DOCSLIB.ORG

POETIC PROPERTIES LEGAL FORMS and LITERARY DOCUMENTS in EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE by Stephen Yeager a Thesis Submitted in Conform

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
POETIC PROPERTIES LEGAL FORMS and LITERARY DOCUMENTS in EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE by Stephen Yeager a Thesis Submitted in Conform POETIC PROPERTIES LEGAL FORMS AND LITERARY DOCUMENTS IN EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE by Stephen Yeager A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Department of English, in the University of Toronto. © Copyright by Stephen Yeager 2010 ABSTRACT "Poetic Properties: Legal Forms and Literary Documents in Early English Literature" Stephen Yeager, Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Department of English, University of Toronto This thesis argues that the Middle English alliterative prosody of the Piers Plowman tradition was influenced by a discourse combining law, history, homily and poetry which was inherited from the administrative practices of the Anglo-Saxon period. As literary and legal textual genres developed recognizably distinct formal characteristics in the later Middle Ages, the combination of homiletic rhetoric and alliterative sound- patterning evoked a surviving discourse in which the formal characteristics of poems and documents were less clearly distinguished. Thus insofar as it evoked Anglo-Saxon textual culture, Piers Plowman provided a formal model which was particularly suitable to criticisms of political institutions that consolidated their power by developing new distinctions between the genres of bureaucratic texts. In each of the texts and traditions studied – Wulfstans homiletic law code I–II Cnut and its Latin translations, The First Worcester Fragment, Laamons Arthurian Brut chronicle-poem, The South English Legendary "Life of St. Egwine", and the Piers Plowman tradition poem Mum and the Sothsegger – apparently “literary” devices are used to authorize historically-based “legal” claims, particularly on behalf of ecclesiastical institutions looking to maintain their local influence in the face of increasingly consolidated royal administrative authority. Though oaths played a much less important procedural role after the Norman Conquest than they did in the Anglo-Saxon period, the appearance of "creative" authenticating procedures in "commemorative" texts created the appearance of orality to post-Conquest readers, to criticize a government which claimed its English "common" law to originate in the remotest recorded antiquity, even as ii it abandoned the practices actually recorded in the earliest surviving law codes and documents to be written in England. Comparing these texts allows a deeper understanding of their shared authenticating strategies, and also a re-appraisal of the methods we use to describe the relationships between medieval documents and authors, literature and law, texts and contexts. Appended to the dissertation is an edition of the SEL "Life of St. Egwine." Because Egwine's hagiographic tradition is so thematically invested in political concerns and closely interconnected with legal documents attributed to Egwine himself, the edition provides an opportunity to take a "disjunctively" literary and diplomatic approach to the tradition, in the process exploring some of the practical implications of the larger theoretical issues raised by the thesis as a whole. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to express my appreciation to the members of my thesis committee, Professor Will Robins, Professor David Townsend, and especially to my supervisor, Professor Andy Orchard; not only for their patient stewardship of this thesis, but more generally for their guidance and instruction over the course of the degree that it culminates. Their attentive readings and helpful suggestions were immeasurably helpful in both shaping the project and refining its substance; any infelicities or errors that may remain are entirely my own. I would also like to thank the members of my examining committee, Professor Toni Healey, Professor Deirdre Lynch, Professor David Klausner, and Professor Andrew Galloway. Their fresh eyes helped me to spot some of the afore-mentioned infelicities, and their comments clarified aspects of my argument in a way that has uncovered many exciting new possibilities for the future. Professor Suzanne Akbari, Professor Lawrin Armstrong, and Professor J. Edward Chamberlin all taught graduate seminars in which early versions of these ideas were first hashed out, and I am thankful to them for their encouragement and guidance, along with the many other faculty members and support staff personnel at the University of Toronto who have made my time as a graduate student so rewarding. And to go back to the beginning, I would like to thank Professor Maud McInerney, who convinced me to apply to the U of T and inspired me to be a medievalist. I am lucky to have completed my post-secondary education with the help of so many mentors and friends, and I am grateful to all of them. I am also indebted to Father James K. Farge, C.S.B.; not only for his work at the Pontifical Institute for Mediæval Studies library, but also for convincing my grandmother to send my father and uncles to St. Thomas High School in Houston, where I would later read Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for the first time. Father Farge is iv just one of the Basilian fathers to play a role in my intellectual development, and I am grateful the entire Congregation of St. Basil for their inspirational work as educators. I would also like to thank Dr. Jonathan Newman and Magda Hayton for their friendship and intellectual fellowship, in the years past and the years ahead; and also the Toronto family Andrew Chang, Craig Jacobs, Atsmon Ganor, and Monica Alder. The years I spent on this project were more intellectually and personally rewarding than I ever would have dreamed when I began, and it was due in no small part to the warmth and generosity of the many friends, teachers and colleagues I met along the way. Finally, I would like to thank my family, especially my parents Scott and Susan Yeager, my wifes parents Don and Bea Quarrie, my wife Cynthia Quarrie, and our son Samuel, for their love and support. This thesis is dedicated to them. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction From Written Record to Memory 1 Definitions 6 The Charter Sawyer 1166 13 Summary of the Chapters 31 Chapter 1 Leges Cnuti, Sermones Lupi: Homily, Law, and the Legacy of Wulfstan 35 Law and Homily: The Problem of Genre 37 Cnut and his Codes: Text and Context 54 Chapter 2 Wulfstan Post–Conquest: Ecclesiastical Anglo-Saxonism in the Golden Age of Forgery 65 Church and Law in Post-Conquest England 67 Cnut in Translation 77 Legislation and Legacy: Wulfstan and the Leges Henrici Primi 94 The First Worcester Fragment 101 Chapter 3 Laamon's Brut: Law, Literature, and the Chronicle-Poem 113 Introducing the Brut 115 The "Lawman" and the Law 131 Law, Land, and Language: Brut's Saxon 'Ambivalence' 142 Chapter 4 The SEL "Life of St. Egwine": Document, Poem, and Editorial Practice 159 The "Life of St. Egwine" Manuscripts 165 Sources 169 Variation and Authentication: S 1251 175 The Choice of a Base-Text 182 Chapter 5 Mum and the Sothsegger: Textual Traditions and Documentary Poetics 198 Defining the Piers Plowman Tradition 201 Text, Gloss, and Genre in Mum and the Sothsegger 208 How to Solve a Problem Like Genghis Khan 219 Out of the Frying Pan: Anti-fraternalism and Lollardy 231 Conclusion 247 Appendix: Edition of the SEL "Life of St. Egwine" 253 Works Cited 260 vi Introduction: From Written Record to Memory An enduring puzzle presented by the corpus of surviving Middle English literature is the question of why there should be such a large corpus of alliterative poems dated to the mid-fourteenth century or later, given the virtual disappearance of classical Old English verse in the late eleventh century. This phenomenon has been misleadingly called "the alliterative revival," a title that suggests a return to the meter, perhaps inspired by an undocumented oral tradition of vernacular poetry that stretched from the Anglo-Saxon period to the Lancastrian era (Chambers 1966; Andrew and Waldron 1978, 46). Thus the revival of alliterative verse would appear to be only one symptom of the larger return to English as a language of serious literary and philosophical writing at the end of the medieval period. Though the theory that these poets were conducting a “revival” has since been frequently refuted—both because there is little indication that they were all part of a coherent movement, and also because even a cursory reading of the poems reveals that they were written by highly literate poets1—the idea of a “revival” has maintained enough of an aura of plausibility that the term has managed to persist, for reasons identified by Ralph Hanna: “On the one hand, the speakers of these poems personify a hoary wisdom and exemplify it through their reliance upon standard learned texts of Latinate origin… yet simultaneously, the mode in which such literary 1 See for example: Thorlac Turville-Petre, The Alliterative Revival (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1977), 15–17; Derek Pearsall, "The Origins of the Alliterative Revival," Middle English Alliterative Poetry and Its Literary Background: Seven Essays, ed. David A. Lawton (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1982), 34–53, esp. 41–44; and Mark Amodio, Writing the Oral Tradition: Oral Poetics and Literate Culture in Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004),182. Arguments for a continuity based on alliterative English "stressed prose" include: Angus McIntosh, "Wulfstan's Prose," Proceedings of the British Academy 35 (1949), 109–42; Norman Blake, "Rhythmical Alliteration," Modern Philology 67.2 (1969), 118–24; Elizabeth Salter, Derek Albert Pearsall and Nicolette Zeeman, English and International: Studies in the Literature, Art and Patronage of Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 170–9; Thomas Cable, The English Alliterative Tradition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 41–63; Thomas A. Bredehoft, Early English Metre, Toronto Old English Series (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). 1 2 communication is not simply marked, but overmarked, as vernacular,” so that they “flaunt their own (thoroughly fictive) orality” (Hanna 1999, 501).2 Alliterative prosody is certainly well-suited for "flaunting" a fictive orality.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • I WRITING MIRACLES in TENTH-CENTURY WINCHESTER
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Birmingham Research Archive, E-theses Repository WRITING MIRACLES IN TENTH-CENTURY WINCHESTER by Cory Stephen Hazlehurst A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of MASTER OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Medieval History College of Arts and Law The University of Birmingham February 2011 i University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract This thesis examines a number of miracle collections and hagiographies written by Winchester monks in the late tenth century. It compares three different accounts of the cult of Swithun by Lantfred, Wulfstan and Ӕlfric, as well as comparing Wulfstan‟s and Ӕlfric‟s Vita Ӕthelwoldi. There were two main objectives to the thesis. The first was to examine whether an analysis of miracle narratives could tell us anything important about how a monastic community perceived itself, especially in relation to the wider world? This was tested by applying approaches used by Thomas Head and Raymond Van Dam to an Anglo- Saxon context.
    [Show full text]
  • A Brief History of Christ Church MEDIEVAL PERIOD
    A Brief History of Christ Church MEDIEVAL PERIOD Christ Church was founded in 1546, and there had been a college here since 1525, but prior to the Dissolution of the monasteries, the site was occupied by a priory dedicated to the memory of St Frideswide, the patron saint of both university and city. St Frideswide, a noble Saxon lady, founded a nunnery for herself as head and for twelve more noble virgin ladies sometime towards the end of the seventh century. She was, however, pursued by Algar, prince of Leicester, for her hand in marriage. She refused his frequent approaches which became more and more desperate. Frideswide and her ladies, forewarned miraculously of yet another attempt by Algar, fled up river to hide. She stayed away some years, settling at Binsey, where she performed healing miracles. On returning to Oxford, Frideswide found that Algar was as persistent as ever, laying siege to the town in order to capture his bride. Frideswide called down blindness on Algar who eventually repented of his ways, and left Frideswide to her devotions. Frideswide died in about 737, and was canonised in 1480. Long before this, though, pilgrims came to her shrine in the priory church which was now populated by Augustinian canons. Nothing remains of Frideswide’s nunnery, and little - just a few stones - of the Saxon church but the cathedral and the buildings around the cloister are the oldest on the site. Her story is pictured in cartoon form by Burne-Jones in one of the windows in the cathedral. One of the gifts made to the priory was the meadow between Christ Church and the Thames and Cherwell rivers; Lady Montacute gave the land to maintain her chantry which lay in the Lady Chapel close to St Frideswide’s shrine.
    [Show full text]
  • Saint's Law: Anglo-Saxon Sanctuary Protection in the Translatio Et Miracula S. Swithuni1
    Saint’s Law: Anglo-Saxon Sanctuary Protection in the Translatio et Miracula S. Swithuni 1 John P. Sexton Patrick Wormald’s handlist of Anglo-Saxon lawsuits begins its gesta and miracula evi- dence with three consecutive suits from Lantfred of Winchester’s c. 972 Translatio et Miracula S. Swithuni.2 The suits, which appear in chapters 25-27, describe the trial by ordeal of a servant accused of “a certain misdeed” (quodam facinore, 25.3), the mutila- tion of a man accused of robbery, and an “arraignment of a man for appropriation of the king’s corn.”3 Although Wormald classifies the third item, like the first, as a “rescue from prison or penalty” case in contrast to the sanctuary cases he identifies in the Vita S. Edithae Virginis and De Miraculis S. Edmundi,4 the corn-appropriation or “wheat- thief” episode rightly belongs in both categories since it intentionally evokes the defin- ing characteristics of sanctuary protection in pre-Conquest legislation. Sanctuary mir- acles are, in fact, quite common in the Anglo-Saxon hagiographic record, informed by 1 I use the modern historian’s term “sanctuary” throughout to indicate the full spectrum of asylum- taking traditions. For a discussion of the various terms employed during the medieval period, see Shoe- maker,“Medieval Sanctuary Law,”22-29. I am grateful to Dr. Shoemaker for providing me with a copy of his dissertation. 2 Wormald,“A Handlist,”269. The three cases are numbered 154-156. The “wheat-thief” episode is retold in Wulfstan of Winchester’s c. 994 Narratio Metrica de Sancto Swithuno (2.10).
    [Show full text]
  • Francia. Band 44
    Francia. Forschungen zur Westeuropäischen Geschichte. Herausgegeben vom Deutschen Historischen Institut Paris (Institut historique allemand) Band 44 (2017) Nithard as a Military Historian of the Carolingian Empire, c 833–843 DOI: 10.11588/fr.2017.0.68995 Copyright Das Digitalisat wird Ihnen von perspectivia.net, der Online-Publikationsplattform der Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland, zur Verfügung gestellt. Bitte beachten Sie, dass das Digitalisat urheberrechtlich geschützt ist. Erlaubt ist aber das Lesen, das Ausdrucken des Textes, das Herunterladen, das Speichern der Daten auf einem eigenen Datenträger soweit die vorgenannten Handlungen ausschließlich zu privaten und nicht-kommerziellen Zwecken erfolgen. Eine darüber hinausgehende unerlaubte Verwendung, Reproduktion oder Weitergabe einzelner Inhalte oder Bilder können sowohl zivil- als auch strafrechtlich verfolgt werden. Bernard S. Bachrach – David S. Bachrach NITHARD AS A MILITARY HISTORIAN OF THE CAROLINGIAN EMPIRE, C 833–843 Introduction Despite the substantially greater volume of sources that provide information about the military affairs of the ninth century as compared to the eighth, the lion’s share of scholarly attention concerning Carolingian military history has been devoted to the reign of Charlemagne, particularly before his imperial coronation in 800, rather than to his descendants1. Indeed, much of the basic work on the sources, that is required to establish how they can be used to answer questions about military matters in the period after Charlemagne, remains to be done. An unfortunate side-effect of this rel- ative neglect of military affairs as well as source criticism for the ninth century has been considerable confusion about the nature and conduct of war in this period2.
    [Show full text]
  • STEPHEN J. HARRIS Professor University of Massachusetts PO Box
    STEPHEN J. HARRIS Professor University of Massachusetts P.O. Box 805 Department of English Amherst, MA 01004 Bartlett Hall (413) 253-1163 Amherst, MA 10003 [email protected] (413) 545-6598 Professor, Department of English, UMass Professor (Adjunct), Department of Germanic and Scandinavian Studies, UMass EDUCATION LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO Ph.D. in English Literature, May, 1999. Specialization in Old English. Dissertation awarded with double distinction. Dissertation: Identity in Anglo-Saxon Literature: Ethnogenesis from Bede to Geoffrey of Monmouth. Committee: Allen J. Frantzen (Director), Karma Lochrie, Tracy Lounsbury (Dept. of Philosophy). UNIVERSITY OF OTTAWA (OTTAWA, ONTARIO) M.A. in English Literature, December, 1991. BISHOP’S UNIVERSITY (LENNOXVILLE, QUÉBEC) B.A. Honours in English Literature, May, 1988. Lisgar Collegiate Institute (Ottawa, Ontario); University of Detroit High School and Jesuit Academy (Detroit, MI). PUBLICATIONS Bede and Aethelthryth: An Introduction to Christian Latin Poetics. West Virginia University Press, 2016. An introduction to how poems were read in monastic schools along with a close reading of Bede’s Hymn to Aethelthryth. Vox Germanica: Essays on Germanic Languages and Literatures in Honor of James E. Cathey, ed. with Michael Moynihan and Sherrill Harbison. Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2012. 306 pp. Nineteen chapters on topics ranging from Norwegian accent shifts to Rilke. Misconceptions about the Middle Ages, ed. with Bryon Grigsby. London: Routledge, 2008. 308 pp. Thirty chapters. Edited collection of essays by international contributors describing and correcting commonly held misconceptions about the Middle Ages. Examples include the notion that medieval people thought the world was flat, that they burned witches, that they used chastity belts, that they submitted wholly to the Catholic Church, and so forth.
    [Show full text]
  • Catalogue of Adoption Items Within Worcester Cathedral Adopt a Window
    Catalogue of Adoption Items within Worcester Cathedral Adopt a Window The cloister Windows were created between 1916 and 1999 with various artists producing these wonderful pictures. The decision was made to commission a contemplated series of historical Windows, acting both as a history of the English Church and as personal memorials. By adopting your favourite character, event or landscape as shown in the stained glass, you are helping support Worcester Cathedral in keeping its fabric conserved and open for all to see. A £25 example Examples of the types of small decorative panel, there are 13 within each Window. A £50 example Lindisfarne The Armada A £100 example A £200 example St Wulfstan William Caxton Chaucer William Shakespeare Full Catalogue of Cloister Windows Name Location Price Code 13 small decorative pieces East Walk Window 1 £25 CW1 Angel violinist East Walk Window 1 £50 CW2 Angel organist East Walk Window 1 £50 CW3 Angel harpist East Walk Window 1 £50 CW4 Angel singing East Walk Window 1 £50 CW5 Benedictine monk writing East Walk Window 1 £50 CW6 Benedictine monk preaching East Walk Window 1 £50 CW7 Benedictine monk singing East Walk Window 1 £50 CW8 Benedictine monk East Walk Window 1 £50 CW9 stonemason Angel carrying dates 680-743- East Walk Window 1 £50 CW10 983 Angel carrying dates 1089- East Walk Window 1 £50 CW11 1218 Christ and the Blessed Virgin, East Walk Window 1 £100 CW12 to whom this Cathedral is dedicated St Peter, to whom the first East Walk Window 1 £100 CW13 Cathedral was dedicated St Oswald, bishop 961-992,
    [Show full text]
  • New I.5 Intro
    1 ANGLO-SAXON, NORSE, AND CELTIC TRIPOS, PRELIMINARY EXAMINATION PAPER 5 ANGLO-SAXON, NORSE, AND CELTIC TRIPOS, PART I, PAPER 5 (PART II, PAPER 23) Old English Introductory Bibliography ESSENTIAL TEXTBOOK B. Mitchell and F. C. Robinson, A Guide to Old English, 8th ed. (Oxford, 2012) (7th ed. (2007) and 6th ed. (2001) also acceptable) [UL: 770.c.200.1; EFL: E125 MIT]1 [The major textbook used in the ASNC course, containing all the first-year set texts, a useful grammar, glossary, introductory remarks, etc.] LEARNING OLD ENGLISH: USEFUL RESOURCES P. S. Baker, Introduction to Old English (Oxford, 2003) [UL: 770.c.200.5; EFL: E1125 BAK] [contains an especially friendly grammar; also available free on the web, see below] R. Hasenfratz and T. Jambeck, Reading Old English: A Primer and First Reader (Morgantown WV, 2005) [EFL: E125 HAS] 1 UL = University Library; EFL = the ASNC section in the English Faculty Library. Note that many of these books should also be available in College libraries; if you find that a particular item is essential to you, but that your College doesn’t have it, try asking your College librarian to order it. Updated 05/08/2013 2 C. Hough and J. Corbett, Beginning Old English (Basingstoke and New York, 2007) [EFL: E125 HOU] R. Marsden, The Cambridge Old English Reader (Cambridge, 2004) [EFL: E126 MAR] M. McGillivray, A Gentle Introduction to Old English (Peterborough (Ontario), London, etc., 2011) [EFL: on order] M. McGillivray, Old English Reader (Peterborough (Ontario), London, etc., 2011) [EFL: on order] B. Mitchell,
    [Show full text]
  • Kent Academic Repository Full Text Document (Pdf)
    Kent Academic Repository Full text document (pdf) Citation for published version Gallagher, Robert and TINTI, FRANCESCA (2018) Latin, Old English and documentary practice at Worcester from Wærferth to Oswald. Anglo-Saxon England . ISSN 0263-6751. (In press) DOI Link to record in KAR https://kar.kent.ac.uk/72334/ Document Version Author's Accepted Manuscript Copyright & reuse Content in the Kent Academic Repository is made available for research purposes. Unless otherwise stated all content is protected by copyright and in the absence of an open licence (eg Creative Commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher, author or other copyright holder. Versions of research The version in the Kent Academic Repository may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. Users should always cite the published version of record. Enquiries For any further enquiries regarding the licence status of this document, please contact: [email protected] If you believe this document infringes copyright then please contact the KAR admin team with the take-down information provided at http://kar.kent.ac.uk/contact.html Latin, Old English and documentary practice at Worcester from Wærferth to Oswald ROBERT GALLAGHER AND FRANCESCA TINTI ABSTRACT This article analyses the uses of Latin and Old English in the charters of Worcester cathedral, which represents one of the largest and most linguistically interesting of the surviving Anglo-Saxon archives. Specifically focused on the period encompassing the episcopates of Wærferth and Oswald (c. 870 to 992), this survey examines a time of intense administrative activity at Worcester, contemporaneous with significant transformations in the political and cultural life of Anglo-Saxon England more generally.
    [Show full text]
  • Hitler's Doubles
    Hitler’s Doubles By Peter Fotis Kapnistos Fully-Illustrated Hitler’s Doubles Hitler’s Doubles: Fully-Illustrated By Peter Fotis Kapnistos [email protected] FOT K KAPNISTOS, ICARIAN SEA, GR, 83300 Copyright © April, 2015 – Cold War II Revision (Trump–Putin Summit) © August, 2018 Athens, Greece ISBN: 1496071468 ISBN-13: 978-1496071460 ii Hitler’s Doubles Hitler’s Doubles By Peter Fotis Kapnistos © 2015 - 2018 This is dedicated to the remote exploration initiatives of the Stargate Project from the 1970s up until now, and to my family and friends who endured hard times to help make this book available. All images and items are copyright by their respective copyright owners and are displayed only for historical, analytical, scholarship, or review purposes. Any use by this report is done so in good faith and with respect to the “Fair Use” doctrine of U.S. Copyright law. The research, opinions, and views expressed herein are the personal viewpoints of the original writers. Portions and brief quotes of this book may be reproduced in connection with reviews and for personal, educational and public non-commercial use, but you must attribute the work to the source. You are not allowed to put self-printed copies of this document up for sale. Copyright © 2015 - 2018 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED iii Hitler’s Doubles The Cold War II Revision : Trump–Putin Summit [2018] is a reworked and updated account of the original 2015 “Hitler’s Doubles” with an improved Index. Ascertaining that Hitler made use of political decoys, the chronological order of this book shows how a Shadow Government of crisis actors and fake outcomes operated through the years following Hitler’s death –– until our time, together with pop culture memes such as “Wunderwaffe” climate change weapons, Brexit Britain, and Trump’s America.
    [Show full text]
  • ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND Her Mon Mæg Giet Gesion Hiora Swæð
    CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND Her mon mæg giet gesion hiora swæð EXECUTIVE EDITORS Simon Keynes, Rosalind Love and Andy Orchard Editorial Assistant Dr Brittany Schorn ([email protected]) ADVISORY EDITORIAL BOARD Professor Robert Bjork, Arizona State University, Tempe AZ 85287-4402, USA Professor John Blair, The Queen’s College, Oxford OX1 4AW, UK Professor Mary Clayton, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland Dr Richard Dance, St Catharine’s College, Cambridge CB2 1RL, UK Professor Roberta Frank, Dept of English, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA Professor Richard Gameson, Dept of History, Durham University, Durham DH1 3EX, UK Professor Helmut Gneuss, Universität München, Germany Professor Simon Keynes, Trinity College, Cambridge CB2 1TQ, UK Professor Michael Lapidge, Clare College, Cambridge CB2 1TL, UK Professor Patrizia Lendinara, Facoltà di Scienze della Formazione, Palermo, Italy Dr Rosalind Love, Robinson College, Cambridge CB3 9AN, UK Dr Rory Naismith, Clare College, Cambridge CB2 1TL, UK Professor Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, University of California, Berkeley, USA Professor Andrew Orchard, Pembroke College, Oxford OX1 1DW, UK Professor Paul G. Remley, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195-4330, USA Professor Paul E. Szarmach, Medieval Academy of America, Cambridge MA 02138, USA PRODUCTION TEAM AT THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Sarah Westlake (Production Editor, Journals) <[email protected]> Daniel Pearce (Commissioning Editor) <[email protected]> Cambridge University Press, Edinburgh Building, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS Clare Orchard (copyeditor) < [email protected]> Dr Debby Banham (proofreader) <[email protected]> CONTACTING MEMBERS OF THE EDITORIAL BOARD If in need of guidance whilst preparing a contribution, prospective contributors may wish to make contact with an editor whose area of interest and expertise is close to their own.
    [Show full text]
  • Historical Background to the Sculpture
    CHAPTER II HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO THE SCULPTURE THE AREA as do the rivers Don and its tributary the Dearne, further south. However, the county straddles the Pennines, so This volume completes the study of the sculpture of the that the upper reaches of the rivers Lune and Ribble, historic county of Yorkshire begun in volumes III (Lang draining away towards the west coast, are also within its 1991) and VI (Lang 2001) of the series: that is, it covers boundaries. the pre-1974 West Riding of Yorkshire. The geographical The effect of this topography on settlement is reflected spread of this area is in itself very important to the present in all phases of its history, as discussed below. Most study (Fig. 2). The modern county of West Yorkshire is dramatically and pertinently for our present purposes, it all to the east of Manchester, but the north-west corner is clear in the distribution of the Roman roads and the of the old West Riding curves round through the Pennine pre-Conquest sculpture, that both follow the river valleys dales to the north and west of Manchester, coming at yet avoid the low-lying marshy areas while keeping below one point to within a few miles of the west coast of the 300 metre mark. England. At the other end, it stretches a long way to the south, into what is now South Yorkshire. In fact, it touches on five other counties apart from the old North and POLITICAL SUMMARY East Ridings of Yorkshire: Lancashire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire.
    [Show full text]
  • 1 Making a Difference in Tenth-Century Politics: King
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by St Andrews Research Repository 1 Making a Difference in Tenth-Century Politics: King Athelstan’s Sisters and Frankish Queenship Simon MacLean (University of St Andrews) ‘The holy laws of kinship have purposed to take root among monarchs for this reason: that their tranquil spirit may bring the peace which peoples long for.’ Thus in the year 507 wrote Theoderic, king of the Ostrogoths, to Clovis, king of the Franks.1 His appeal to the ideals of peace between kin was designed to avert hostilities between the Franks and the Visigoths, and drew meaning from the web of marital ties which bound together the royal dynasties of the early-sixth-century west. Theoderic himself sat at the centre of this web: he was married to Clovis’s sister, and his daughter was married to Alaric, king of the Visigoths.2 The present article is concerned with a much later period of European history, but the Ostrogothic ruler’s words nevertheless serve to introduce us to one of its central themes, namely the significance of marital alliances between dynasties. Unfortunately the tenth-century west, our present concern, had no Cassiodorus (the recorder of the king’s letter) to methodically enlighten the intricacies of its politics, but Theoderic’s sentiments were doubtless not unlike those that crossed the minds of the Anglo-Saxon and Frankish elite families who engineered an equally striking series of marital relationships among themselves just over 400 years later. In the early years of the tenth century several Anglo-Saxon royal women, all daughters of King Edward the Elder of Wessex (899-924) and sisters (or half-sisters) of his son King Athelstan (924-39), were despatched across the Channel as brides for Frankish and Saxon rulers and aristocrats.
    [Show full text]