The Normans and their Viking relatives have long been known as masterful seafarers and clever adapters of local cultures wherever they settled and conquered. The various clusters in this broad collection of people associated with the move from Scandinavia to the north of France, and thence to England, Sicily, and the Crusader States, have been a mainstay in medievalist scholarship for many decades. While recent trends in scholarship have mostly examined each group of so-called Normans independently, rather than as part of a larger collective bound loosely by lineage, the editors of this volume take the opposite approach--not as a means to reify divisions between “northern” Normans (those in Normandy and England) and “southern” ones (in Sicily and the Holy Land), but as a comparative take on many places with significant Norman influence and settlement.

The geographical scope of the seven papers in this volume presents a broad perspective on the Norman world, covering England, Scandinavia, northern Ireland, Rus, the North Sea area, Sicily, and the connection between the eastern Roman Empire and the western Norman world. The volume’s editors have adopted an analytical framework of transcultural studies, which the editors describe as a process of cultural transmission, and they describe the sea as the stage for that process. Although the introduction sets up a focus on the Normans as users of the sea itself, the majority of the papers avoid explicit mention of seafaring and instead focus closely on questions about the origins of specific cultural elements that the Normans either borrowed or transmitted in ways that happen to have taken place across bodies of water. The editors’ introduction establishes the parameters of the transcultural approach as one that addresses local exchanges. Most of the seven papers in the volume follow this hyper-local focus, with most declining to make large-scale connections or conclusions.

The first two chapters are about castles. Mark Bowden and Allan Brodie discuss a specific castle, that of Pevensey where William the Conqueror first landed on England’s shores. They detail the archaeological work done at the site and several enduring questions about the structure, concluding that even while its strategic significance for maritime launches declined as the sea retreated from that area, its symbolic importance caused it to be maintained throughout the ensuing centuries. In the next chapter, Andrew Blackler addresses the origins of castles generally in the Norman world, arguing that key architectural elements such as the keep may have originated in the Eastern Roman Empire. Various groups of Norman adventurers, mercenaries, crusaders, and pilgrims traveled to and around the eastern Mediterranean, giving them access to Byzantine examples of fortified towers that may have been transmitted thence to other parts of the wider Norman world.

The next three chapters focus on the North Atlantic area. In chapter three, Carolyn Cargile directly addresses the sea, both as a literal agent of transmission and as a metaphor in the writings of Orderic Vitalis. For Orderic, time, like the sea, is filled with undulating waves and dangerous depths, and he likens the job of the historian to that of the sailor. At the same time, Cargile finds in Orderic’s Historia ecclesiastica evidence of literary influence from Scandinavia, suggesting that direct intellectual connections continued around the North Sea in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Chapter four continues to elucidate the connection between England and Scandinavia by looking at the church in York dedicated to the Norwegian saint-king St. Olaf and the succeeding abbey of St. Mary’s, whose foundation story was narrated by its first bishop without reference to its connection with the Scandinavian cult. Daniel Talbot argues that the history of cultural transmission between England and Scandinavia was effaced in order to emphasize the abbey’s connection to the new Norman rulers. Next, Claire Collins examines the career of John de Courcy, the first Norman lord to establish a principality in northern Ireland. He mixed local Irish traditions and imported Norman ones as he established and sought to expand his lordship on the shores of the Irish Sea.

The last two chapters turn to the further edges of the broad Norman world. Chapter six turns southward to the Mediterranean, with an investigation of a single letter from a longer diplomatic exchange between the Norman king of Sicily and the Fatimid caliph in Cairo. Mahir Shaab Abdusalam mines the letter for what it can tell us about political and diplomatic relations between the two states, and an appendix includes his translation of the letter. Finally, Alexandra Vukovich addresses the connections between Rus and the Norman-Viking world, as illustrated in borrowings and imitations on the coinages of Rus. Avoiding old debates about the degree of Normanitas in early Rus, she frames the connections across Eurasia as intertwined with a wider “Viking diaspora,” as she terms it.

The volume ends with a reflection piece by David Bates, whose work inspired many of the volume’s contributions. He situates these essays within the long historiographical context of Norman studies and charts a path to future study of transcultural exchange within the Norman world. Although literal seafaring is not at the heart of this volume’s chapters, they are all about the effects and consequences of cultural transfers made possible by maritime connectivity. Considerable work on this topic has been conducted in the Mediterranean realm, so this volume’s significance is in bringing a similar methodology to the broader expanse of the Norman world.