Geography and English Identity in the Middle Ages

Contents: Foreword Preface Patrick Wormald: The writings of Patrick Wormald, Sarah Foot Patrick Wormald as historian, Sarah Foot Patrick Wormald: the teacher, Stuart Airlie Living with Patrick, Jenny Wormald. Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Foundations: Archipelagic thoughts: comparing early medieval polities in Britain and Ireland, James Campbell Celtic kings: 'priestly vegetables'?, T.M. Charles-Edwards The Bretwaldas and the origins of overlordship in Anglo-Saxon England, Barbara Yorke Royal and Ecclesiastical law in 7th-century Kent, Lisi Oliver. Gregory and Bede: Divine justice in Gregory the Great's Dialogues, David F. Johnson Bede, the Britons and the book of Samuel, Alan Thacker Bede and Benedict of Nursia, Scott DeGregorio After Bede: continuing the Ecclesiastical History, Joanna Story Chosen arrows, first hidden then revealed: the visitation-archer sequence as a key to the unity of the Ruthwell cross, A%oamonn A CarragA!in. Carolingian Authority and Learning: Alcuin, Charlemagne and the problem of sanctions, Henry Mayr-Harting 'For it is written in the law': Ansegis and the writing of Carolingian royal authority, Stuart Airlie Kings, clergy and dogma: the settlement of doctrinal disputes in the Carolingian world, Thomas F.X. Noble Carolingian missi and their books, Rosamond McKitterick Charlemagne's daughters, Anton Scharer Hrabanus Maurus in Anglo-Saxon England: in honorem sanctae crusis, William Schipper. English Politics and Law (9th-12th centuries): The Fonthill letter: Ealdorman Ordlaf and Anglo-Saxon law in practice, Nicholas P. Brooks An anonymous historian of Edward the Elder's reign, David A.E. Pelteret Reform and retribution: the 'anti-monastic reaction' in the reign of Edward the Martyr, Sashi Jayakumar AEonne se cirlisca man ordales weddiged: the Anglo-Saxon lay ordeal, Sarah Larratt Keefer Trial by ordeal in Anglo-Saxon England: what's the problem with barley?, John D. Niles Lordship and justice in late Anglo-Saxon England: the judicial functions of soke and commendation revisited, Stephen Baxter The Making of English Law and the varieties of legal history, John Hudson Liturgy or law: misconceived alternatives?, Janet L. Nelson. Church, Cult and Memory in England: King A+thelred's charter for Eynsham Abbey (1005), Simon Keynes Si litterali memorie commendaretur: memory and cartularies in 11th-century Worcester, Francesca Tinti Emma's Greek scrine, Lynn Jones Emma: image and ideology, Catherine E. Karkov The bishop's book: Leofric's homiliary and 11th-century Exeter, Elaine Treharne The dangerous dead in early medieval England, John Blair Indexes.

This book explores the reception and creation of memories of an Anglo-Scandinavian medieval past between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. A key premise is that “Memory is a dynamic process” (p. 1) and is performative rather than merely reproductive, leading to “the creation of some kind of community across time” (p. 1). Machan argues that the English Middle Ages have been, and need to be, understood in relation to Scandinavia (p. 2). Memories of this relationship were passed down from the medieval period and later inspired the creation of new “memories” articulating a distinctive perspective on the “emerging global role of Great Britain” (p. 3). Evoking Scandinavia was a way of remembering the medieval English past: much of what writers “remembered about medieval English geography, history, religion, and literature, they remembered by means of Iceland, Norway, and, to lesser extents, Denmark and Sweden” (p. 3).Having established the book's main claims, the opening chapter surveys English-Scandinavian relations in the medieval period itself and in medieval texts. The rest of the book is not organized chronologically, but instead repeatedly revisits a series of tropes relating to four main topics: natural history, ethnography, moral assessments, and literature. The book in this way resembles a series of variations on a set of related themes.Chapter two is concerned with the striking number of travel narratives devoted to Scandinavia and Iceland in the period 1600–1900. Machan considers well-known travelers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and William Morris alongside many more obscure writers. He argues that Norway and Iceland offered British visitors a kind of time travel, taking them back to what their own land had been like before its rise to global superpower status: “encountering the north could be a way for British travelers in particular to encounter themselves” (p. 28). Observing the inadequacies of city life in Oslo and Reykjavik enhanced travelers’ sense of the splendors of British cities. The Nordic countryside, on the other hand, offered natural wonders that could not be experienced in Britain. Alongside scientific interest in these natural phenomena, the medieval Icelandic sagas provided a literary stimulus to visit Iceland and determined what readers wanted to see there. By offering a mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar, Scandinavia and Iceland sharpened travelers’ understanding of their own past and present: “What was discovered in the process was Britain as much as Scandinavia” (p. 45).Chapter three charts the development of ideas of the English and Scandinavians as (originally) a single people. This history is linked to evolving ideas about the common linguistic origins of English and the Scandinavian languages. The chapter includes an interesting analysis of the importance of Odin to a sense of ethnic identity in England, and a telling comparison with contemporary Scandinavian writings about the god. The chapter concludes by observing that British and Nordic writers differed in their use of the past to define the present: British writers sought similarities between England and Scandinavia, whereas Nordic writers ignored Britain or “saw only differences” (p. 81).The next chapter develops the idea that Scandinavia represented an open-air museum that enabled British travelers to visit their own past, providing a kind of homecoming tinged with painful recognition of the simplicity that had been lost in Britain and the ambiguous consequences of modernization in Scandinavia. Other topics touched on here include the importance of the Norse past to some regional identities in England and the way a shared Protestant faith became a “ubiquitous trope in accounts of Anglo-Scandinavian ethnicity” (p. 95).Chapter five is devoted to language and literature, revisiting earlier themes to demonstrate how “the English encounter with Scandinavia involved the active fashioning of what was being remembered” (p. 117). Attention is paid to George Hickes's pioneering philological work and to intriguing claims by some nineteenth-century British travelers in Scandinavia that the local languages were similar enough to English to enable comprehension. Turning to literature, Machan explores the use of Norse mythological texts from the seventeenth century onwards, noting the influential role of Thomas Percy in their Anglophone dissemination. The book then reaches a little beyond its period to relate the issues discussed to J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937) with its debt to “the recycled Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages” (p. 130). The chapter ends with further reflections on the role of Icelandic sagas in inspiring travel to Iceland and includes thoughtful commentary on William Morris's saga translations.The concluding chapter again steps beyond 1900 to consider Tolkien's views on the relationship between English and Norse cultures and his opposition to the use Nazis made of a Nordic past. After briefly considering the place of Old Norse in Anglophone higher education and global interest in Norse mythology, Machan reads accounts of the kraken as figuring the workings of memory: “There may not be real krakens in the oceans, but that does not make them any less real as cultural icons, in the past or today” (p. 162). Finally, Machan concludes that “any definition of the reality of the English Middle Ages cannot but evolve from what the Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages came to mean” (p. 162).As Machan several times points out, the period 1600–1900 saw the successive creation of the modern states of Great Britain and the United Kingdom, a process entwined with the kind of national remembering examined in this book. Given that context, it is regrettable that Machan does not distinguish more rigorously between England/English and Britain/British in his analysis. For example, the Nordic peoples are said to have influenced “Great Britain's languages,” so that in the tenth and eleventh centuries “distinctions between the Norse and English peoples are not easily drawn” (p. 5): this obscures the fact that Norse was far less influential on Cornish, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh than on English, and passes from a statement about Britain as a whole to a conclusion about only the English. A passage in the Icelandic Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu claiming that before the Norman Conquest the language in “England” was the same as that in Norway and Denmark is offered as evidence of a belief that “Britain” and Iceland shared a language (p. 8). On p. 14 the “so-called Celtic fringe” is said to be an “external reference point” for the forging of a British nation, but Celtic-speaking parts of Scotland and Wales were and are part of—not “external” to—Great Britain.In Chapter three it is not clear how the proposition that “early modern British people could be understood to remain fundamentally Nordic” (p. 53) can have been true of all the peoples of Britain. Indeed, Machan claims that this was the case “despite the sustained presence of several neighbouring Brythonic groups” (ignoring non-Brythonic Gaelic). However, “Brythonic groups” were British people: they had been on the island since before the arrival of English-speakers and by the period referred to here they were part of the modern British state, not its “neighbours.” A brief reference to English colonization of other parts of Britain on p. 150 seems to me to oversimplify the process by which a British state and British identity were created.Machan does address the question of “what to call the regions” with which he is concerned (p. 18), rightly pointing out that modern distinctions do not necessarily coincide with those made in earlier periods. But noting that although most of the Anglophone writers he will discuss wrote during the formation of Great Britain and the United Kingdom they “lived in England proper” (p. 18) seems to undermine the very distinction it is trying to make by implying that there is after all an (improper) sense in which England can mean the same as Britain. Machan argues that the name “England” does not evoke the historical reality or the developing commitment to a colonial and imperial Britain found in his writers (p. 18), but his consequent preference for referring to the “English” people but to “Britain” as a place is not consistent with the historical (and contemporary) reality that England was and is only part of Britain.Some of the writers discussed in this book certainly themselves failed to distinguish carefully between England and Britain. Greater insight might, however, have been achieved by interrogating their imprecision rather than accepting it. Indeed, one might expect a book about memory and national identity to be particularly sensitive to the way such usage erases the memory of non-English peoples in the archipelago. The writer outside Machan's period to whom he occasionally turns for illuminating comparisons might have provided a model here: Tolkien had a very robust sense of the distinction between England/English and Britain/British.Other traditions about the past during this period (such as the prominent Arthurian strand in nineteenth-century culture) paid much more attention to the non-Anglo-Scandinavian elements in Britain's (real or imagined) medieval history. In Chapter five there is brief recognition of “other views of the Middle Ages and its relevance to the present, ones that do not depend on Nordic mediation; Anglo-Celtic dynamics for example produced their own powerful cultural memory” (pp. 115–16). The opportunity is not, however, taken to explore the relative importance of these competing perspectives or how people reconciled such different narratives.Despite its tendency to equate part and whole, this book is a valuable contribution to scholarship on English medievalism and the influence and reception of Nordic history, culture, and literature. It is full of interesting material and offers new perspectives on familiar texts alongside insightful discussion of less well-known material. Machan deploys impressive scholarship across all relevant languages and commands detailed knowledge of primary texts from the well-known to the now largely forgotten. The notes to each chapter extensively document relevant scholarship, and the author's deep learning is presented with eloquence and lucidity. The book's thesis is thought-provoking and readers will find much to stimulate them.

Such an imaginary exchange captures a commonly held view about national identity in England (Kumar, 2003). As members of by far the predominant part of the Union, people in England can easily come to regard England and Britain as synonymous with each other. The remainder of the United Kingdom impinges little on their everyday lives or consciences. As a result they can happily and freely describe themselves as English on one occasion, British on another – and mean little or nothing by the difference. It is perhaps little wonder that national identity in England has been described as ‘fuzzy’ (Cohen, 1995).

This paper examines national identity in England and Scotland, arguing that it is necessary to understand how people construe it instead of simply assuming that it is constructed from above by the state. It adds to qualitative data on this issue by discussing recent survey data, from the British and Scottish Social Attitudes surveys 2006, in which for the first time people are asked about their reasons for making a specific choice of national identity. In so doing it fleshes out the responses given to a well known survey question (the so-called ‘Moreno’ question) providing a greater understanding of what a large sample of people are saying when they make these territorial identity choices. The English and the Scots handle ‘national’ and ‘state’ identities differently, but the paper shows there is considerable similarity as regards reasons for choosing national identity. Both English and Scottish ‘nationals’, those placing greater weight on their ‘national’ as opposed to their ‘state’ identities, choose to do so mainly for cultural and institutional reasons. They are not making a ‘political’ statement about the break-up of Britain. At the British end of the scale, there are patterns in the English data which throw into doubt easy assertions about ‘being British’. Simply assuming, as some politicians and commentators do, that ‘British’ has singular meanings is unfounded. The future of the United Kingdom as presently constituted may lie in the hands of those who describe themselves as equally national (English or Scottish) and British. Devolution influences which national identity people choose in all three sets of national identity categories but these effects are sociologically most interesting in this group. Devolution seems to have encouraged them to stress the equality of the two nations in the British state, recognising that they are equal partners, that one can be equally proud of a national and a British identity, and that it is not necessary to choose one over the other.

Among the relics in the treasury of the church of St Catherine at Maaseik in Limburg, Belgium, there are some luxurious embroideries which form part of the so-calledcasula(probably ‘chasuble’) of Sts Harlindis and Relindis (pls. I–VI). It was preserved throughout the Middle Ages at the abbey church of Aldeneik (which these sister-saints founded in the early eighth century) and was moved to nearby Maaseik in 1571. Although traditionally regarded as the handiwork of Harlindis and Relindis themselves, the embroideries cannot date from as early as their time, and they must have been made in Anglo-Saxon England. Indeed, they represent the earliest surviving examples of the highly prized English art of embroidery which became famous later in the Middle Ages asopus anglicanum.

<i>Undoing Babel: The Tower of Babel in Anglo-Saxon Literature</i>. Tristan Major. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. Pp. xiii+289.

III The Central Middle Ages (900–1200)

Reviewed by: Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages by Lynn T. Ramey Jorge Carlos Arias Lynn T. Ramey, Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages (Gainesville: University Press of Florida 2014) xii + 176 pp. Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages is a valiant effort of scholarship in the current academic environment. The criticisms of the so-called linguistic turn, the complex history of the modern concept of race, and the weight of the idea of a clean break between the medieval and renaissance periods have made the study of “race” in a pre-modern setting a dangerous endeavor. Ramey’s goal is to point out that many important elements that would become much more explicit in “scientific racism” and nineteenth-century European colonialist discourses were already present in the Middle Ages. She supports this point armed with post-colonial and literary analyses of a wide variety of sources: medieval prose and verse, Classical ethnographies, medieval commentaries on the Bible, fifteenth-century colonial debates and, most surprisingly, modern films and nineteenth-century depictions of the Middle Ages. [End Page 289] Given that few scholars today would consent to the un-qualified use of the term race before the modern period, Ramey’s first task is to explain how she plans to use it and what she really intends to study. She settles on treating racism as “a form of xenophobia,” often utilizing the concept of “the Other” (1). She describes medieval culture not as “color blind” as many older studies of this topic have asserted but as “proto-racial” and containing a “cacophony of discourses” regarding race, before modern conceptions of phenotypic difference cemented a hegemonic idea of race (2). Ramey focuses on “prejudice against darker-skinned persons from non-Western cultures precisely because of their skin color and their usually imagined, always unfamiliar, cultural practices” (1). Lest there be some confusion, Ramey explicitly states that she is not arguing that racial consciousness was born in the Middle Ages, but that the medieval period did play an important role in its subsequent development (3). There are two central critiques in the book: first, of the scholarly tradition that asserted that a categorical rupture existed between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; second, of the role of the nineteenth century in shaping not only our modern conceptions of race but also of the medieval period itself. The first tradition helped to isolate the study of race solely to the modern era and consequently resulted in the interpretation of the medieval period as a “golden age of cohabitation,” and erased “the history of prejudice that was present from what many consider to be the foundation of European civilization” (3). Writers of the nineteenth century displayed a particularly Romanticized view of the Middle Ages, for example evident in the development of professional history and its relationship to the creation of the modern nation-state based on supposed and Romanticized ties to medieval predecessors. This view became intertwined with a search for essentialist origins and a scientific racism that reflected certain nineteenth-century concerns on race back into the medieval period. Chapter 1 looks at various examples of this Romanticized view of the Middle Ages in the nineteenth century. Washington Irving’s tales of medieval Spain in The Alhambra (1832) are imbued with a fear of “racially linked degeneration more appropriate to his own American culture” (9). For example, his praise of the Arab elite of Muslim Spain, which he portrays as white and worthy of intermarriage with the “Gothic” Christian elite, is contrasted with depictions of the decay of the monarchy of Granada through its intermarriage with Berber groups, characterized as dark and governed by emotion. Eugène-Emmanual Viollet-le-Duc, as the architect in charge of restoring many of France’s most famous medieval structures (Vézelay Abbey, Mont Saint-Michel, Notre Dame Cathedral) between 1838 and 1879, not only had an immense influence in the representation and re-interpretation of medieval architecture, but he also helped to strengthen the notion that “elementary characteristics of… race” and environment were linked to ethnically essentialist aesthetic and architectural choices (23). Chapter 2 is an overview of how race has...

Sir Orfeo and English Identity Dominique Battles Scholars have long noted how the abduction of Queen Heurodis in the Middle English Sir Orfeo is as much, if not more, a political crime as a personal one, and how the loss of Heurodis very quickly turns into the loss of a kingdom.1 The nature of the crime attests to this. Rather than taking her outright, the Fairy King approaches Heurodis in the orchard, takes her against her will on a tour of his kingdom, then returns her to the orchard, only to then steal her again the next day. The intervening time turns what would have been a private act (i.e. an abduction/rape) into a public and political act, as Heurodis reports to King Orfeo on the extent of the Fairy King's holdings, his "palays … castels & tours, / Riuers, forestes … / & his riche stedes ichon" (lines 157–61), and as Orfeo assembles an army into a defensive maneuver.2 Orfeo's failure the next day to protect the queen becomes, therefore, not simply a personal loss but a military defeat of sorts, witnessed by hundreds of fighting men, to a foe whose land holdings, as far as we can tell, outclass Orfeo's own. The invasion of Orfeo's realm, the failure of his forces, and the subsequent exile of the king himself clearly mirror the storyline of political conquest. In this article, I explore how the land holdings, castles, and military strategies surrounding this crime, among other aspects of the poem, to some extent cast the central conflict between Orfeo and the Fairy King in cultural terms that suggest an [End Page 179] awareness of racial difference between Anglo-Saxon and Norman long after the Conquest. In order to explore the Anglo-Saxon aspect of Sir Orfeo, it is necessary to establish that as late as the early fourteenth century, when Sir Orfeo was written, an awareness of ethnic difference between the Normans and the Anglo-Saxons prevailed. While the French influence on English society and literature in the post-Conquest period remains indisputable, recent studies have argued for the persistence of Anglo-Saxon cultural identity well beyond the Conquest. Nick Webber, for instance, explores how the inescapable cultural conflict that resulted from the Conquest served to solidify and polarize English and Norman identities, from both perspectives, throughout the colonial period.3 Hugh M. Thomas explores several important texts that uphold English honor against the backdrop of rampant prejudice against the English as rustic, militarily inept, and incompetent.4 (Of course, the Normans more or less created this model of Englishman by killing off most of the native English aristocracy.) The subject of ongoing English resistance to Norman dominance is a growing area of study, chiefly among historians, and one that holds important implications for literary scholarship of the Middle English period. A select body of scholarship has begun to explore the survival and expression of this "Englishness" in post-Conquest English literature. Thorlac Turville-Petre has written extensively on the survival and assertion of an English (i.e. Anglo-Saxon) national identity in opposition to the Norman, and earlier Danish, invaders in a host of literary, as well as historical, texts and manuscripts.5 His study of the famous Auchinleck manuscript, which preserves the earliest and best version of Sir Orfeo, demonstrates just how pervasive native English identity could still be, even as late as the early fourteenth century.6 Mark Amodio's recent study argues that Anglo-Saxon poetry did not, in fact, die with the Norman Conquest. Instead, it went underground, from which it resurfaces [End Page 180] in the Middle English period in the form of themes (e.g. exile) and story patterns (e.g. the return song) that appear in Sir Orfeo.7 Most recently, Robert Allen Rouse explores the survival and proliferation of the memory of Anglo-Saxon England in the romances of the fourteenth century. Examining the Matter of England romances, among other texts, Rouse explores how English identity is negotiated, revised, but nevertheless preserved well beyond the Conquest. He argues that "the Anglo-Saxon past, far from being marginal to post-conquest English culture, occupied an important role within the...

Before History, Before Difference: Bodies, Metaphor, and the Church in Anglo-Saxon England Clare A. Lees (bio) and Gillian R. Overing (bio) . . . she was thrust—despoiled of her own clothes, to the infamous disgrace of her family—into the loathsome harlotry of a brothel, where the detestable wantonness of prostitutes runs wild and the shameless impudence of whores is disgustingly flaunted, nevertheless, walled about by the shining splendour of a mighty light, she gazed on angelic faces and was covered with her Lord’s robes. —Agnes, Aldhelm’s prose De Virginitate They dragged then the maiden to the harlot’s house, but she at once met there an angel of God shining, such that no man was able to look on her or touch her because of that mighty light, for that house all shone like the sun in day, and the more eagerly they gazed on her, the more their eyes were dazzled. —Agnes, Ælfric, Lives of Saints Few cultural historians, and even fewer cultural theorists, would place the study of Anglo-Saxon England at the heart of contemporary debates about the role of history within cultural studies. Indeed, Anglo-Saxon England has been characterized as different from other periods of English history in that it is most frequently located “before history.” Narratives of Western history often elide the early medieval period; its history, compressed beyond recognition or simply omitted, is downplayed in favor of that of Greek and Roman worlds and that of the more modern West, beginning with the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, historians recognize the emergence of the individual (and the heretic), as well as familiar clerical and secular institutions (Gregorian reforms, Lateran councils, clerical celibacy, marriage, the universities, towns, a money economy). The medieval world starts to resemble, however precariously, the modern. Although much work has recently loosened the hold of this master paradigm on the analysis and writing of medieval history after the Anglo-Saxon period,1 the period itself remains emphatically pre-historical—at the origin, though not at the beginning.2 Whether from simple ignorance of this earlier period or for reasons largely unconscious and/or disciplinary, debates in medieval studies on the nature of subjectivity and identity, gender, the body, and sexuality, representation and power continue to operate from, or are conditioned by, the premisses of this master paradigm.3 Cultural history before the twelfth century is thus alienated, offering a history different [End Page 315] from later periods, yet one whose difference goes unrecognized and uncontested. The continuing processes of differentiation that construct the Anglo-Saxon period can be seen in a variety of contexts, whether in terms of origins (and their connections to European and North American nationalism), periodization (that is, not post-Conquest England), social formations (tribal to civil state), language (not Latin, not Middle English), religion (pagans and/or Christians), gender (the so-called “golden age” of Anglo-Saxon women), or sexuality (no sex please, we’re Anglo-Saxon).4 From the more conventional standpoint of a developmental model of history, Anglo-Saxon England is originary—inescapably different from and often irrelevant to subsequent medieval periods. Commonly held distinctions for periodization (to which we do not necessarily subscribe) are that the Anglo-Saxon period traditionally ends around 1066: excluding the problem of when to locate the “early medieval,” the medieval period itself usually extends either to 1400 or 1500, depending on one’s views on when “high medieval” begins and ends, and on where and when one locates the Renaissance; the newer term, “Early Modern” can encompass late medieval through to the late seventeenth century and beyond. The Anglo-Saxonist working within the field might find these continually asserted and often commutable distinctions as puzzling and arbitrary as the Modernist. What such periodic gradations do elucidate, however, is an ongoing process of dependent differentiation, where one period defines itself against another, and where each preceding period is necessarily constructed as “pre-historical.” Definition by means of difference, therefore, is not limited to the Anglo-Saxon period. The long view, moreover, elucidates a further analogy: that of the larger processes by which history constructs difference and difference is constructed historically to those...

Dominique Barthélemy, L'an mil et la paix de Dieu: La France chrétienne et féodale, 980–1060John Blair, Anglo‐Saxon OxfordshireBy Endre Bojtár, Foreword to the Past: A Cultural History of the Baltic PeopleMildred Budny, Anglo‐Saxon and Early Anglo‐Norman Manuscript Art at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge: An Illustrated CatalogueGeneviève Bührer‐Thierry, Evêques et pouvoir dans le royaume de Germanie. Les Eglises de Bavière et de Souabe 876–973H.B. Clarke, M. Ni Mhaonaigh and R. O'Floinn, Ireland and Scandinavia in the Early Viking AgeMarilyn Dunn, The Emergence of Monasticism: From the Desert Fathers to the Early Middle AgesJudson J. Emerick, The Tempietto del Clitunno near SpoletoColmán Etchingham, Church Organisation in Ireland AD 650 to 1000Alberto Ferreiro (ed), The Visigoths: Studies in Culture and SocietySarah Foot, Veiled Women: I. The Disappearance of Nuns from Anglo‐Saxon England; II. Female Religious Communities in England, 871–1066John Haldon, Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine World, 565–1204Mark Humphries, Communities of the Blessed: Social Environment and Religious Change in Northern Italy, AD 200–400Catherine Karkov, Michael Ryan and Robert T. Farrell (eds), The Insular TraditionMarco Mostert (ed), New Approaches to Medieval CommunicationValerio Neri, I Marginali nell'Occidente tardoantico: poveri, ‘infames’ e criminali nella nascente società cristianaBruce R. O'Brien, God's Peace and the King's Peace: The Laws of Edward the ConfessorR.I. Page, An Introduction to English RunesTimothy Reuter (ed), The New Cambridge Medieval History III: c.900–c.1024Gisela Ripoll and Josep M. Gurt (eds), Sedes regiae (ann. 400–800)Barbara H. Rosenwein (ed), Anger's Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle AgesBarbara H. Rosenwein, Negotiating Space: Power, Restraint and Privileges of Immunity in Early Medieval EuropeH. Sarfatij, W.J.H. Verwers and P.J. Woltering (eds), In Discussion with the Past. Archaeological Studies Presented to W.A. Van Es.Anna Silvas (trans), Jutta and Hildegard: The Biographical SourcesJuliette Dor, Lesley Johnson and Joscelyn Wogan‐Browne (eds), New Trends in Feminine Spirituality: The Holy Women of Liège and their ImpactMary‐Ann Stouck (ed), Medieval Saints. A ReaderPaul E. Szarmach and Joel T. Rosenthal (eds), The Preservation and Transmission of Anglo‐Saxon Culture. Selected Papers from the 1991 Meeting of the International Society of Anglo‐SaxonistsP. Urbańczyk (ed), The Neighbours of Poland in the Tenth CenturyStefan Weinfurter, The Salian Century: Main Currents in an Age of TransitionIan Wood and Evangelos Chrysos (eds), East and West: Modes of Communication. Proceedings of the First Plenary Conference at Mérida (Transformation of the Roman World, V)

Author's Introduction The article provides an overview of the annals known collectively as The Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle , an extensive project of historical writing in English initiated in the late ninth century and continued for some two centuries and in eight manuscript versions. Because of the great complexity of its textual history, and the relative obscurity of its origins, much scholarship on the Chronicle has concentrated on its language – vocabulary and spelling – in an attempt to reconstruct both the relationships of the manuscripts to each other, as well as their putative originals and possible source materials. At the same time, the Chronicle has always been used as a source, in a raw sense, of historical data. This article considers the merits and limitations of both approaches, as well as advocating the value of more recent work that considers the Chronicle itself as a cultural product, which mediates and thereby shapes the perception of events by means of a deliberately restrictive and highly specific idiom. Summarizing the trends of past scholarship and attempting to predict the shape of future work, the article aims both to introduce students to the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle and to establish the centrality of this text to broader questions about the nature of historical writing. Author Recommends Michael Swanton's The Anglo‐Saxon Chronicles (London: Phoenix, 2000) is the best translation available for those who want to access the texts in Modern English. Following the practice of earlier Chronicle editors and translators such as Plummer and Garmonsway, Swanton provides concurrent annals from different manuscript versions, with A and E providing his main texts. He also includes black and white plates of various Anglo‐Saxon antiquities, as well as maps and genealogical tables. For those who can read Old English, the volumes of the magisterial series The Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition are essential, since they provide the texts of all the major Chronicle versions in a modern, scholarly format with full annotations and lengthy discussion of the manuscript background, textual relationships, and language: MS A , vol. 3, ed. Janet Bately (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1986); MS B , vol. 4, ed. Simon Taylor (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983); MS C , vol. 5, ed. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001); MS D , vol. 6, ed. G. P. Cubbin (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996); MS E , vol. 7, ed. Susan Irvine (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004); MS F , vol. 8, ed. Peter S. Baker (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000). Thomas Bredehoft's Textual Histories: Readings in the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001) was the first book‐length study devoted to this text, and is a thought‐provoking, well‐researched and enjoyable read for students and scholars alike, paying admirable attention to manuscript details such as pointing and layout. Alice Sheppard's Families of the King: Writing Identity in the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), another book‐length study, considers the Chronicle not just as a repository of historical detail, but as a nationalizing text containing shaped narratives of kin and lordship. No scholar has done more to advance our understanding of the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle , and particularly the relationships among the manuscript versions and the use of source material, than Janet Bately. Essential reading in order to understand the complex textual history of the Chronicle includes: Janet Bately, ‘The Compilation of the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle, 60 BC to AD 890: Vocabulary as Evidence’, Proceedings of the British Academy 64 (1978): 93–129; ‘World History in the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle: Its Sources and its Separateness from the Old English Orosius’, Anglo‐Saxon England 8 (1979): 177–94; ‘Bede and the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle ’, in Saints, Scholars and Heroes: Studies in Medieval Culture in Honour of Charles W. Jones (Collegeville, MN: Hill Monastic Manuscript Library, 1979), 233–54; ‘The Compilation of the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle Once More’, Leeds Studies in English 16 (1985): 7–26; ‘Manuscript Layout and the Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle’, John Rylands University Library Bulletin 70 (1988): 21–43; The Anglo‐Saxon Chronicle: Texts and Textual Relationships (Reading: Reading Medieval Studies Monograph, 1991). Online Materials A manuscript image of annals 824–33 from the C‐text of the Chronicle may be viewed at http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/themes/histtexts/angsaxchron.html . You can hear R. D. Fulk reading the poetic entry for annal 937 of the Chronicle at http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/noa/audio.htm . This poem, known as The Battle of Brunanburh , which employs heroic diction and a traditional verse form, commemorates Æþelstan of Wessex's victory against a combined force of Picts, Irish, and Norsemen. The Chronicle is not the only formulaic historical text in Anglo‐Saxon England, although it is arguably the most wide‐ranging in its focus, as well being the most self‐aware of its identity as a historical and national text. Charters are a related form, sharing with the Chronicle a highly formulaic diction (albeit generally in Latin), a focus on territorial tenure and exchange, and the function of recording details of persons and events. Translations of the charters are available at: http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/kemble/pelteret/2%20Index.htm . Sample Syllabus The Textuality of Medieval Culture Course Description This course will explore, in a broad and interdisciplinary manner, the various influences and aspects of textuality in medieval English culture both early and late. We will investigate the question of what constitutes a ‘text’ in a manuscript culture in which scribes customarily and substantively altered the texts they copied; in which the beginnings and ends of individual works were not graphically marked;

Reviewed by: Studies in Medievalism XXVII: Authenticity, Medievalism, Music ed. by Karl Fugelso Roderick McDonald Fugelso, Karl, ed., Studies in Medievalism XXVII: Authenticity, Medievalism, Music, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2018; hardback; pp. 282; 9 colour, 17 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781843845034. Medievalism, as a field of study, is somewhat ill-theorized and highly contingent. Karl Fugelso's preface to this volume highlights the 'ambiguity […] acute in medievalism', its 'erraticness', 'slipperiness', 'elusiveness' and 'malleability' (p. xiii). Perhaps such uncertainty can offer space for productive energies that might enable the field to theorize itself? But to explore issues of authenticity when the field is itself so elusive is perhaps a little ambitious, especially when the apparent vehicle for this exploration is a collection of nominally related papers on diverse topics, covering modern literary and visual arts, religious and political appropriations, and adaptations of 'medieval' in popular culture. The agency of the medievalist is here paramount: Fugelso notes that each contributor creates 'their own particular middle ages [and this reveals] much more about […] the medievalists, much less about the Middle Ages' (p. xiii). Thereby, discussion of authenticity devolves to the contributor and their idiosyncrasies. Beyond Fugelso's preface and David Matthews's 'Introduction' (reflecting on the 'Middle Ages in the Modern World' conference convened in Manchester in mid-2017) there are ten chapters across three sections: 'Medievalism and [End Page 212] Authenticity', 'Other Responses to Medievalism (and Authenticity)', and 'Early Music (and Authenticity) in Films and Video Games'. A topic specialist will find useful material here, but all are largely topic- rather than theory-focused. Perhaps this is a shortcoming, an artefact of the collected paper format, and a theorist may need to look elsewhere. Aside from Matthews, who (wryly?) observes that the field of medievalism studies 'is becoming less interested in itself as a form of organised study with a set of disciplinary problems […] instead characterised by scholars who simply get on with the work in their chosen field' (p. 10), there is little here treating the field generally; Fugelso's observed ambiguity (and the field's contingency) is not addressed. The first section is largely Lit Crit: three chapters on literature, two on visual media. Nickolas Haydock examines different notions of authenticity informing the reception of the nineteenth-century gothic novel and Clare A. Simmons historicizes inauthenticities in Keats's medievalist poem 'St Agnes'. Next, Carolyne Larrington parses medievalizing emotions in Game of Thrones, and Elan Justice Pavlinich explores medievalist race depictions in two Disney film productions. Timothy Curran concludes this section, looking at religious medievalism in Romantic poetry. The second section casts the net widely. Daniel Wollenberg looks at long political shadows cast by medieval philosopher William Ockham, and Matthias D. Berger explores modern nationalist implications of medieval battle re-enactments. Then follow three well-wrought contributions on visual arts: Lotte Reinbold considers pre-Raphaelite refractions of Kingis Quair, Aida Audeh finds resonances of Petrarch and Dante in the art of Van Gogh, and Tessel M. Bauduin traces the medievalism of Surrealists. The final section, dealing with music in medieval-themed cinema and video games, is its own piece of work: it even has its own introduction. Here, Karen M. Cook looks at authenticities of chant-based sound medievalizing video games, Adam Whittaker tracks the auditory texture of cinematic depictions of plague, and Alexander Kolassa explores medievalizing soundscapes in the Russian film Hard to Be a God. Most of the analyses in this volume take the form of a statement of principle or position, followed by discussion or close reading of passages, products, attributes, characteristics or characterizations. It is a tried and true method, the bread and butter of (particularly North American) academe, and a useful approach to understanding influences, motivations, and contexts associated with a given work, genre, or movement. It is all productive, but it is hard to avoid the feeling that we need more, and better. Simplistic constructs, untended generalizations, and acritical monoliths surface at numerous places in this volume and these are revealing: 'the Middle Ages', 'the medieval period', 'the medieval world', 'traditional Christianity', 'the rupture between the medieval and the modern'. These go forth unexamined and ill-defined, an unnuanced...

Journal Article Veiled Women. Vol. I: The Disappearance of Nuns from Anglo-Saxon England. Vol. II: Female Religious Communities in England, 871–1066, Sarah Foot Get access Sally Thompson Sally Thompson Wells, Somerset Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 116, Issue 467, June 2001, Pages 701–702, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/116.467.701 Published: 01 June 2001

Reviewed by: Striving with Grace: Views of Free Will in Anglo-Saxon England Jonathan Wilcox Striving with Grace: Views of Free Will in Anglo-Saxon England. By Aaron J. Kleist. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. Pp. xvii + 420. $90. This is a book based on an appealing premise—to pursue a single important theological idea across the complexity of writings in Anglo-Saxon England—which is fulfilled with notable success. Teasing through the complexity of theological thought that has accrued on the distinction between striving and grace, Aaron Kleist lays out the thought of three patristic writers, Augustine, Gregory, and Bede, and four Anglo-Saxon authors they influenced. Kleist uses source study and manuscript evidence along with close reading to make a contribution to the history of ideas, uncovering the subtlety of thought of some of the most important named authors of Anglo-Saxon England—Alfred, perhaps Wulfstan, and Ælfric, as well as the lesser-known Lantfred of Winchester. The result is a deeply informed theological study that provides insight into the thought world of Anglo-Saxon England. The issue of merit vs. grace, or the role of human volition in distinction to the capacities given by the creator, is a hugely important one for Christian thought, leading quickly to consideration of the source of evil, the extent of human freedom [End Page 533] of will, and the conundrum of predetermination. Differences within the debate are often rather subtle, yet small distinctions mattered a lot with various unsuccessful views condemned as heresies. Manichean, Donatist, Pelagian, and Semi-Pelagian positions are sketched out with admirable clarity and economy by Kleist, who shows how underlying all the discussion is a delicate pas de deux between striving and grace, freedom of will and divine determinism. Kleist presents in a few pages Augustine’s evolving position, which was to become orthodoxy despite his perhaps surprising extreme emphasis on grace over merit. Gregory, Kleist shows, gives a bit more weight to human striving, while Bede, despite repeatedly stressing grace, provides yet more emphasis on human merit in striving. Kleist shows how the work of all three fathers circulated in Anglo-Saxon England and suggests they provide a range of orthodox options for subsequent writers to draw on. Bede plays a pivotal role as both a father of the church and a thinker within Anglo-Saxon England, and the remainder of this study focuses on theological positions in England. Kleist briefly moves away from explicitly Christian theological work to consider Boethius’ Neoplatonic Consolation of Philosophy, which includes prominent consideration of the source of evil and the nature of free will, a work that famously circulated in an Alfredian translation. Kleist considers how the work is Christianized through the commentary traditions, explaining in part its huge popularity in the Middle Ages, and considers anew the famous image of the axle and the idea of divine foreknowledge within the Old English translation, which turns out to present a largely Augustinian position on grace. Kleist then turns to an altogether less familiar work, Lantfred of Winchester’s Carmen de libero arbitrio, a poem on free will by a probably Frankish monk who visited Winchester in association with the Benedictine reform, which, Kleist shows, pulls away from Augustine’s emphasis on prevenient grace to embrace a Semi-Pelagian heresy in its emphasis on human volition. Kleist then considers a Latin sermon preserved in Copenhagen, Kongelige Bibliotek, MS Gamle Kongelige Sammlung 1595, a work either composed by or strongly associated with Wulfstan the Homilist. Most of Wulfstan’s vernacular writings paint with too broad a brush to allow Kleist to position the archbishop in relation to the debates on free will, but this Latin sermon, Kleist shows, draws on a book of Cassian’s Collationes that was central to the Semi-Pelagian heresy and condemned on that account. Despite that source, the theology of the Wulfstanian sermon sounds mostly unexceptionable, apparently by simply avoiding those parts of the Collatio that had been condemned as heretical by Prosper of Aquitaine. Nevertheless, it perpetrates Semi-Pelagian thought in just the way a homilist might be expected to, by stressing the individual’s responsibility for repentance where, Kleist suggests, Augustine would have insisted...