pre-Conquest England Research Articles

Hellenic Language and Thought in Pre-Conquest England

Bede, reflecting on the success of the Canterbury school set up by Theodore of Tarsus remarked: “some of their students still alive today are as proficient in Latin and Greek as in their native tongue” [trans. Colgrave and Mynors 1969, 335]. By the time we get to the court of Alfred two hundred years later, there had been a famous decline in learning from which Greek, as a language, had not yet recovered. However, there remained a strong interest in Greek as a sacred language in liturgies, prayers and magical charms, and later in hermeneutic poetry. Theodore’s influence was not limited to Greek Language, he also brought knowledge of Maximus the Confessor and Pseudo-Dionysius. The influence of Greek mystical theology would find fuller expression in the translations associated with the court of King Alfred via contact with the Carolingian court, but the seeds for this reception in England may already have been sown. This paper will outline the evidence for the use of Greek language in a variety of contexts, including a charm for the staunching of blood, and it will examine the extent of the influence of Greek patristic thinking in Old English texts including both clerical prose and secular poetry.

Making or Declaring Law? Legislative Intent and Privileged Speech in Anglo-Saxon England

Celebrated by a generation of literature scholars, lamented by E. D. Hirsch, the disappearance of the author and authorial intentions as means of interpretation has a history with branches in the study of pre-Conquest England. Long before the twentieth century, Anglo-Saxon legislators were disappearing from their laws, as discussion of their intentions in establishing them was viewed by historians with increasing disfavor. Even today, commentary on early English royal legislation seldom acknowledges that these texts enjoyed (or were intended to enjoy) the force of law in any meaningful sense. Only in the past decade have cracks emerged in the consensus that such legislation was meant for anything beyond symbolic purposes, a view backed by a much older consensus that pre-Conquest law could do no more than “declare” what had always been custom, thus revealing little about the purposes of kings and their counselors. This essay traces commentators’ reticence about acknowledging the legislative purposes behind early English legislation to disputes over codification that agitated German-speaking parts of Europe in the early nineteenth century. Yet the earliest editors and commentators prized these materials specifically because they exhibited the lawmaking powers of kings and their councils. The article examines neglected evidence afforded by early English legislation itself, finding that this earlier tradition was by no means exhausted when abandoned.

Early Medieval English Life Courses: Cultural-Historical Perspectives ed. by Thijs Porck and Harriet Soper

Reviewed by: Early Medieval English Life Courses: Cultural-Historical Perspectives ed. by Thijs Porck and Harriet Soper Timothy D. Arner thijs porck and harriet soper, eds., Early Medieval English Life Courses: Cultural-Historical Perspectives. Leiden: Brill, 2022. Pp. xii, 369. isbn: 978–90–04–49929–4. $194. Early Medieval English Life Courses: Cultural-Historical Perspectives literally considers some age-old questions: how does the human body change throughout its lifetime? What is the relationship between physical, emotional, and intellectual maturity? How is the biological process of aging conditioned by one’s social environment? The essays in this volume look for answers in a range of sources from pre-Conquest England, and, in so doing, provide a rich account of perspectives on the stages of human development. The collection helpfully groups the essays into four sections with three essays in each. Part I is dedicated to ‘Defining and Dividing the Life Course,’ with the first two essays examining how stages of the human life course were classified in early medieval English texts. Thijs Porck’s ‘The Ages of Man and the Ages of Woman in Early Medieval England: From Bede to Byrhtferth of Ramsey and the Tractatus de quaternario’ describes different approaches to categorizing life stages in Old English [End Page 102] and Anglo-Norman manuscripts. Tracing aging schemata as represented through three key works, Porck demonstrates that ‘early medieval English authors stuck to a flexible but uniform definition of the human life course’ (p. 45), and he identifies a significant shift in this paradigm during the twelfth century. Daria Izdebska’s essay surveys vocabulary for describing the stages of life throughout the Old English corpus, linking the various words used to describe infancy, youth, maturity, and old age to their Latin equivalents and to the Old English lexemes associated with these phases. These essays are followed by a discussion of an individual’s particular and influential understanding of aging and maturity, as Darren Barber’s ‘Alcuin and the Student Life Cycle’ highlights Alcuin’s writings about how one’s development through the stages of youth allows greater possibilities for moral and spiritual education. The second set of essays on ‘The Life Course and the Human Body’ considers the discourse around significant bodily changes or events. Jacqueline Fay’s ‘Treating Age in Medical Texts from Early Medieval England’ offers the field’s first look at ‘how, or even if, Old English medieval remedies are inflected by age’ (p. 118) and how these texts define normative and non-normative bodies with regard to age, gender, and bodily strength. Caroline R. Batten examines Old English obstetric remedies, demonstrating how the pregnant female body is more consistently associated with death than the creation and nurturing of life. In ‘The Theology of Puberty in Early Medieval England,’ Elaine Flowers shows how ‘the biological process of puberty in pre-Conquest England . . . generated theological consequences associated with leaving an age of spiritual innocence behind’ (p. 160). Focusing almost exclusively on the male body as a pubescent subject, theological discourse describes sexual temptation as both a challenge and opportunity for young men to demonstrate moral understanding and self-control. The essays in ‘Part III: Intergenerational Dynamics’ concern how names, knowledge, and goods are passed down to create a sense of individual identity within a community. James Chetwood’s essay on naming and renaming demonstrates how names were bestowed not only at birth but throughout one’s life to signal familial and social bonds. Just as Flowers’ essay in Part II considers the theological discourse regarding bodily processes, Katherine Cross examines how eighth- and ninth-century ecclesiastical texts refer to the weaning of infants as both a natural life process and a metaphor for spiritual instruction. Amy Faulkner’s essay on treasure describes how Genesis A presents an ideal model for aristocratic inheritance that Beowulf shows to be prone to disruption. The volume’s final section considers ‘Life Beyond the Human.’ Gale R. Owen-Crocker demonstrates how object biography can reveal ‘The Life Course of Artefacts’ as she examines the Orkney Hood, the Bayeux Tapestry, the Sutton Hoo Hanging Bowl and Shield, and early English manuscripts. The final essay places the linear life course of human development alongside the...

Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England

Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England

The Heavenly Field: A Reconsideration of Mother Earth in the Æcerbot Rite

The Heavenly Field: A Reconsideration of Mother Earth in the <i>Æcerbot</i> Rite

Deconstructing the Female Antagonist of the Coronation Scandal in B’s Vita Dunstani

ABSTRACT The clerical author known as B provides the earliest account of one of pre-Conquest England’s more infamous tales: the coronation scandal of 955. In his Vita S. Dunstani, written 995 × 1005, B recounts that King Eadwig (955–959) absconded from his coronation feast, later to be found by Dunstan, the Abbot of Glastonbury, engaging in a sexual liaison with two women, a mother and daughter. Dunstan’s forcible separation of Eadwig from the two women is presented as the genesis for a feud that plays out between Dunstan and the older of the two women, Æthelgifu. Where much previous analysis of this episode has focused on the saint, Dunstan, and the king, Eadwig, this article seeks to centre Æthelgifu as the primary antagonist of the story. In so doing, it undertakes a detailed examination of her character construct, considering the political situation, intertextual models and biblical archetypes that inform it.

Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500–1500. Edited by Jennifer Jahner, Emily Steiner, and Elizabeth M. Tyler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+581.

<i>Medieval Historical Writing: Britain and Ireland, 500–1500</i>. Edited by Jennifer Jahner, Emily Steiner, and Elizabeth M. Tyler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+581.

Aldred’s Glosses to the notae iuris in Durham A.iv.19: Personal, Textual and Cultural Contexts

ABSTRACT This paper discusses Aldred’s glosses to the expanded forms of a series of abbreviations (or notae) of (Roman) legal terms included on fols 85r–86r of Durham, Cathedral Library, MS A.iv.19. By taking a novel approach to Aldred’s work and focusing on what his glossing practices can tell us about his scholarly interests rather than his taste for morphological and semantic structures, this paper shows that, unlike other glossators working south of the Humber, Aldred did not have an interest in the study of (Roman) legal matters and therefore his work should not be aligned with that of Southumbrian scholars, as has been the case in the past. Nonetheless, his work is still very important for our understanding of legal studies in pre-Conquest England: while the Southumbrian materials are dominated by Isidore’s Etymologies, Aldred’s list provides an insight into other sources available to pursue this field of study in early medieval England.

Restoring Creation: The Natural World in the Anglo-Saxon Saints' Lives of Cuthbert and Guthlac by Britton Elliott Brooks

Reviewed by: Restoring Creation: The Natural World in the Anglo-Saxon Saints' Lives of Cuthbert and Guthlac by Britton Elliott Brooks Matthew Firth Brooks, Britton Elliott, Restoring Creation: The Natural World in the Anglo-Saxon Saints' Lives of Cuthbert and Guthlac (Nature and Environment in the Middle Ages), Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2019; hardback; pp. 323; R.R.P. £70.00; ISBN 9781843845300. In Restoring Creation, Britton Elliott Brooks brings the environmental humanities into dialogue with early English hagiography. Specifically, Brooks seeks to present 'the sophisticated and considered engagement with the non-human world' (p. 3) that may be revealed through a close reading of early English hagiography. This [End Page 197] he intends to serve as a corrective to the oversimplifications he perceives in much previous environmental humanities scholarship, which has tended to posit nature as having a negative alterity in the medieval worldview. Central to Brooks's thesis is the idea that it is possible to reconstruct how the English themselves understood the natural world. Representations of nature in early English hagiography, he argues, were defined by 'contemporary theological and philosophical views' (p. 3) and tied to the physical landscape through the regionalism of their narratives. Of those contemporary theological and philosophical views, Brooks focuses on the concept of the restoration of Creation: a breaching of the postlapsarian division between humanity and nature, effected by the achievement of holiness and sanctity. Given the wealth of hagiography from pre-Conquest England, Brooks necessarily limits his focus subjects, choosing to structure his study around the vitae of the eremitic saints Cuthbert and Guthlac. The nature of their eremitism provides the two English saints what Brooks terms a 'direct and transformative interaction with Creation' (p. 15). This is well demonstrated in his case studies; each of Brook's five chapters examines a single hagiography, ordered by chronology of authorship. This structure allows Brooks to demonstrate how the vitae built upon one another, adopting and adapting Augustinian and Bedan exegesis of Creation. Chapter 1 focuses on the anonymous Vita Sancti Cuthberti (698 × 705), examining those passages of the text in which Cuthbert's sanctity restores Creation, albeit temporarily. It is a sanctity that stems from obedience; Cuthbert's obedience restores Creation just as Adam and Eve's disobedience brought about its Fall. Brooks argues that this obedience is specifically framed in monastic terms and suggests that the hagiographer perceived the 'divine order of the universe' (as it relates to the natural world) to parallel monastic order (p. 28). Chapters 2 and 3 turn to Bede, first his metrical Vita Sancti Cuthberti (705 × 716) and then his prose Vita Sancti Cuthberti (c. 721). Brooks's examination of the metrical vita is Restoring Creation's most compelling chapter. It is a work that he at once perceives as personal—'a ruminative and poetic exercise for Bede himself' (p. 67)—and as foundational not only to the Cuthbertine tradition, but to the entry of Augustinian exegeses of Creation into English hagiography. The restoration of Creation here is again tied to monastic obedience, Cuthbert portrayed as what Brooks terms 'an idealized Gregorian monk-pastor' (p. 16). It is a characterization of Cuthbert that comes into full focus in Bede's prose vita. In this text, Brooks identifies an authorial interest in Cuthbert's evolving spiritual maturity—miracles of restoration provide both impetus for and evidence of Cuthbert's achievement of 'spiritual majority' (p. 171). Bede draws on Augustinian interpretations of the Fall and Creation to portray Cuthbert as an exemplar of saintliness and obedience, Creation's own obedience to the saint being predicated on his perfect sanctity. Brooks turns to Guthlac in Chapters 4 and 5, first discussing the Vita Sancti Guthlaci (730 × 740) of Felix before going on to examine the terminological nuances of the Old English Prose Life of Guthlac and Guthlac A (both texts that [End Page 198] have proved difficult to date). What is possibly most interesting in these chapters is the explicit tying of Guthlac's vitae to the landscape of the East Anglian fens. In the Vita Sancti Guthlaci, Brooks sees Guthlac's story, like Cuthbert's, as being one of spiritual progression toward saintliness, but here to some degree...

UNCONSECRATED BURIAL AND EXCOMMUNICATION IN ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND: A REASSESSMENT

This article investigates the ideologies which underpinned unconsecrated burial in late Anglo-Saxon legal and religious texts. The exclusion of sinners and criminals from Christian cemeteries has typically been interpreted by scholars as a form of excommunication or an attempt to facilitate damnation. However, a reassessment of legislative, diplomatic, and ecclesiastical sources reveals that this was not so. In tenth-century laws and charters, unconsecrated burial was imposed exclusively by secular authorities; it was only prescribed by ecclesiastical authorities from ca. 1000. This suggests that it originated as a temporal punishment but later came to be used as an ecclesiastical sentence. The following analysis of the textual evidence yields two interrelated arguments. First, this article demonstrates that through the mid-eleventh century, unconsecrated burial was a penalty distinct from ecclesiastical excommunication. Where excommunication was imposed upon living sinners, to coerce them to penance, unconsecrated burial was prescribed for the unrepentant or criminal dead, whose actions placed them beyond earthly help. Second, this article contends that written prescriptions for unconsecrated burial differentiated secular from ecclesiastical jurisdictions. Although laymen and clergy collaborated in the dispensation of law and justice throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, the written evidence for unconsecrated burial shows that this penalty fell either under the authority of secular or of ecclesiastical agents, demonstrating a clearer separation between these spheres than is usually recognized in pre-Conquest England.

Eall-feala Ealde Sæge: Poetic Performance and "The Scop's Repertoire" in Old English Verse

Eall-feala Ealde Sæge:Poetic Performance and "The Scop's Repertoire" in Old English Verse1 Paul Battles (bio) and Charles D. Wright (bio) Scenes depicting the recitation of verse, particularly in Beowulf, are among the most memorable and closely studied passages in Old English poetry. Beowulf repeatedly depicts the making and performance of poetry (Hill 2002), and it is the swutol sang scopes ("the clear song of the scop," Bwf 90a) that first draws the monster Grendel's attention to Heorot and sets in motion the major events of the first part of the poem.2 In Beowulf, the creation of new stories is inextricably linked with the recitation of ones already known, so that the poem "aligns itself with a poetics where transmission and composition are co-dependent, indivisible aspects of the same act" (Jones 2009:486). A different but equally famous depiction of the scop emerges in the Venerable Bede's account of Caedmon, wherein divine inspiration supersedes tradition as the source of poetic creativity. Of course, these and similar accounts concerning the making and performance of Old English verse cannot be taken as straightforward portraits of the Anglo-Saxon "singer of tales": after all, Hrothgar's scop is Danish and Bede's Christian poet is entirely ignorant of traditional song. Moreover, since Beowulf and other narratives depicting vernacular poets—such as Widsith and Deor—are fictional accounts set int he Migration Age, some critics have gone so far as to deny that they can tell us anything at all about the Anglo-Saxon scop (Frank 1993).3 Yet in the words of John D. Niles, such a position seems "to represent a veritable ecstasy of skepticism" (2003:37). Niles usefully characterizes oral poetry as both a living tradition in pre-Conquest England and also as a "cultural myth whose long process of construction was set in motion as soon as the first missionaries from Iona and Rome introduced the arts of writing to Britain in a systematic way" (38). Fictional portraits of the scop, then, combine elements of poetic practice with a deeply-felt nostalgia for an imagined ancestral past (see Trilling 2009). While not straightforwardly reflective of reality, neither are they completely divorced from it. Even fictional portraits of the making and performance of poetry can tell us much about Anglo-Saxon poetics. Several studies have shown that depictions of poetic performance throughout the corpus incorporate several recurrent thematic patterns supported by common lexemes; in turn, these patterns – traditional themes4—are the product of a tradition that has its roots in the oral recitation of verse. Among the Old English themes depicting the recitation of verse are "The Singer Looks at His Sources," (see Creed 1962; Renoir 1981); "Joy in the Hall," (see Opland 1976; Foley 1983) and the "Poet-patron" see Maring 2011). Like other commonplaces of "heroic" life5—such as feasting, fighting, and voyages by sea or land—in Old English poetry the performance of poetry is articulated through a nexus of conventional ideas, images, and verbal expressions. In this essay we identify and discuss a previously unrecognized theme relating to poetic performance, which we will call "The Scop's Repertoire." This theme, which stages or describes the making of verse, associates that process with three motifs: copiousness; orality; and antiquity. Copiousness references the performer's knowledge of many poems or songs, and implicitly or explicitly links this vast repertoire with the ability to skillfully and quickly weave new texts. Orality means that these texts take the form of spoken, not written, words; they are variously described as spoken tales, as poems, and/or as songs accompanied by instruments. Finally, antiquity adumbrates the power of tradition, characterizing either the texts known to the poet and/or their subject matter as ancient and therefore venerable. As we shall see, "The Scop's Repertoire" takes two forms: in one all three motifs are explicitly present; in the other, the motif of antiquity is absent or displaced. These two variants of "The Scop's Repertoire" articulate different models for what it is that poets do: in the tradition model, they accumulate a store of ancient songs, and learning these endows poets with the...

The Right of Peers to Attend the Accession Council and the Coronation

The coronation of English and later British Kings and Queens represents an ancient survival. Although changed greatly over time, the essence can be traced to the earliest centuries of pre-Conquest England. Contemporary pressures, including increased secularism and the changed role of the constituent countries of the United Kingdom, have raised questions about the form and content of a future coronation in London. One of these is the role of the peerage, traditionally accorded a significant place in any coronation. This article will consider the question of the right of peers—hereditary or life—to attend a coronation. It does so by looking at whether a coronation is a legal or constitutional necessity, who can or should attend a coronation, and also looks briefly at some of the other activities associated with the accession of a new Sovereign, that traditionally involved members of the peerage.

The Anglo-Saxon World, by Nicholas J. Higham and Martin J. Ryan

It seems ungenerous to say that many readers of this splendidly illustrated and highly informative book will first open it to see whether or not it measures up to another, published over thirty years ago. For all the fresh discoveries made since its publication, the 1982 volume The Anglo-Saxons put together by James Campbell, Eric John and Patrick Wormald still occupies an authoritative place at the head of undergraduate reading lists on the history of pre-Conquest England. To read the present book only to see how far its authors, Nicholas Higham and Martin Ryan, have succeeded in living up to their predecessors’ standards would seem the wrong way to approach this new introduction to Anglo-Saxon England, which clearly seeks to synthesise a good deal of more recent scholarship into a form suitable for new readers. But, in truth, the shadow of The Anglo-Saxons lies so heavily over much of this book that the comparison cannot be avoided. The debt manifests itself most immediately in the organisation of the book, not only in the decision to accompany the predominantly political history of the main text with annotated but semi-detached illustrations of objects and artefacts, but also in the various short essays on major ‘sources and issues’ appended to each chapter in the manner of its predecessor’s nineteen ‘picture essays’. A similar sense of familiarity may strike the reader in the closing pages, where Higham comments on the extent to which ‘the basic structures of England owe much to the Anglo-Saxon past’ (p. 426), in much the same way that Campbell concluded his volume with a rumination on how England’s later inhabitants might set about ‘weighing their debt to and links with the Anglo-Saxon past’.

SCOTT T. SMITH. Land and Book: Literature and Land Tenure in Anglo-Saxon England.

Despite the ‘linguistic turn’ in history, the conscious promotion of interdisciplinarity and the increasing willingness of literature scholars to turn to ‘non-literary’ texts (for example, Tom Bredehoft and Alice Sheppard in their books on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), it is a rare scholar of Old English literature who is happy reading charters. Scott Smith is such a scholar, also notable for his willingness to move between Old English and Latin. The book under review relates clearly on the one hand to a growing body of work on the construction of ideas of land and landscape (Nicholas Howe has been a leading figure) and on the other to a long and honourable tradition of diplomatics. However, in its specific focus on property, in the stimulating way it relates literary and documentary sources, and in its detailed readings of individual texts, it offers a worthwhile new contribution. The topic of the book is the discourse of land tenure and the way that discourse not only transformed a resource (land) into a cultural artefact (property) but served to engage a range of other questions about identity, power and the human condition in the world. In an introduction, five chapters and conclusion, the book first examines various kinds of charters, in which questions of the history, ownership and transfer of land are obviously central, and then moves on to look at the role of tenurial discourse in other settings such as homily and poetry. The first chapter focuses on royal diplomas, which account for rather less than 1000 of the roughly 1600 surviving documents from pre-Conquest England. This chapter introduces an anxiety over permanent possession, which is a persistent theme through the book: couched in insistently religious language, diplomas ostensibly confer eternal possession of the land granted, and yet at the same time frequently refer to the impermanence of any earthly inheritance—one should grant temporal property (typically, to ecclesiastical foundations) to gain eternal reward. Both ceremonies such as placing of sods on an altar and elements of display in the texts themselves, such as the flamboyant style of the Athelstan A charters, are strategies designed to suppress such tensions and reaffirm the power and the efficacy of the diploma. However, in close readings of selected diplomas, Smith shows how rhetorical elaboration can introduce further doubts, for example over the possibility of dispute or the shifting of royal favour. The topic of dispute is further explored in Chapter 2, which focuses chiefly on one lengthy dispute charter, S1447. Smith examines the narrative strategies of the charter, noting the way local, familial history is enfolded into larger political dynamics: the progress of a dispute between brothers is aligned with the replacement of King Eadwig by King Edgar. Such narratives function to ‘overwrite’ possible alternative accounts—a point already well-made by Sarah Foot in her 2006 essay ‘Reading Anglo-Saxon Charters’, but here allied to much more detailed literary analysis.

New Evidence for the Influence of Gallic Canon Law in Anglo-Saxon England

The importance of canon law collections to Anglo-Saxon legal culture has long been thought negligible, especially in comparison to the considerable importance of an alternative genre of canonical literature known as the penitential handbook. Over the past several decades, however, evidence for the use and circulation of continental canon law collections in pre-Conquest England has been mounting, to the extent that it could challenge traditional notions about the dominance of penitential law in the early English Church. This study presents new evidence for the reception in Anglo-Saxon England of a major continental collection known as theCollectio vetus Gallica.

Reconquering England for the English in Havelok the Dane

The Middle English Havelok the Dane (ca. 1295–1310), set in pre-Conquest England and rooted in Lincolnshire history, features an Anglo-Danish alliance through marriage between the heir to the throne of Denmark, Havelok, and the heir to the throne of England, Goldeboru.1 The alliance comes amidst circumstances, paralleled in the two countries, of political usurpation and conquest. Both Havelok and Goldeboru lose their fathers (and kings) in early childhood, find themselves robbed of their royal positions, and are thrust into hardship despite the best efforts of their ailing fathers to provide for their future safety and well-being. Though Havelok is often considered a romance, in which such romantic unions typically play a central role, the marriage between the royal heirs departs from convention in that the union serves strictly political aims as it goes against both of their wishes, eliciting his feelings of awkwardness and her disgust. Their joint political destiny becomes manifest to both of them only after marriage when they realize that this union empowers them to reclaim their royal authority and take back their countries, which they do. Political readings of Havelok the Dane tend to situate the poem in the present, within the contemporary political affairs of the reign of Edward I (1272–1307), emphasizing the abuse of royal power in general.2 While these readings rightly identify political corruption as a primary

Hosting the king: hospitality and the royal iter in tenth-century England

Traditional studies of royal itinerancy have depended on locating the king’s progress through his kingdom(s) as precisely as possible and it should therefore not surprise that the iter regis in pre-conquest England has received relatively little attention, since Anglo-Saxon diplomas only rarely record their date and place of issue, making the establishment of the royal itinerary all but impossible. However, more recent studies, particularly by German scholars, have moved away from the earlier attention to the concrete details of the royal iter and focus more on the effects of itinerancy as a method of rulership, viewing itinerancy as a central part of royal ritual. This study argues that if we investigate itinerancy in tenth-century England from this standpoint, we can throw new light onto the subject. Contemporary sources reveal that in England as in France and Germany the iter regis was of great importance, with symbolic acts of feasting and gift-giving accompanying royal visits. The attention given to these ritualised acts in contemporary sources suggests, moreover, that Anglo-Saxon kingship possessed an important ‘charismatic’ quality, which deserves further investigation.

Landscapes of Monastic Foundation:The Establishment of Religious Houses in East Anglia, c. 650-1200 (review)

Reviewed by: Landscapes of Monastic Foundation: The Establishment of Religious Houses in East Anglia, c. 650-1200 Julia Crick Landscapes of Monastic Foundation: The Establishment of Religious Houses in East Anglia, c. 650-1200. By Tim Pestell. [Anglo-Saxon Studies, 5.] (Rochester, New York: The Boydell Press. 2004. Pp. xvi, 280.$85.00.) This volume presents a revised version of a Ph.D. thesis begun under the supervision of the archaeologist Roberta Gilchrist and completed in 1999 under the direction of the landscape historian Tom Williamson. The author is known to archaeologists and historians from a number of articles and in particular for the excellent volume on productive sites which he co-edited with Katharina Ulmschneider (2003). The study under review shows the influence of both advisers in its conception, both the theoretical and spatial interests of Gilchrist and the strongly regional approach of Williamson, but the author treads very much his own path, aiming "to combine both documentary and material evidence without giving either primacy" (p. 17). We should think of this volume, perhaps, as a regional study along the lines of John Blair's investigations of early Surrey and Oxfordshire and Peter Sawyer's of Lincolnshire, in which the authors attempt to review the totality of extant evidence. Pestell's goal is at once more limited and more wide-ranging: not simply the region but its ecclesiastical structures, not simply the church, but monastic foundations, a focus which leads him beyond the Norman Conquest into the much better charted territory of the twelfth century. Pestell begins with a chapter on approaches to what he calls "Monastic Studies," identifying as its prevailing trends architectural reconstruction, which he brands "antiquarian," and center-by-center studies. Even within these few brief pages one would expect to see much greater account taken of previous work on the location of monasteries in their agrarian contexts, in both institutional studies, notably that of Christopher Dyer, and regional surveys like D. H. Williams' work on the Welsh Cistercians (neither referenced in the bibliography). Such work relies on relatively rich deposits of documentary evidence, and Pestell properly draws attention to the volume of literature about the Cistercians, no doubt a reflection of just this phenomenon. Pestell's aim, and in [End Page 382] part his achievement, is very different: to attempt to work against the grain of the evidence and to look at the East Anglian landmass as a geological and topographical whole, investigating the place of monasteries within it. He looks in turn at the siting of monasteries before the first Viking age (chapter 2), evidence for monastic survival during it (chapter 3), new foundations in the tenth-century reform (chapter 4), before a lengthy consideration of post-Conquest foundations (chapter 5), ending with reflections on the general trends observed. The approach brings its own problems. As the author notes, few monastic sites have been excavated in East Anglia; documentary resources are poor and even more poorly distributed, and generalization is hazardous. Nevertheless, consideration of the location of monasteries, discussion of artifactual remains, and reports on the author's own metal-detecting and field-walking lead to interesting observations about the siting of monasteries in old and new locations, their accessibility by boat, the use of island locations, and the identification of monastic sites archaeologically. The most conservative and least satisfactory chapter concerns the monastic reform movement where Pestell is deprived of artifactual and archaeological data, and regional historical evidence simply does not respond to his frame of reference. His synthesis would have been the stronger had he paid fuller attention to the diversity of ecclesiastical structures in and historical evidence from pre-Conquest England, and had he devoted more space to a discussion of his own method and how it relates to the work of others. Traditionalists might have appreciated an appendix in the form of a brief gazeteer of sites. This is a book brimming with ideas, many of which deserve to be followed up, and its unevenness is in part the inevitable consequence of its ambition. Julia Crick University of Exeter Copyright © 2007 The Catholic University of America Press

LaЗamon's Gift

LaЗamon's Brut, from a moment in English literary and cultural history whose sense of tradition is particularly difficult for us to comprehend–a century and a half after the Norman Conquest, at the beginnings of Middle English–has a notoriously complex relation to England's past and traditions. This essay focuses on how The Brut takes a traditional social and literary preoccupation in pre-Conquest England, the lordly gift exchange, and expands it to explore a new range of spiritual gifts (or deceptive claims to them), including professional knowledge, counsel to the powerful, and literary fame. This expansion of the gift corresponds to broad cultural shifts as well as to more topical matters in King John's reign, the probable period of the poem's composition. The poem fashions itself as a gift in these volatile terms, repeatedly embracing an unknown literary future while it accurately limns some fundamental new features of Middle English literature. (AG)

Book reviews

Books reviewed:Guyda Armstrong and Ian N. Wood, (eds) Christianizing Peoples and Converting Individuals.Pierre Bonnerue, (ed) Benedict of Aniane. Concordia regularum.Constance Brittain Bouchard, ‘Strong of Body, Brave and Noble’: Chivalry and Society in Medieval France.André Debord, Aristocratie et pouvoir: le rôle du château dans la France médiévale.H. Conrad‐O’Briain, A.M. D’Arcy and J. Scattergood.(eds), Text and Gloss. Studies in Insular Learning and Literature Presented to Joseph Donovan Pheifer.Richard Gameson and Henrietta Leyser, (eds) Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages. Studies Presented to Henry Mayr‐Harting.Hans‐Werner Goetz, Moderne Mediävistik. Stand und Perspektiven der Mittelalterforschung.Heinrich Götz, Lateinisch‐althochdeutsch‐neuhochdeutsches Wörterbuch.Matthew Innes, State and Society in the Early Middle Ages: The Middle Rhine Valley 400–1000.Bernhard Jussen, Spiritual Kinship as Social Practice: Godparenthood and Adoption in the Early Middle Ages.Jeremy K. Knight, The End of Antiquity. Archaeology, Society and Religion, AD 235–700.Richard Reece, The Later Roman Empire. An Archaeology, AD 150–600.Ellen Swift, The End of the Western Roman Empire. An Archaeological Investigation.Isabel Moreira, Dreams, Visions and Spiritual Authority in Merovingian Gaul.J.M.H. Smith, (ed) Early Medieval Rome and the Christian West. Essays in Honour of Donald A. Bullough.Benedicta Ward, High King Of Heaven: Aspects of Early English Spirituality.Ann Williams, Kingship and Government in Pre‐Conquest England, c. 500–1066.