ABSTRACT
A strong theme in recent work on medieval southern Italy has been a desire to contextualise the Norman presence in the region by integrating the conquest into a broader understanding of the medieval Mezzogiorno. One of the few historians to have discussed intermarriage in the Norman Mezzogiorno in this context is Graham Loud. He has repeatedly emphasised the importance of intermarriage for assimilation between Normans and natives in southern Italy, asserting that intermarriage 'played a significant role in making the distinction between Lombard and Norman redundant'. As Ewan Johnson has recently pointed out, since here people has a Lombard woman addressing her late Norman husband, the reference to 'our people' cannot refer simply to one ethnic group or the other, but must refer to a group including both Lombards and Normans. The early chronicles from southern Italy thus indicate that in the last decades of the eleventh century there was still certain degree of disquiet about intermarriage and its potential implications.
