This volume of essays focuses on how individuals living in the late tenth through fifteenth centuries engaged with the authorizing culture of the Anglo-Saxons. Drawing from a reservoir of undertreated early English documents and texts, each contributor shows how individual poets, ecclesiasts, legists, and institutions claimed Anglo-Saxon predecessors for rhetorical purposes in response to social, cultural, and linguistic change. Contributors trouble simple definitions of identity and period, exploring how medieval authors looked to earlier periods of history to define social identities and make claims for their present moment based on the political fiction of an imagined community of a single, distinct nation unified in identity by descent and religion.
Contributors are Cynthia Turner Camp, Irina Dumitrescu, Jay Paul Gates, Erin Michelle Goeres, Mary Kate Hurley, Maren Clegg Hyer, Nicole Marafioti, Brian O'Camb, Kathleen Smith, Carla María Thomas, Larissa Tracy, and Eric Weiskott.
Author(s): Jay Paul Gates, Brian T. O'Camb
Series: Explorations in Medieval Culture, 11
Publisher: Brill
Year: 2019
Language: English
Pages: 336
City: Leiden
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Figures and Tables
List of Abbreviations
List of Contributors
Introduction
Anglo-Saxon Predecessors and Precedents
Jay Paul Gates and Brian T. O’Camb
Chapter 1
The Legacy of King Edgar in the Laws of Archbishop Wulfstan
Nicole Marafioti
Chapter 2
Exile and Migration in the Vernacular Lives of Edward “the Confessor”
Erin Michelle Goeres
Chapter 3
Quidam proditor partis Danicae: Aelred’s Re-Imagining of the Anglo-Saxon Past
Jay Paul Gates
Chapter 4
The Hermitic Topos: “Selling” Shared Sanctity to Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, and English Audiences
Maren Clegg Hyer
Chapter 5
Looking for Holy Grandmothers in Late Medieval Nunneries
Cynthia Turner Camp
Chapter 6
Peace Weaving and Gold Giving: Anglo-Saxon Queenship in Havelok the Dane
Larissa Tracy
Chapter 7
Writing, Rewriting, and Disrupting the Anglo-Saxon Past in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale
Kathleen Smith
Chapter 8
The Case of Poema Morale: Old English Homiletic Influence in Early Middle English Verse
Carla María Thomas
Chapter 9
The Familiar Wisdom of Treasured Friends and the Landscape of Conquest in the Proverbs of Alfred
Brian T. O’Camb
Chapter 10
The Idea of Bede in English Political Prophecy
Eric Weiskott
Afterword
Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Kate Hurley
Bibliography
General Index
