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The Norman conquerors of Anglo-Saxon England have traditionally been seen both as rapacious colonizers and as the harbingers of a more civilized culture, replacing a tribal Germanic society and its customs with more refined Continental practices. Many of the scholarly arguments about the Normans and their influence overlook the impact of the past on the Normans themselves. The Continuity of the Conquest corrects these oversights. Wendy Marie Hoofnagle explores the Carolingian aspects of Norman influence in England after the Norman Conquest, arguing that the Normans’ literature of kingship envisioned government as a form of imperial rule modeled in many ways on the glories of Charlemagne an...
Postcolonial approaches to the Middle Ages have received much attention in recent decades, and the study of medieval processes of collective identity formation and medieval nationhood have likewise been increasingly influential. 'Other Nations' participates in this discourse, but its goal is to trace the complex processes of mythologizing (and hybridizing) identities in the British Isles throughout the Middle Ages, specifically how the hybridizing of the mythologies informs processes of collective identity formation. The authors in 'Other Nations' address the question of hybridization from different vantage points, including those that indicate a resistance to assimilation, as way of emphasi...
An examination of how regional identities are reflected in texts from medieval England.
Fruits of the most recent research on the worlds of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
Beginning shortly after Charlemagne's death in 814, the inhabitants of his historical empire looked back upon his reign and saw in it an exemplar of Christian universality - Christendom. They mapped contemporary Christendom onto the past and so, during the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, the borders of his empire grew with each retelling, almost always including the Christian East. Although the pull of Jerusalem on the West seems to have been strong during the eleventh century, it had a more limited effect on the Charlemagne legend. Instead, the legend grew during this period because of a peculiar fusion of ideas, carried forward from the ninth century but filtered through the social, ...
Captured here for the first time is the richness of the Charlemagne tradition in medieval Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Wales and Ireland and its coherence as a series of adaptations of Old French chansons de geste
This book investigates the ways in which ideas associated with the Celtic and the Classical have been used to construct identities (national/ethnic/regional etc.) in Britain, from the period of the Roman conquest to the present day.
Ireland possesses an early and exceptionally rich medieval vernacular tradition in which memory plays a key role. What attitudes to remembering and forgetting are expressed in secular early Irish texts? How do the texts conceptualise the past and what does this conceptualisation tell us about the present and future? Who mediates and validates different versions of the past and how is future remembrance guaranteed? This study approaches such questions through close readings of individual texts. It centres on three major aspects of medieval Irish memory culture: places and landscapes, the provision of information about the past by miraculously old eye-witnesses, and the personal, social and cu...
This collection honours the scholarship of Professor David F. Johnson, exploring the wider view of medieval England and its cultural contracts with the Low Countries, and highlighting common texts, motifs, and themes across the textual traditions of Old English and later medieval romances in both English and Middle Dutch.
Bringing together scholarship on multilingual and intercultural medieval Britain like never before, The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain comprises over 600 authoritative entries spanning key figures, contexts and influences in the literatures of Britain from the fifth to the sixteenth centuries. A uniquely multilingual and intercultural approach reflecting the latest scholarship, covering the entire medieval period and the full tapestry of literary languages comprises over 600 authoritative yet accessible entries on key figures, texts, critical debates, methodologies, cultural and isitroical contexts, and related terminology Represents all the literatures of the British Isles i...