian as merely a poor attempt at doing theology. Rhetoric, by contrast, offers a basis for the independence of history as a discipline in its own right, which can then engage with theology on its own terms.57On the terms of this dispute, see especially Peter Van Nuffelen, Orosius and the Rhetoric of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) and the response of Hans-Werner Goetz, ‘Orosius und seine “Sieben Geschichtsbücher gegen die Heiden”: Geschichtstheologie oder Rhetorik? Kritische Anmerkungen zu einer Neuerscheinung’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 96, no. 1 (2014): 187–98. While this approach offers more flexibility to engage with the way that individual authors bridge the gap between history and theology within the context of history-writing specifically, this narrower focus on genre renders this approach less apt to address the broader conceptual and linguistic interaction between history and theology that constitutes an author’s wider world view.

Given the noted limitations of the previous approaches, I take my lead here from a recent trend towards particularism in the study of medieval history-writing and from the wider trend among medieval authors themselves towards compilation. Since the decline of an idea of historical genres in the 1990s, increasing emphasis has been placed on the intentionality of the individual author and the way that the circumstances and aims of a particular text shaped its parameters and contents, as opposed to wider genre conventions.58Justin Lake, ‘Authorial Intention in Medieval Historiography’, Historical Compass 12, no. 4 (2014): 345–7; cf. Goetz, Geschichtsschreibung, 124. In a similar vein, the individual manuscripts containing historical texts have attracted new interest for the way that texts are not only shaped by an author, but also adapted in the process of copying or recast through the act of compilation.59Lars Boje Mortensen, ‘Changes of Style and Content as an Aspect of the Copying Process: A Recent Trend in the Study of Medieval Latin Historiography’, in Bilan et perspectives des études médiévales en Europe. Actes du premier Congrès européen d’Études Médiévales (Spoleto, 27–29 mai 1993), ed. Jacqueline Hamesse (Louvain-la-Neuve: Institut d’Etudes Médiévales, 1995), 265–76; see also Jay Rubenstein, ‘What is the Gesta Francorum and Who Was Peter Tudebode?’, Revue Mabillon 16 (2005): 179–204; Benjamin Pohl, Dudo of Saint-Quentin’s Historia Normannorum: Tradition, Innovation and Memory (York: York Medieval Press, 2015); Marek Thue Kretschmer, Rewriting Roman History in the Middle Ages: The ‘Historia Romana’ and the Manuscript Bamberg, Hist. 3 (Leiden: Brill, 2007). This focus on authors, compilers and indeed the manuscripts themselves draws attention to the way in which texts are not merely constrained by the parameters of genre or the preconditions of a world view, but play an active role within these discourses.60The issue of genre is addressed with great sensitivity along these lines in Edward Roberts, Flodoard of Rheims and the Writing of History in the Tenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 78–83, at 81: ‘Texts do not belong to genres but rather participate in them’. Indeed, medieval authors and compilers were themselves accustomed to addressing different fields of study and styles of text alongside one another, as we see in the compilations of authors like Guido of Pisa (fl. ca. 1115) and Lambert of Saint-Omer (fl. ca. 1120) or the multifaceted and encyclopaedic histories of Honorius Augustodunensis (fl. 1098–1140) or Hugh of Saint Victor (d. 1141), which variously blend historical and geographical content with inter alia astronomical, mythical and biblical material.61On the so-called genre of Imago mundi, see Goetz, Geschichtsschreibung, 115–16, and Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, ‘Mappa mundi und Chronographia: Studien zur imago mundi des abendländischen Mittelalters’, Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 24 (1968): 125–8. These collections served various functions, from education on the part of Hugh and Honorius, to civic eulogy for Guido and apocalyptic speculation with Lambert, but what is clear across all of them is how the authors understood history, geography and cosmology as inherently interconnected fields that served to illuminate their view of the world.62Valerie V. I. Flint (ed., Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 57 (1982): 1–153) in Honorius Augustodunensis, Imago mundi, 13–18 [hereafter Hon., Im. mun.]; Lars Boje Mortensen, ‘Hugh of St. Victor on Secular History: A Preliminary Edition of Chapters from His Chronica’, Cahiers de l’institut du moyen-âge grec et latin 62 (1992): 4; Michele Campopiano, ‘Construction of the Text, Construction of the Past. Historical Knowledge, Classical Myth and Ideology in a Medieval Comune (Pisa, Eleventh to Twelfth Centuries)’, Troianalexandria 9 (2009): 63–84; Jay Rubenstein, ‘Lambert of Saint-Omer and the Apocalyptic First Crusade’, in Remembering the Crusades: Myth, Image, and Identity, ed. Nicholas Paul and Suzanne Yeager (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 69–95. In this way, rather than imagining history and theology as dependent or independent subjects governed by particular genres and norms, we may think about them as fields of possibility that lay open to an author.

There is, however, a wider context to these chronological boundaries. The decades between 1140 and 1160 represent a significant juncture in the intellectual environment of western Europe. This is especially relevant in the context of history-writing, as the traditional narrative of twelfth-century historiography tends to culminate with mid-century figures like Otto of Freising.64Classen, ‘Res Gestae’; Michael Staunton, ‘Did the Purpose of History Change in England in the Twelfth Century?’, in Writing History in the Anglo-Norman World: Manuscripts, Makers and Readers, c.1066–1250, ed. Laura Cleaver and Andrea Worm (York: York Medieval Press, 2018), 7–9; Denys Hay, Annalists and Historians: Western Historiography from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Centuries (London: Methuen, 1977), ch. 3; Beryl Smalley, Historians in the Middle Ages (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), chs 5–8. It has also been suggested that from the second half of the century historians turned away from synthetic narrative and towards more bare chronicling.65Kempshall, Rhetoric, 438. Similarly in the field of geography, we find, for instance, a growing awareness of eastern and African Christianity in the second half of the century in a manner unprecedented in the preceding half-century.66Camille Rouxpetel, L’Occident au miroir de l’Orient chrétien: Cilicie, Syrie, Palestine et Égypte (XIIe–XIVe siècle) (Rome: École française de Rome, 2015), 107–15; Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, Die ‘Nationes Christianorum orientalium’ im Verständnis der lateinischen Historiographie: Von der Mitte des 12. bis in die zweite Hälfte des 14. Jahrhunderts (Cologne: Böhlau, 1973), 424; Hamilton, ‘Impact of the Crusades’, 23–4. So also in the areas of overlap between history and theology, the third quarter of the century saw the emergence of new and influential historical projects, above all with Joachim of Fiore and Peter Comestor.67On Joachim, see Matthias Riedl, ed., A Companion to Joachim of Fiore (Leiden: Brill, 2017). On Peter Comestor, see Mark Clark, The Making of the Historia Scholastica, 1150–1200 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2015). On a broader scale, the mid-century marks a turning point in the schools towards institutionalisation of the sort that would ultimately result in the birth of the medieval university a few decades later and which had no less significant implications for the intellectual culture of the latter half-century.68Stephen C. Ferroulo, The Origins of the University: The Schools of Paris and Their Critics, 1100–1215 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 279; Ian P. Wei, ‘From Twelfth-Century Schools to Thirteenth-Century Universities: The Disappearance of Biographical and Autobiographical Representations of Scholars’, Speculum 86, no. 1 (2011): 42–78; Wim Verbaal, ‘The Council of Sens Reconsidered: Masters, Monks, or Judges?’, Church History 74, no. 3 (2005): 460–93; cf. R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950–1250 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 23.

Finally, on a more conceptual level, dividing the twelfth century at the mid-point has equally relevant implications for the way that we think about the period as historians. It is typical, especially in the field of intellectual history, to follow Charles Homer Haskins’s Renaissance of the Twelfth Century and think about the period in terms of a long twelfth century.69In its classical form, this encompassed a period from 1050–1250: Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), 8–10. Subsequent scholars have tended to expand the earlier boundary, even as far as the late tenth century: Thomas F. X. Noble, ‘Introduction’, in European Transformations, ed. Noble and Van Engan, 4–5. The result is a forward-looking historiography: ‘we think of the poets and scholars of the early twelfth century always as forerunners, never as fulfillers of an intellectual tradition’.70C. Stephen Jaeger, ‘Pessimism in the Twelfth-Century “Renaissance”’, Speculum 78, no. 4 (2003): 1182; cf. Verbaal, ‘Council of Sens’, 492–3. This is a crucially important observation if we seek to engage with authors of the early twelfth century on their own terms. It is all too easy to read these authors with a knowledge of later historical developments, like the ultimate futility of the crusading movement or the role of travellers in expanding geographical knowledge of the east.71Jay Rubenstein, Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 314; Rouxpetel, L’Occident, 48–53. More significantly, to capture the disruptive nature of the moment on the geographical awareness of twelfth-century authors, it is important to appreciate how they still stood in the shadow of a post-Carolingian conception of the world.72Wolever, ‘Post-Carolingian Geographies’; Matthew Gabriele, An Empire of Memory: The Legend of Charlemagne, the Franks, and Jerusalem before the First Crusade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

This distinction has implications for the language of the cardinal points. Macrobius explains that since ‘we’ inhabit the northern temperate zone:

Yet just as the distinction between the heavens and earth is not consistently observed, neither is the corresponding distinction between meridies and auster. Although Isidore distinguishes the parts of the sky and earth, he uses meridies for both.84Isi., Etym. 3.42.1–3, 13.1.3–6. Likewise, while Isidore names the northern zone by its proper Greek term arctos, he describe it in terms of the Latin aquilo, a trend already identified more than a century earlier by Servius: ‘the first [zone is] septentrionalis, or, as some want, aquilonius’.85Isi., Etym. 3.44.4; Servius, In Vergilii Georgica 1.233, ed. Georg Thilo, In Vergilii carmina commentarii, 3 vols (Leipzig: Teubner, 1881–7), 3:186: ‘primus septentrionalis, vel, ut quidam voluit, aquilonius’. So while Honorius was very likely influenced by Macrobius, the extent of this influence on geographical texts is difficult to gauge. Isidore, for example, is mostly consistent in his use of meridies, with auster appearing only four times in the fourteenth book of the Etymologies.86Isi., Etym. 14.3.12, 14.6.14–15, 14.7.5. Honorius also prefers meridies, although not so consistently as Isidore.87Hon., Im. mun. 1.7–35, ed. Flint, 52–66. On the other hand, Hugh of Saint Victor prefers auster through the first half of his Descriptio mappae mundi, perhaps reflecting the role of winds on many medieval maps.88Hugh of Saint Victor, Descriptio mappe mundi 1–18, ed. Patrick Gautier Dalché (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1988), 134–51 [hereafter HoSV, Desc.]. So, although inconsistent, there is a general preference for meridies and septentrio in geographical descriptions.89Cf., e.g., Orosius, Historiarum adversum paganos libri VII 1.2.9–104, ed. C. Zangemeister (Leipzig: Teubner, 1889), 5–15 [hereafter Orosius]; Julius Honorius, Cosmographia 39–51, ed. Alexander Riese, Geographi latini minores (Heilbronn: Henninger, 1878), 46–55 [hereafter Jul. Hon., Cosm.]; Dicuil, Liber de mensura orbis terrae 1–5, ed. and trans. J. J. Tierney (Dublin: The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1967), 44–59; Guido of Pisa, Geographica 120–30, ed. Joseph Schnetz, Itineraria Romana, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1990), 139–42; Lambert of Saint-Omer, Liber floridus, 21r, 50r–v, 54v, 139r [hereafter Lamb., Lib. flor.]. All citations of Lambert are to the autograph manuscript (Ghent, University Library, MS 92) with reference also to Albert Derolez, Lamberti Audomarensis Canonici Liber Floridus: Codex authographus 92 bibliothecae universitatis Gandavensis. Auspiciis eiusdem universitatis in commemorationem diei natalis (Ghent: Story-Scientia, 1968).

A second important distinction is between the winds and the cardinal points. Most cosmological, geographical and encyclopaedic texts make a point of enumerating a list of the winds and many distinguish this list from a separate list of the cardinal points. This sort of distinction is already evident in antiquity, as when Pliny explains that while the ancients had only four winds, for the four parts of the world, now there are eight winds, two for each part of the sky.90Pliny the Elder, Naturalis historia 2.46.119, ed. and trans. H. Rackham, Natural History, vols 1–2, Loeb Classical Library 330, 352 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938–42), 1:260–1; see p. 000 below. Thus, the four parts of the world/sky: oriens, meridies, occasus and septentrio, are distinguished from the four cardinal winds: Subsolanus, Auster, Favonius and Septentrio.91Pliny, Naturalis historia 2.46.119, ed. Rackham, 1:260–1. This sort of distinction is clearly delineated and passed on to the Middle Ages in the encyclopaedic sources of the seventh to eighth centuries.92For wind diagrams, see Obrist, ‘Wind Diagrams’, 45–9. Both Isidore and Bede draw the same distinction, providing separate enumerations of the four parts of the world and the names of the winds.93Isi., Etym. 3.42.1–3, 13.1.3–6, 13.11.2–14; Bede, De natura rerum 10, 27, CCSL 123A, 200–1, 218–19. Likewise, in the twelfth century, Hugh begins his Descriptio mappae mundi with an exposition of the winds, likely derived from Isidore’s Etymologies, which distinguishes Subsolans from ortus solis, Auster from meridies, Zephirus from occidens and leaves the double signification of Septentrio self-evident.94HoSV, Desc. 1, ed. Gautier Dalché, 134. Honorius, on the other hand, provides separate chapters for the wind rose and for the cardinal points, both of heaven and earth, but does not describe the cardinal winds in terms of the cardinal points.95Hon., Im. mun. 1.60, 91–2, ed. Flint, 73, 81.

The use of the winds in actual geographical description is uncommon, although the equivocal vocabulary can lead to interpretive problems. For instance, aquilo and boreas can refer either to north (as a cardinal point) or north-east (as a wind). Two cases will adequately highlight the difficulty here. In the first case, although Orosius only uses the four cardinal points for African and Asian geography, his European geography employs a more specific vocabulary. In one of the most elaborate cases, Macedonia is described as having ‘the Agean sea to the east; Thrace to the north-east; Euboea and the Macedonian Gulf to the south-east; Acaea to the south; to its west (favonius) are the Acroceraunian mountains … ; to its west (occasus) is Dalmatia; to its north-west, Dardania; to its north, Moesia’.96Orosius, 1.2.57, ed. Zangemeister, 10, trans. A. T. Fear, Seven Books of History against the Pagans (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 42–3: ‘Macedonia habet ab oriente Aegaeum mare, a borea Thraciam, ab euro Euboeam et Macedonicum sinum, a meridie Achaiam, a fauonio montes Acrocerauniae … ab occasu Dalmatiam, a circio Dardaniam, a septentrione Moesiam’. While their meaning here is relatively clear, given the opposition to septentrio, the use of aquilo or boreas often comes down to context. For example, Fear chooses to translate boreas simply as ‘north’ in the description of Britain’s northern extension, but as ‘north-east’ when describing Ireland’s extension ab Africo in boream.97Orosius, 1.2.76, 80, ed. Zangemeister, 12, trans. Fear, 45. Furthermore, even though aquilo is consistently translated as ‘north-east’ in Orosius’s geography of the world, its two occurrences in the history itself are translated (correctly) as just ‘north’.98Orosius, 5.24.14, 7.23.5, ed. Zangemeister, 184, 263, trans. Fear, 259, 359.

A trickier case is that of Hugh of Saint Victor. His vocabulary is quite consistent in the chapters that are original to the Decriptio (1–23). East, west and south are consistently oriens, occidens and auster, with only one case each of africus and meridianus.99HoSV, Desc. 3, 18, ed. Gautier Dalché, 136, 151. For north, Hugh prefers septentrio, but there are also three instances of aquilo that are not obviously a product of his sources.100Cf. Gautier Dalché on HoSV, Desc. 7, ll. 168, 171 and 12, l. 285, in ed. Gautier Dalché, 138–9, 143. While two may simply be used to contrast with auster, all three plausibly describe a specifically north-eastern geography: the region around the Caucasus Mountains.101HoSV, Desc. 7, 12, ed. Gautier Dalché, 138–9, 143–5. To complicate matters further, like in Orosius, Hugh sometimes uses the winds as intermediate directions when describing European geography, as when he contrasts the two northern trajectories from the Alps: ‘one part extends between the Alps, from the south (auster) into the north (septentrio) and the Adriatic, and again from the south (auster) to the north-east (boreas), from the Tyrrhenian Sea and Sicily up to the mouth of the river Danube’.102HoSV, Desc. 19, ed. Gautier Dalché, 151: ‘Vna pars inter Alpes ab austro in septentrione et mare Adriaticum tenditur, et iterm ab austro ad boream a Tyrreno mari uel Siculo usque ad ostia Danubii fluminis’. So even when authors use the winds for directions, they tend to be subsumed within a broader vocabulary of the cardinal points. The limiting factor in this case may simply be the specificity of the geography as much as any particular preference for a certain vocabulary. With the advent of the compass and early developments towards portolan charts from the late twelfth century, there is a corresponding increase in the use of a wind rose for orientation, rather than merely the cardinal points.103Patrick Gautier Dalché, Carte marine et portulan au XIIe siècle: Le Liber de Existencia Riverierarum et Forma Maris Nostri Mediterranei (Pise, circa 1200) (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1995), 69–76; Christiane Deluz, ‘Une image du monde: La géographie dans l’Occident médiéval (Ve–XVe siècle)’, in La terre: Connaissance, représentations, mesure au moyen âge, ed. Patrick Gautier Dalché (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 114. Even still, there is a blending of the terminology as oriens and occidens are integrated into the compass rose.104Gautier Dalché, Carte marine, 74–5. As such, although the two vocabularies are generally distinguished, this distinction was never absolute.

History-writing in particular brings a range complications with it on this front. Although there has been some productive research on the use of individual terms, as with Fraesdorff’s discussion of the distinction between different terms for the north, the broader backdrop to these changes remains largely unstudied.107Fraesdorff, Norden, 37–40, 144–53. Thus while Fraesdorff contextualises changing terminology around the turn of the eleventh century in terms of an increasing familiarity with those regions since the Carolingian era, the literary context for this change would repay further study.108Fraesdorff, Norden, 130–43. Alongside this specific proliferation of terminology for the north from the late eleventh century, there is also a coordinate proliferation of directional terminology generally in certain histories. Indeed, as Fraesdorff notes of Adam of Bremen’s (d. post 1081) terminology, while at times we find aquilo taking on a specifically negative connotation, in contrast with the more neutral septentrio, both are still used as neutral geographical terms.109Fraesdorff, Norden, 147n180, 149n192–5; cf. Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum 1.5, 4.4, 36, ed. Bernhard Schmeidler, MGH SS rer. Germ. 2 (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1917), 7, 232, 272. So from a broader literary perspective, there is already an extent to which Adam simply varies his terminology for variety’s sake. This affects more than just the north, as Adam likewise uses oriens and ortus (solis) for east; occidens and occasus (solis) for west; and meridies and auster for south.110E.g., Oriens: Adam of Bremen, Gesta Hammaburgensis 1.1, 2.19, 4.1, MGH SS rer. Germ. 2, 4, 75, 230; Ortus: 1.5, 4.5, 10, MGH SS rer. Germ. 2, 7, 233, 239; Occidens: 2.58, 4.5, 10, MGH SS rer. Germ. 2, 118, 233, 238; Occasus: 1.5, 2.22, 4.10, MGH SS rer. Germ. 2, 7, 81, 238; Meridies: 1.5, 2.17, 4.5, MGH SS rer. Germ. 2, 7, 72, 233; Auster: 1.10, 2.19, 4.13, MGH SS rer. Germ. 2, 10, 75, 241. An interesting question therefore arises about the way that authors vary their terminology.

There are three trends among historians in the early twelfth century which, while not exhaustive, should provide a good indication of the sort of variation that should be expected. These trends must first be situated within the classical rhetorical tradition, under which classical and medieval historiography fell, and the principles it prescribes regarding style and the choice of vocabulary.111Kempshall, Rhetoric, 295–7. A fundamental principle of classical rhetoric is that the skilful orator employs a style of language appropriate to the subject matter and audience.112Cicero, Orator 21.71, ed. Rolf Westman (Leipzig: Teubner, 1980), 21–2; Rhetorica ad Herennium 4.2.3, ed. Gualtiero Calboli, Cornifici seu incerti auctoris ‘Rhetorica ad C. Herennium’, vol. 1 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 280. Cicero influentially categorises these possibilities into three styles – grand, moderate and simple.113Terence O. Tunberg, ‘Prose Styles and Cursus’, in Medieval Latin: An Introduction and Bibliographical Guide, ed. F. A. C. Mantello and A. G. Rigg (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 111–14; Kempshall, Rhetoric, 296–9; Cicero, Orator 29.101, ed. Westman, 30; Rhetorica ad Herennium 4.8–10.11–14, ed. Calboli, 292–6; Augustine, De doctrina christiana 4.17–27.34–60, ed. William M. Green, CSEL 80 (Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1963), 143–66; cf. Cicero, De oratore 3.45.177, ed. Kazimierz F. Kumaniecki (Leipzig: Teubner, 1969), 336. But this is only implicitly linked to the treatment of vocabulary.114See also Cicero, De oratore 3.38–43.152–70, ed. Kumaniecki, 321–32; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 8.3.24–39, ed. Michael Winterbottom, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 2:435–8; Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii 5.509–13, ed. James Willis (Leipzig: Teubner, 1983), 175–7. When it comes to the latter, the Rhetorica Ad Herennium offers the most useful treatment of vocabulary selection for our purposes in its discussion of clarity. Clarity is what makes language easy to understand, and it is achieved through the use of ordinary and proper vocabulary.115Rhetorica ad Herennium 4.12.17, ed. Calboli, 302–3: ‘Explanatio est, quae reddit apertam et dilucidam orationem. Ea conparatur duabus rebus, usitatis uerbis et propriis. Vsitata sunt ea, quae uersantur in sermone, consuetudine cotidiana; propria, quae eius rei uerba sunt aut esse possunt, qua de loquemur’ (Clarity is what renders speech clear and evident. This is achieved through two things: ordinary and proper words. Ordinary words are those which are employed in speech according to common use; proper words are those which are, or can be, the proper terms for the thing about which we speak). Cf. Quintilian, 8.2, ed. Winterbottom, 2:425–30. We can see both of these impulses at work in the context of directional terminology.

In the first case, there are authors who exhibit a ‘conservative’ reliance on a simple and consistent set of terms for the cardinal points. A prime example of this trend is the Chronicle of Sigebert of Gembloux (d. 1112). Although immensely well read, Sigebert uses a narrow and consistent vocabulary for the cardinal points throughout his chronicle. Indeed, besides using both meridies and auster for south, Sigebert entirely restricts himself to oriens, occidens and aquilo along with their adjectival forms. This conspicuously mirrors the vocabulary of the Vulgate, which uses an equally unadorned terminology for the cardinal points, with only oriens, occidens and aquilo in the vast majority of cases. Septentrio appears just over a dozen times along with a bare handful of instances of ortus or occasus.116E.g., Ex 38:11, Ps 67:5, 102:12, Lk 12:54, 1 Mc 12:37. But as with Sigebert, the Vulgate also uses meridies and auster with almost equal frequency. Thus, Sigebert appears to have adopted a specifically biblical lexicon by varying only his southern terminology. Finally, this contrast between the variability of southern vocabulary and the consistency of the northern vocabulary may serve to underscore the theme of evil arising from the north, which Sigebert introduced at the beginning of the Chronicle.117Sigebert of Gembloux, Chronica prol., ed. Ludwig Bethmann, MGH SS 6 (Hannover: Hahn, 1844), 302 [hereafter Sig., Chron.]; cf. Fraesdorff, Norden, 37–44; see p. 000 below.

In the annalistic sources of the eleventh century, we see a different trend emerging for the use of proper terminology, which is evident especially in the changing vocabulary of the north.118E.g., Annales Augustani 1042, ed. G. H. Pertz, MGH SS 3 (Hannover: Hahn, 1839), 126; Hermanni Augiensis Chronicon 1042, 1051, ed. G. H. Pertz, MGH SS 5 (Hannover: Hahn, 1844), 124, 130; Annales Quedlinburgenses 1020, ed. Martina Giese, MGH SS rer. Germ. 72 (Hannover: Hahn, 2004), 558; cf. Fraesdorff, Norden, 134–43. This is plainly apparent, for example, in the change in terminology among Sigebert’s continuers. Already in the first continuation to 1136, Anselm of Gembloux no longer maintains Sigebert’s terminological consistency, using septentrio for the north.119Anselm of Gembloux, Continuatio Sigeberti 1117, MGH SS 6, 376–7; Chazan, L’Empire et l’histoire universelle, 316–19, notes a wider loss of ideological clarity as well. Septentrio is likewise used by both the Auctarium Aquicinense and Robert of Torigni (d. 1186).120Auctarium Aquicinense 1092, ed. L. Bethmann, MGH SS 6 (Hannover: Hahn, 1844), 394; Robert of Torigni, Chronica 876, ed. and trans. Thomas N. Bisson, The Chronography of Robert of Torigni, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2020), 2:2–3; cf. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Latin 15009, 27r. However, a more striking example of the shift in vocabulary is seen in the Chronicle of Romuald of Salerno (d. 1181). With two exceptions, both drawn directly from Bede and Jerome respectively, it uses aquilo consistently up to 990.121Romuald of Salerno, Chronicon, ed. C. A. Garufi, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, 2nd series, vol. 7.1 (Città di Castello: S. Lapi, 1909–35), 9, 21, 71, 91, 100, 138 [hereafter Romuald]. Citations of Romuald follow the pagination of Garufi’s edition. On the problems with this edition, see Carl Erdmann’s review in Neues Archiv 48 (1930): 510–12. Cf. Jerome, In Hieremiam libri sex 1.1, ed. Siegfried Reiter, CSEL 59 (Vienna: Tempsky 1913), 6, and Bede, De temporum ratione 66, ed. C. W. Jones, CCSL 123B (Turnhout: Brepols, 1967), 463–535. From 990 onwards, septentrio is used in every instance, save one description of the sky turning red as fire ‘from the northern (septentrio) region towards the north (arctos)’.122Romuald, 208, cf. 170, 205, 251: ‘a septemtrionali parte usque ad arcton’. This change in vocabulary corresponds with the ‘Troian section’ of the chronicle, that runs from the threshold of the eleventh century to roughly 1125.123See D. J. A. Matthews, ‘The Chronicle of Romuald of Salerno’, in The Writing of History in the Middle Ages: Essays presented to Richard William Southern, ed. R. H. C. Davis and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 250–2, and p. 000 below. In both cases septentrio is used specifically to refer to heavenly signs, and is therefore plausibly understood as a turn towards proper terminology.

There is still a third consideration when it comes to vocabulary selection: aesthetics. One of the fundamental principles of ancient and medieval aesthetics was varietas.124See generally Mary Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), ch. 5, and Jacqueline M. Burek, Literary Variety and the Writing of History in Britain’s Long Twelfth Century (York: York Medieval Press, 2023), ch. 1. It is central, for example, to Ad Herennium’s discussion of rhetorical ornamentation: ‘Dignitas is that which renders speech ornate, distinguishing it with varietas’.125Rhetorica ad Herennium 4.13.18, ed. Calboli, 304: ‘Dignitas est, quae reddit ornatam orantionem uarietate distinguens’. Cf. Quintilian, 8.3.24, ed. Winterbottom, 2:435; Carruthers, Beauty, 137–8. Varietas is likewise influentially associated with mere diversitas by Augustine, who interprets the many colours of the queen’s dress in Psalm 44:10 as the variety of languages that express the mysteries of the faith: ‘we understand varietas from the diversitas of languages’.126Augustine, Enarrationes 44.24, ed. E. Dekkers and J. Fraipont, CCSL 38 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1956), 512: ‘uarietatem intelleximus de diuersitate linguarum’; Carruthers, Beauty, 156. The aesthetic aspect of varietas, and indeed the importance of variation for variation’s sake as Augustine describes, remained a key aspect of aesthetic experience in the twelfth century. Otto of Freising cites Psalm 44, for example, in justification of the proliferation of religious orders in the twelfth century.127Otto of Freising, Chronica sive historia de duabus civitatibus 7.35, ed. Adolf Hofmeister, MGH SS rer. Germ. 45 (Hannover, 1912), 371. But this is best expressed in Bernard of Clairvaux’s (d. 1153) famous invective against the excessive ornamentation of Cluny: ‘so multiple, and so marvellous a variety of diverse forms appears everywhere, that one would rather read in the marble than in the codices’.128Bernard of Clairvaux, Apologia 12.29, ed. Jean Leclercq, Bernardi Opera, vol. 3 (Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1963), 106. I have adapted Carruthers’s translation in Beauty, 148: ‘Tam multa denique, tam que mira diversarum formarum apparet ubique varietas, ut magis legere libeat in marmoribus, quam in codicibus’. Finally, for history-writing in particular, the principle of variety already plays a central role as a principle for narrative construction.129Karl F. Morrison, History as a Visual Art in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 93–102.

A useful testing ground for this idea is the variation of terms for west, since unlike with the north, there is no significant difference of terminology to grapple with. In most cases there are simply four derivatives of occido: occidens, occidentalis, occasus and occiduus. Variation between these terms can therefore be understood prima facie as an aesthetic choice. Orderic Vitalis, for instance, describes the assembly of the crusading army ‘from many peoples of the western (occidentalium) regions’.130Orderic Vitalis, Historia ecclesiastica 9.1, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969–80), 5:4 [hereafter OV], my trans.: ‘a multis occidentalium populis’. Although this expresses the same point as Baudri of Bourgueil, Historia Ierosolimitana prol., ed. Steven Biddlecombe (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014), 3 [hereafter Baudri, Hist.], the wording is entirely Orderic’s. Just a few lines later he reiterates the point, emphasising how the holy sepulchre enticed the ‘western (occiduos) faithful’.131OV, 9.1, ed. Chibnall, 5:4, my trans.: ‘occiduos fideles’. Bede’s description of the Saxons offers another example of this sort of variation. He normally refers to the West Saxons as ‘Occidentales Saxones’. Yet when he introduces the three groups that came from Old Saxony, he refers to them as ‘Occidui Saxones’. One potential explanation is his reference to Wessex (provincia Occidentalium Saxonum) in the preceding sentence.132Bede, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum 1.15, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 50–1. In both cases, the change in terminology is not important for clarity, but is best understood as an artistic decision on the part of the author. At the same time, it is important to remember that repetition could be considered a virtue as much as a vice.133Rhetorica ad Herennium 4.12.18, 4.14.20–1, ed. Calboli, 304, 306–7. So Orderic’s use of the same term twice in quick succession for the western (occidentalis) knights recruited by Bohemond may have been intentional.134OV, 8.20, ed. Chibnall, 4:264–5.

This sort of rhetorical variation can be seen with other terms as well. An extensive example is Bede’s shifting terminology of the north in his description of Britain and Ireland. He describes how Britain lies between septentrio and occidens, extending 800 miles to the north (boreas). Days and nights vary greatly by season there since, under the north (septentrio) pole, the summer sun passes through the north (boreas). Besides Britain, Ireland is the next largest island, on whose north (septentrio) shore the Picts landed. It is shorter than Britain to the north (aquilo) but extends further south, almost level with northern (septentrionalis) Spain.135Bede, Historia ecclesiastica 1.1, ed. Colegrave and Mynors, 14–19. Similarly, Orderic describes how Antenor settled on the shore of the northern (boreas) ocean, from whom the Normans (aquilonales homini) descend.136OV, 9.3, ed. Chibnall, 5:24–5. Variation of terminology, therefore, must be considered not only in terms of meaning, but also in terms of an aesthetics.

The subsequent chapters address individual case studies on the north, east and west, and south respectively, showing how different authors engaged with the changing world of the early twelfth century. These will consider the function of the cardinal points as overarching categories within the historical consciousness of the early twelfth century and especially as categories for identity formation. Chapters 4 and 5 explore issues of identity, where traditional understandings of north, west and east were being challenged or even overturned through the newly emerging historical contexts. Finally, Chapter 6 will evaluate the general absence of discussion of the south and highlight an important exception to this trend at the monastery of Cluny. This material will underscore not only the ideological significance of space as a category for medieval authors, but also that medieval authors were self-conscious of and actively engaged with their geographical conceptions of the world.

We begin in Chapter 1 with ‘The Exegetical Tradition’. The Ordinary Gloss on the Bible offers a useful entry to the Patristic and Carolingian tradition at the emerging schools of northern France. Here we find that the cardinal points were not only a fundamental geographical vocabulary in the Bible and the subsequent Latin exegetical tradition, but by the twelfth century they had developed a relatively stable set of exegetical, especially allegorical, associations. While this basic allegorical repertoire served as a foundation for the interpretation of the cardinal points in the Bible, we find a consistent interplay between the standard associations and the demands of the particular text that could only be resolved through a particular exegetical narrative. In this way, the interpretation of the cardinal points remained multifaceted with each direction playing multiple roles, as in the interpretation of Jews and Gentiles from the Fathers to the twelfth century. Finally, a case study on the interpretation of the four gates of the heavenly Jerusalem reveals how twelfth-century exegetes showed increasing freedom in their treatment of the biblical text and its allegorisation.

Chapter 2 follows with ‘The Geographical Tradition’. Ancient and medieval geography was structured fundamentally around two-, three- and four-part divisions of the inhabited world. The classical world focused especially on a north-south climatic opposition, often overwritten onto the division of the world into Europa, Asia and ultimately Africa or Libya. With the Fathers and the late antique Cosmographia of Julius Honorius, the cardinal directions take on an increasing significance within geographical description and as geographical regions themselves alongside Europe, Africa and Asia or the tres partes, as medieval authors referred to them. As the north, south and west developed increasing autonomy as geographical regions, they exerted influence over the way that authors conceptualised the north-western and south-eastern edges of the world. By the twelfth century, the resultant tensions are identifiable in both textual geographies and maps. Africa, Ethiopia and Egypt come to be treated as a combined, southern region of the world and the islands around Britain are increasingly associated with only one of north or west. Furthermore, given the growing prominence of maps and schematisation of geographical exposition, we find a reordering of the tres partes especially associated with the schools of northern France and the self-conscious structuring of geographical exposition around a conventional east-west movement. Finally, the inclusion of allegorisations of the cardinal points on geographical and cosmological diagrams shows how the cardinal points developed more than a merely structural or organisational significance in the conceptualisation of the world.

Chapter 3, ‘The North in Universal Historiography’, charts the use of the north across three universal chronicles – those by Sigebert of Gembloux, Romuald of Salerno and Orderic Vitalis – from different regions of western Europe in the early to mid-twelfth century. The vocabulary of the cardinal points provided these historians with a mutually intelligible discourse based on a shared set of value-laden associations. Well into the middle of the century the north remained the most prominent and widely discussed region of the world. All three authors understood the north as a region of chaos and violence, inhabited by pagan peoples, who posed a consistent threat to the order of the Christian world. In this capacity the north takes on a broader ideological significance as an antitype to Christianity as well as broader notions of civility and order. Despite this shared understanding, each historian adapts these ideas to their own context and to the aims of their particular histories. The north thus played a role in arguments about the investiture controversy and right order of the world as well as about the relationship of the southern Italian Normans and the papacy or justifications for the Norman conquest of England.

Chapter 4, on ‘Western Identity and the First Crusade’, considers how the success and memory of the First Crusade provided the impetus for significant reevaluation of the idea of the west. Despite its traditionally negative associations, in the wake of the First Crusade we find a range of authors identifying the west as the preeminent Christian region of the world. While it finds scant use among the eye-witness accounts of the crusade, the French Benedictine revisers of the Gesta Francorum develop a starkly polemical opposition between a west, charged with providential authority, against an east that had been all but lost to heresy and Islam. Yet the application of this vocabulary to the crusading venture quickly extended beyond the histories of the First Crusade itself. Chronicles, especially in Bavaria and the diocese of Liège, pick up on the terminology of the west to discuss the unity of diverse groups involved in the corporate activity of the Christian world. Finally, we see this bleeding out into the wider historical consciousness of Anglo-Norman historians, as William of Malmesbury in particular associates the western crusaders with Charlemagne and the introduction of the English into a nascent community of western nations.

In Chapter 5, Normans reevaluate themselves as ‘The Men of the North’. From the 1130s, the etymology of northmannus (Norman) as a combination of the words ‘north’ and ‘man’ starts being included in histories, both general and ducal, written within the Duchy of Normandy. This occurs first in the writing of Orderic Vitalis, who applies this etymology to his broader argument about the reformation of the Normans’ natural love of violence and conquest. Robert of Torigni’s use of the etymology likewise reveals a wider range of influences. The application of classical ethnographic characteristics ties it into the wider reception of classical texts and newly translated medical writings, which were widely disseminated through the Norman world. This allowed for Norman authors to not only establish their gens among the nations of western Europe, but also to reframe the violence of their traditionally negative northern origin in a positive light. Indeed, by the 1160s authors such as Stephen of Rouen are able to boast of the chivalric prowess of the now specifically Scandinavian Normans over the French.

Finally, Chapter 6 considers the issue of ‘North and No South’ in twelfth-century history-writing. Unlike the north or even east and west, the south receives very little discussion in the twelfth century. In the context of Scandinavia, there is a common rhetorical opposition of the north with a spiritual vision of the Church as the south. But there is a clear asymmetry here, as while the north is a real geography, the south represents merely a spiritual condition in this trope. Otherwise, we find hints of Italy being described as south from the perspective of Gaul, but it is rarely actually described in these terms. There is a small subsection of authors who do explicitly discuss the south as a region of the world in historical contexts, a group of authors centrally associated with the monastery of Cluny between the mid-eleventh and mid-twelfth century. This is most evident by far in the extensive geopolitical and ethnographical comments of Peter the Venerable, but this awareness of Africa and explicit discussion of the south appears in a range of other Cluniac authors. Through Cluny’s early connections with Spain and hagiographical tradition around the abduction of Abbot Maiolus by Muslims, we can see how authors associated with the monastery developed a unique vision of the world, characterised by a clearer awareness of the Islamic world and a closer association of Islam with Spain and Africa or the south.

By the twelfth century, the cardinal points had not only established themselves as the basic vocabulary for geographical description in exegetical, geographical and historical texts, but they brought with them a well-established collection of ideas about the significance of each direction as well as the associated regions of the world. This formed a coherent and ubiquitous discourse that not only structured the way that authors conceptualised their place in world, geographically, historically and spiritually, but also provided them with a means to describe and contest that image. Faced with the opening of north, east and south to the Latin world, through conquest and cultural interchange, and catalysed by an education revolution at the nascent schools and through the arrival of Greek and Arabic learning, twelfth-century authors naturally turned to this vocabulary to come to grips with the rapidly changing world. Greater attention to the cardinal points therefore not only reveals the interplay of still significant post-Carolingian ideas about the world with the new realities of northern and eastern expansion, but also underscores the broader ideological significance of space as a category in the Middle Ages.