ELAINE TREHARNE. Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English, 1020-1220.

Abstract

Elaine Treharne has done more than anyone to put the twelfth century back into English literary history. Her publications, from her 1997 edition of the Old English Life of St Nicholas to Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century, co-edited with Mary Swan in 2000, to a series of major articles over the past 15 years (surely worthy of collection in Ashgate’s Variorum series), have shown beyond all doubt that vernacular textual production continued unabated after the Norman Conquest. The publication of this book, her first monograph, is accordingly a major event. The central claim of the book is that writing in English (as opposed to Latin, Norse or French) was a statement of English identity; accordingly English writing constitutes ‘a literature of resistance’ to Danish, and later Norman, colonial overlordship. This position is explored over eight short chapters, organized broadly chronologically, and in stimulating readings of texts and manuscripts like the York Gospels, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a confraternity agreement between Worcester and nearby monasteries, homiliaries including CCCC 188, Cotton Vespasian D. xiv, Bodley 343 and Hatton 116 and the Eadwine Psalter. These are followed by a bibliography and index.