Description
Book SynopsisAn interdisciplinary study examining the origins of Anglo-Norman views of kingship in idealized interpretations of Charlemagne’s imperium. Demonstrates how the idea of “Englishness” developed in the Middle Ages as much as a consequence of the Anglo-Norman imagination and experience as a reaction against it.
Trade Review“The Continuity of the Conquest further expands the horizons of an already expanding body of work on the medieval Charlemagne legend. That Frankish king and emperor loomed large in the imaginations of the Anglo-Normans, in ways both tacit and explicit. Wendy Hoofnagle forces us to reconceptualize what we think we know about Englishness, and indeed England itself, in the central Middle Ages.”
—Matthew Gabriele,Virginia Tech
“In The Continuity of the Conquest, Wendy Hoofnagle presents a wide-ranging and learned study that will be an important contribution to a variety of fields within medieval studies and beyond.”
—Anne Latowsky,University of South Florida
“Landscape and architecture; mythmaking and historical writing; imperial expansion and the ideology of kingship: all of these themes are addressed in ways which will offer new perspectives and which are sure to be thought-provoking to scholars of the Anglo-Norman era.”
—Lindsay Diggelmann Parergon
Table of ContentsContents
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE: Introduction
Continuity and Carolingian Kingship: The Case of the Early Normans
An “Obsession with the Continent”: A Reconsideration of Insular Continuity
CHAPTER TWO: Conversion Politics and the Ideology of Imperialism
The Politics of Allurement: Conversion and Charlemagne’s Civilizing Impulse
Conversion Politics: Rituals of Submission and Unification
The Pygmalion Effect: Dudo of St. Quentin and the Rituals of Empire
Converting the British Barbarian: “Sitting at High Table” at the
Anglo-Norman Court
CHAPTER THREE: Making Their Mark: The Imperial Ideology of Topography
Imperial Unification and Sacral Kingship: Henry of Huntingdon’s Via regia
Charlemagne’s Imperial Memory and the Symbolic Landscape:
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Castles
CHAPTER FOUR: Taming the Wilderness: A New Look at the New Forest
Keeping It in the Familia? Norman Forest Law and its Carolingian Ancestry
In the Dreams of Snoring Monks: The King’s Body in the New Forest
Addicted to the Chase: Expressions of Royal Power in Marie de France’s Forests
CHAPTER FIVE: Epilogue
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX