Description
Book SynopsisThis 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. See inside the book.
Trade Review"Jay Paul Gates and Brian T. O’Camb’s edited volume Remembering the Medieval Present is the eleventh in the Explorations in Medieval Culture series. In the interdisciplinary style characteristic of the series, it combines historical, philological, and manuscript approaches to political, religious, and literary sources in order to explore how the history of pre-Conquest England was engaged with, rewritten, and reinterpreted in the tenth to fifteenth centuries. At the centre of these essays sits an investigation into history, time, and community—collectively they explore how the past was used to create and navigate identity in the present. [...] The interdisciplinary approach of this collection is a great strength here. It contributes a comprehensive analysis into diverse usages of history, drawing out how different genres of sources in various ways worked to a similar goal of identity building. [...] Overall, Medieval Present provides a compelling variety of investigations into usages of the pre-Conquest past across genres and contexts; it is a sound addition to the research into appeals to history". - Lucy Moloney, in: Parergon, 38.1 (2021) "Jay Paul Gates and Brian O’Camb have edited a stimulating and timely collection of ten essays covering various aspects of the ways medieval authors and audiences, ca.1000–1600, attempted to understand the early medieval English past. The essays in Remembering the Medieval Present highlight the value that later generations attached to their constantly evolving and individualized versions of the imagined early English past. They showcase numerous examples of how identifying alterations to perceived narratives of the past help the modern reader to better understand the cultural capital of historical knowledge in political, intellectual, religious, and cultural spheres.[…]Gates and O’Camb and their contributing authors have given us much to think about in this fascinating essay collection." Charles C. Rozier, in Journal of British Studies, 60.3 (July 2021) "The volume as a whole offers many valuable local insights into the texts examined. In addition, certain leitmotifs emerge across its chapters: memories of early colonization are repeatedly used to construct a sense of national unity; the lives of early saints can generate a strong sense of identity in myriad contexts; in the hands of poets, a textual inheritance becomes a tool for remembering, interrogating, and reimagining literary history itself. Such areas of inquiry as these will surely continue to produce insights into how the past was remembered across the medieval period. To guide such future studies, this volume should stand as a strong reminder that the pressures of the present fundamentally influence how history is remembered." Anya Adair, in The Medieval Review, 22.03.20. See the full review here.
Table of ContentsContents Acknowledgements List of Figures and Tables List of Abbreviations List of Contributors Introduction: Anglo-Saxon Predecessors and Precedents Jay Paul Gates and Brian O’Camb 1 The Legacy of King Edgar in the Laws of Archbishop Wulfstan Nicole Marafioti 2 Exile and Migration in the Vernacular Lives of Edward “the Confessor” Erin Michelle Goeres 3 Quidam proditor partis Danicae: Aelred’s Re-Imagining of the Anglo-Saxon Past Jay Paul Gates 4 The Hermitic Topos: “Selling” Shared Sanctity to Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, and English Audiences Maren Clegg Hyer 5 Looking for Holy Grandmothers in Late Medieval Nunneries Cynthia Turner Camp 6 Peace Weaving and Gold Giving: Anglo-Saxon Queenship in Havelok the Dane Larissa Tracy 7 Writing, Rewriting, and Disrupting the Anglo-Saxon Past in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale Kathleen Smith 8 The Case of Poema Morale: Old English Homiletic Influence in Early Middle English Verse Carla María Thomas 9 The Familiar Wisdom of Treasured Friends and the Landscape of Conquest in The Proverbs of Alfred Brian O’Camb 10 The Idea of Bede in English Political Prophecy Eric Weiskott Afterword Irina Dumitrescu and Mary Kate Hurley Bibliography General Index
