New study of the complexities of how power operates in a number of Anglo-Saxon texts. A work of fine and nuanced intelligence... Skilled and learned readings of a number of important texts. Fluent, polished, and beautifully written. Dr Katy Cubitt, University of York. The formation and operation of systems of power and patronage in Anglo-Saxon England are currently the focus of concerted scholarly attention. This book explores how power is shaped and negotiated in later Anglo-Saxon texts, focusing in particular on how hierarchical, vertical structures are presented alongside patterns of reciprocity and economies of mutual obligation, especially within the context of patronage relationships (whether secular, spiritual, literal or symbolic). Through closeanalysis of a wide selection of sources in the vernacular and Latin (including the Guthlac poems of the Exeter Book, Old English verse epitaphs, the acrostic poetry of Abbo of Fleury, the Encomium Emmae Reginae and Libellus AEthelwoldi Episcopi), the study examines how texts sustain dual ways of seeing and understanding power, generating a range of imaginative possibilities along with tensions, ambiguities and instances of disguise or euphemism. It also advances new arguments about the ideology and rhetoric of power in the early medieval period. Catherine A.M. Clarke is Professor in English, University of Southampton.

The essays here engage with the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons and their literature have been received, confronted, and re-envisioned in the modern imagination. An excellent collection... breaks new ground in many areas. Should make a substantial impact on the discussion of the contemporary influence of Anglo-Saxon Culture. Conor McCarthy, author of Seamus Heaney and the Medieval Imagination Britain's pre-Conquest past and its culture continues to fascinate modern writers and artists. From Henry Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader to Seamus Heaney's Beowulf, and from high modernism to themusclebound heroes of comic book and Hollywood, Anglo-Saxon England has been a powerful and often unexpected source of inspiration, antagonism, and reflection. The essays here engage with the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons and their literature have been received, confronted, and re-envisioned in the modern imagination. They offer fresh insights on established figures, such as W.H. Auden, J.R.R. Tolkien, and David Jones, and on contemporary writers such asGeoffrey Hill, Peter Reading, P.D. James, and Heaney. They explore the interaction between text, image and landscape in medieval and modern books, the recasting of mythic figures such as Wayland Smith, and the metamorphosis of Beowulf into Grendel - as a novel and as grand opera. The early medieval emerges not simply as a site of nostalgia or anxiety in modern revisions, but instead provides a vital arena for creativity, pleasure, and artistic experiment. Contributors: Bernard O'Donoghue, Chris Jones, Mark Atherton, Maria Artamonova, Anna Johnson, Clare A. Lees, Sian Echard, Catherine A.M. Clarke, Maria Sachiko Cecire, Allen J. Frantzen, John Halbrooks, Hannah J. Crawforth, Joshua Davies, Rebecca Anne Barr

Essays examining the way in which the sea has shaped medieval and later ideas of what it is to be English. Local and imperial, insular and expansive, both English yet British: geographically and culturally, the sea continues to shape changing models of Englishness. This volume traces the many literary origins of insular identity from local communities to the entire archipelago, laying open the continuities and disruptions in the sea's relationship with English identity in a British context. Ranging from the beginnings of insular literature to Victorian medievalisms, the subjects treated include King Arthur's struggle with muddy banks, the afterlife of Edgar's forged charters, Old English homilies and narratives of migration, Welsh and English ideas about Chester, Anglo-Norman views of the sea in the Vie de St Edmund and Waldef, post-Conquest cartography, The Book of Margery Kempe, the works of the Irish Stopford Brooke, and the making of an Anglo-British identity in Victorian Britain. SEBASTIAN SOBECKI is Professor of Medieval English Literature and Culture at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. Contributors: Sebastian Sobecki, Winfried Rudolf, Fabienne Michelet, Catherine A.M. Clarke, Judith Weiss, Kathy Lavezzo, Alfred Hiatt, Jonathan Hsy, Chris Jones, Joanne Parker, David Wallace

Considerations of writing about war, in war, because of war, and against war, in a wide range of texts from the middle ages onwards. War was the first subject of literature; at times, war has been its only subject. In this volume, the contributors reflect on the uneasy yet symbiotic relations of war and writing, from medieval to modern literature. War writing emerges in multiple forms, celebratory and critical, awed and disgusted; the rhetoric of inexpressibility fights its own battle with the urgent necessity of representation, record and recognition. This is shown to be true even to the present day: whether mimetic or metaphorical, literature that concerns itself overtly or covertly with the real pressures of war continues to speak to issues of pressing significance, and to provide some clues to the intricateentwinement of war with contemporary life. Particular topics addressed include writings of and about the Crusades and battles during the Hundred Years War; Shakespeare's "Casus Belly"; Auden's "Journal of an Airman"; and War and Peace. Ian Patterson is a poet, critic and translator. He teaches English at Queens' College, Cambridge. Laura Ashe is Associate Professor of English and a Tutorial Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. Contributors: Joanna Bellis, Catherine A.M. Clarke, Mary A. Favret, Rachel Galvin, James Purdon, Mark Rawlinson, Susanna A. Throop, Katie L. Walter, Carol Watts, Tom F. Wright, Andrew Zurcher.

Essays examining the complex intertwining and effect of medievalism on modernity - and vice versa. The question of how modernity has influenced medievalism and how medievalism has influenced modernity is the theme of this volume. The opening essays examine the 2001 film Just Visiting's comments on modern anxieties via medievalism; conflations of modernity with both medievalism and the Middle Ages in rewriting sources; the emergence of modernity amid the post-World War I movement The Most Noble Order of Crusaders; Antonio Sardinha's promotion of medievalism as an antidote to modernity; and Mercedes Rubio's medievalism in her feminist commentary on modernity. The eight subsequent articles build on this foundation while discussing remnants of medieval London amid its moderndescendant; Michel Houellebecq's critique of medievalism through his 2011 novel La Carte et le territoire; historical authenticity in Michael Morrow's approach to performing medieval music; contemporary concerns in Ford Madox Brown and David Gentleman's murals; medieval Chester in Catherine A.M. Clarke and Nayan Kulkarni's Hryre (2012); medieval influences on the formation of and debate about modern moral panics; medievalist considerations inmodern repurposings of medieval anchorholds; and medieval sources for Paddy Molloy's Here Be Dragons (2013). The articles thus test the essays' methods and conclusions, even as the essays offer fresh perspectives on the articles. Karl Fugelso is Professor of Art History at Towson University in Baltimore, Maryland. Contributors: Edward Breen, Katherine A. Brown, Catherine A.M. Clarke, Louise D'Arcens, Joshua Davies, John LanceGriffith, Mike Horswell, Pedro Martins, Paddy Molloy, Lisa Nalbone, Sarah Salih, Michelle M. Sauer, James L. Smith

A series which is a model of its kind EDMUND KING, HISTORY The contemporary historians of Anglo-Norman England form a particular focus of this issue. There are contributions on Henry of Huntingdon's representation of civil war; on the political intent of the poems in the anonymous Life ofEdward the Confessor; on William of Malmesbury's depiction of Henry I; and on the influence upon historians of the late antique history attributed to Hegesippus. A paper on Gerald of Wales and Merlin brings valuable literary insights to bear. Other pieces tackle religious history (northern monasteries during the Anarchy, the abbey of Tiron) and politics (family history across the Conquest, the Norman brothers Urse de Abetot and Robert Dispenser, the friendship network of King Stephen's family). The volume begins with Judith Green's Allen Brown Memorial Lecture, which provides a wide-ranging account of kingship, lordsihp and community in eleventh-century England. CONTRIBUTORS: Judith Green, Janet Burton, Catherine A.M. Clarke, Sebastien Danielo, Emma Mason, Ad Putter, Kathleen Thompson, Jean A. Truax, Elizabeth M. Tyler, Bjoern Weiler, Neil Wright

Pastoral and locus amoenus traditions in Medieval English literature, and the early mythologisation of English landscape, space and identity through pastoral topoi. In its exploration of literary representations of ideal landscapes and the production of English identity across Latin and vernacular texts from Bede to Chaucer, this study looks in particular at pastoral and locus amoenustraditions in Medieval English literature, and the early mythologisation of English landscape, space and identity through pastoral topoi. From Bede's Ecclesiastical History and its seminal interpretation of Britain as thedelightful island, the study moves through representations of landscape in Old English poetry to the exploitation of the symbolic potential of their local landscapes by regional monastic houses in twelfth- and thirteenth-century texts and pastoral conventions, performances and the idea of the city in the fourteenth century. Introductory and concluding sections form bridges to current scholarship on representations of Englishness through pastoral topoi in the Early Modern period. Catherine A.M. Clarke is Professor of English, University of Southampton.