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Living through Conquest is the first ever investigation of the political clout of English from the reign of Cnut to the earliest decades of the thirteenth century. It focuses on why and how the English language was used by kings and their courts and by leading churchmen and monastic institutions at key moments from 1020 to 1220.
The Oxford History of English traces the language from its obscure Indo-European roots to its position as the world's first language. In accounts made vivid with examples from an immense range of documentary evidence, including letters, diaries, and private records, fifteen experts describe the history of English in all its versions, written and spoken. They reveal the language's rich and protean variety over the centuries and chart the progress of all its versions, standard, regional, and international. With impeccable and approachable scholarship, they describe and explain its constantly changing sounds, words, meanings, and grammar. This is a book for everyone interested in the English language, present and past.
When describing the transition from Old Norse religion to Christianity in recent studies, the concept of "Christianization" is often applied. To a large extent this historiography focuses on the outcome of the encounter, namely the description of early Medieval Christianity and the new Christian society. The purpose of the present study is to concentrate more exclusively on the Old Norse religion during this period of change and to analyze the processes behind its disappearance on an official level of the society. More specifically this study concentrates on the role of Viking kings and indigenous agency in the winding up of the old religion. An actor-oriented perspective will thus be established, which focuses on the actions, methods and strategies applied by the early Christian Viking kings when dismantling the religious tradition that had previously formed their lives. In addition, the resistance that some pagan chieftains offered against these Christian kings is discussed as well as the question why they defended the old religious tradition.
In medieval Europe, the death of a king could not only cause a dispute about the succession, but also a severe crisis. In times of a vacant throne particular responsibility fell to the bishops - whose general importance for the time around the first milennium has been revealed by recent scholarship - as royal counsellors and policy makers. This volume therefore concentrates on the bishops' room for manoeuvre and the patterns of episcopal power, focusing on the Eastern Frankish Reich and Anglo-Saxon England in a comparative approach which is not least based upon the research of a renowned medievalist, Timothy Reuter. His article about "A Europe of Bishops" ("Ein Europa der Bischöfe") is presented in English translation for the first time.
Anglo-Danish Empire is an interdisciplinary handbook for the Danish conquest of England in 1016 and the subsequent reign of King Cnut the Great. Bringing together scholars from the fields of history, literature, archaeology, and manuscript studies, the volume offers comprehensive analysis of England’s shift from Anglo-Saxon to Danish rule. It follows the history of this complicated transition, from the closing years of the reign of King Æthelred II and the Anglo-Danish wars, to Cnut’s accession to the throne of England and his consolidation of power at home and abroad. Ruling from 1016 to 1035, Cnut drew England into a Scandinavian empire that stretched from Ireland to the Baltic. His reign rewrote the place of Denmark and England within Europe, altering the political and cultural landscapes of both countries for decades to come.
An examination of the linguistic and cultural construction of one of the texts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. In the twelfth century, a version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was rewritten at Peterborough Abbey, welding local history into an established framework of national events. This text has usually been regarded as an exception, a vernacular Chronicle written in a period dominated by Latin histories. This study, however, breaks new ground by considering the Peterborough Chronicle as much more than just an example of the accidental longevity of the Chronicle tradition. Close analysis reveals unique interpretations of events, and a very strong sense of communal identity, suggesting that the...
La 4e de couv. indique : "As early as the 1st century AD, learned Romans knew of more than one group of people living in north-western Europe beyond their Empire's Gallic provinces whose names contained the element that gives us modern "Frisian". Those apparently were Celtic-speaking peoples, but that population seems to have completely replaced in the course of the convulsions that Europe underwent at the transition from the Ancient world to the Early Medieval in the 4th and 5th centuries. The importance of linguistically Germanic Frisians as neighbours of the Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Saxons and Danes in the centuries immediately following the fall of the Roman Empire in the West is widely rec...
This collection brings together twelve essays published between 1988 and 2014, two of which are here translated into English from (respectively) their original French or German. All the essays use gender as the main category of analysis, whether of late ancient or early medieval texts or of modern medievalist films. The historical studies of medieval Europe emphasize the use of manuscript-level evidence, that is, actual sources from the period in question; arguably, this approach provides a more accurate understanding of the period than does work done on the basis of printed and edited sources. Furthermore, many of the manuscript-based essays specifically exploit liturgical or liturgy-adjace...
A seminal biography of the underappreciated eleventh-century Scandinavian warlord-turned-Anglo-Saxon monarch who united the English and Danish crowns to forge a North Sea empire Historian Timothy Bolton offers a fascinating reappraisal of one of the most misunderstood of the Anglo-Saxon kings: Cnut, the powerful Danish warlord who conquered England and created a North Sea empire in the eleventh century. This seminal biography draws from a wealth of written and archaeological sources to provide the most detailed accounting to date of the life and accomplishments of a remarkable figure in European history, a forward-thinking warrior-turned-statesman who created a new Anglo-Danish regime through designed internationalism.
"This book reveals another very different side of Viking society. It claims that the Viking legacy was not simply one of 'rape and pillage', but included law and order, agriculture and trade, as well as language and heroic literature. It also provides evidence that the influence of Scandinavians in the British Isles continued well after 1066"--Jacket.