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In 1070, when Lanfranc left his abbacy at Caen to become Archbishop of Canterbury, he was probably about 60 years old — by medieval standards an advanced age. In Lombardy, and then in Normandy, he had had a long and varied experience of lay, monastic, and general church life, and not least of the aspirations and concerns of the early reform papacy and of secular rulers who, for whatever reason, had sympathy with them. At each stage of his life he had demonstrated his ability to adapt himself with integrity and effectiveness to the demands that he encountered. A cardinal feature of Lanfranc's monastic years as prior of Bec and as abbot of Caen was his close and sympathetic relationship with the reform popes of the time, especially Leo IX, Nicholas II, and Alexander II, all of whom held him in high regard.

Considered in terms of his own life and achievement, Lanfranc's exceptional stature as Archbishop of Canterbury is apparent. In particular aspects of an archbishop's life and work in church and kingdom, others would excel him, but in the succession of archbishops from Augustine to the present day, only Theodore of Tarsus approaches Lanfranc's high competence in each of the main concerns of his office, his skill in human and political relationships, and above all the enduring character and benefit of his government of the English church both in itself and as an aspect of national life. He was important as a monk-archbishop not only because of his background as monk and prior of Bec and then abbot of Saint-Étienne at Caen, but also because he was ex officio abbot of the cathedral monastery at Canterbury.

This chapter discusses Lanfranc's entry into the monastic order as a fundamental conversion of life, his life as monk, and his years as prior of Bec. There is no positive reason to doubt that Lanfranc's decision to change his manner of life came quite suddenly. Lanfranc became abbot of Saint-Étienne at Caen in 1063, and ruled the newly founded abbey until he became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1070. When he moved to Caen he is likely to have been already some fifty years of age. His seniority, and therefore his experience and proven loyalty, are likely to have commended him to Duke William, who for political as well as for ecclesiastical reasons was seeking to establish the town of Caen as a centre of ducal authority.

This chapter looks at the narrow field of university history and uses this concept to explain why it has become unfashionable for monographs to present histories of individual universities. This is examined in the context of Roy's approach in her publication. Here themes of contemporary interest are combined with the conventional concerns of a university historian. The chapter presents a full review of Roy's analysis on Caen. The fate of Caen shows that there can be many different routes to the ‘modernization’ of the university system.

This chapter is a study of the sources, locations, and uses of the lands which made Earl Robert a super-magnate in England and lord of a barony which stretched from western Lower Normandy across England to South Wales. In Normandy, his marriage made him lord of Torigni-sur-Vire, Évrecy, and Creully well as prévôt of Caen. Robert’s English honor of Gloucester was the greatest source of his wealth. His demesne was concentrated in six Severn Valley and southwestern counties and notable for its urban holdings such as at Gloucester, Tewkesbury, Burford, London, and especially Bristol, the most valuable and militarily secure. In South Wales Robert was lord of the honor of Glamorgan and its dependency, the lordship of Gwynllŵg. Glamorgan gave the earl the jurisdictional rights of a Marcher lord.

Shilts’s journalistic “voice” begins to emerge. Shilts’s clash with David Goodstein comes to a head, with Shilts fired from The Advocate but later hired by KQED as a contributor to the “Newsroom” TV program. Shilts begins to address his personal alcohol abuse issues amidst lack of full-time employment but remains a daily marijuana user. Shilts’s TV journalism career covers election and subsequent assassination of Milk (along with Mayor George Moscone), and gay battle against Proposition 6. Shilts covered riots following the trial of convicted Milk-Moscone killer Dan White. Shilts’s relationship with KQED begins to erode as he struggles to master television journalism. Shilts gains scorn for connections to conservative Republican Senator John Briggs.

This chapter focuses on limestone in the context of the Normandy town of Caen, which is largely built atop and indeed from that stone. Caen is thus at once extraction site and extracted matter. Discussing both buildings within the city and the texts of a local historian, Charles de Bourgueville, which describe them and their destruction at the hands of Protestants during the Wars of Religion, this chapter seeks out some of the ways in which humans long for that stone’s endurance while also worrying about its fragility. Putting geological and human timelines into dialogue, the chapter thus situates the exterranean at the intersection of extraction, longing, and fear.

Less than a month after the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, John Clellon Holmes finished his new jazz novel, titled The Horn. By this time, he and Kerouac were already the object of strong media interest in connection with the Beat phenomenon, and also began to reap some of its more obvious rewards. Holmes was offered by Esquire much more money than he used to receive to write an essay explaining the Beat Generation to the magazine’s upscale readers, while Kerouac was busy talking to interviewers to answer the same questions. The “Beat frenzy” sweeping over the two novelists had surfaced at a poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7, 1955, with Allen Ginsberg reading the first part of Howl. There were efforts to belittle the Beats, including that of journalist Herb Caen, who coined the word “Beatnik” in his San Francisco Chronicle column on April 2, 1958.

This chapter tells of two young chauffeurs in Marcel Proust's excursions to Monaco that would play critical roles in his life and would ultimately change the course of his novel In Search of Lost Time. The first chauffeurs he hired from Jacques Bizet's car-rental agency was Alfred Agostinelli, who in his new red taxi would drive Proust to Caen—a location famous for its medieval churches. It would be Proust's stay in Cabourg that would bring about a dramatic change in his life that he would return every summer until 1914. The second chauffeur to influence his life would be Odilon Albaret, however this chapter focuses mainly upon Proust's relationship to Agostinelli, and his later infatuation and love for the Italian.