Scraping out the embers of my brain like the clagged and gritty ash of a grease fire on the top of the cooker…

In this post:

• Alex Woolf, From Pictland to Alba.
• Candida Moss, God’s Ghostwriters
• Orkeyinga Saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney
• Steven Vanderputten, Dark Age Nunneries: The Ambiguous Identity of Female Monasticism, 800-1050
• Larissa Tracy and Jay Paul Gate, Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature: Negotiations of National Identity

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Alex Woolf, From Pictland to Alba: 789-1070. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2007. The New Edinburgh History of Scotland.

I’ve been on a Vikings kick for a while, and that made me realise how little context I had either for Scotland or Ireland between 700 and the late 11^th century. From Pictland to Alba reminds me a little of an introductory course textbook, but it is easily the most useful and satisfying work of narrative history I’ve read in good long while: Woolf is very particular about explaining the problems with the sources, how we can know what we know, what is plausible extrapolation, and what is just plain unknowable. As the book is nearly 20 years old, I’m aware of recent archaeological work that could add information or additional complexity to Woolf’s narrative, but there is no more recent synthesis in book form.

One of the things Woolf does very well is draw attention to the linguistic and cultural diversity of the region presently known as Scotland in the early middle ages. Norse dialects, Old English dialects, Celtic British dialects and Celtic dialects originating in Ireland — it’s not news to Insular historians, but it hit like a shocking bolt of clarity, the idea that people were essentially speaking pre-medieval Welsh around the Tay in the early middle ages! And the idea that northern dialects of Celtic British (Scottish Welsh?) and Irish might have been mutually comprehensible at this time, also a complete shocker to me. There’s so much going on, and so many gaps in the sources. A fascinating book about a fascinating place and period.

Candida Moss, God’s Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible. London: William Collins. 2024. This edition 2025.

An excellent examination of the role of unfree labour in the composition of the New Testament, as scribes, copyists, invisible and unacknowledged co-authors, messengers, curators, and silenced collaborators. Moss’s research is rigorous and her achievement impressive. (My undergraduate degree in religions and theology is a long time ago now, but most of it was spent on history, archaeology and source criticism, so I feel I have some context to judge.) It is also a project of immense empathy and one that has the difficulty of reading from silences — the deliberate silencing to which enslaved humanity has always been subject. Moss includes an extensive apparatus of notes on her website, supplementing the book’s own endnotes. Those who have difficulty conceiving of the New Testament as a human project rather than a divinely perfected one will probably be unsatisfied, but as a work of history God’s Ghostwriters deserves its accolades. Clear, readable, compelling, and very human.

Anon., Orkneyinga Saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney. London: Penguin. 1978. This edition first published 1981. Translated by Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards.

A vivid and very readable translation of a saga written around 1200, which purports to be a history of Viking Orkney. For the early part of the narrative, its historicity is extremely dubious, and perhaps only accidentally getting any detail plausibly correct: later events are sometimes attested, rather than contradicted, by other sources. It loves a bit of hagiography for Magnus Erlendsson. Useful for thinking about how people in Orkney the 12^th century thought about their immediate past. Also what they thought was normal behaviour in terms of conflict and raiding and slaving and warring. Some very entertaining bits.

Steven Vanderputten, Dark Age Nunneries: The Ambiguous Identity of Female Monasticism, 800-1050. New York: Cornell University Press. 2018.

This isn’t the book I was hoping to read. I was hoping to read something more grounded in what (different regions/kinds of) nuns actually did, what distinguished them from each other and from male monastics, and the physical evidence of the communities in which they lived. This is instead a book about how several different religious communities in Middle Europe negotiated with local aristocrats, bishops, and a church movement towards “reform,” regularisation, and episcopal control to preserve their independence and local influence as much as possible. I would have probably got more out of it if I had more of the context, but it does not illuminate the context to any great extent. A book for specialists and not friendly to interested amateurs. Also it was very good at putting me to sleep, so perhaps I’d have got more out of it if I’d been better at keeping my eyes open.

Larissa Tracy and Jay Paul Gate, Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature: Negotiations of National Identity. Woodbridge Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer. 2012.

The thesis of this book is that many works of medieval literature depict torture in order to satirise and critique it; that when torture is represented it is as the work of tyrants and unjust rulers. The authors argue that torture and brutality are literary motifs that negotiate cultural anxieties around national identity. Medieval writers situate these practices outside the boundaries of their own, “civilised” realms, within the domain of a barbarian “Other”, in order to define themselves and their nations in opposition to them.

In its broad strokes this thesis is persuasive. (My first introduction to a historical treatment of medieval torture was John Langbein’s Torture and the Law of Proof, which demonstrates really quite conclusively that the practical function of torture, as well as its ideological role, was within a legal framework where a conviction for capital punishment required either unimpeachable witnesses or a confession, and where there weren’t a lot of forms of imprisonment that didn’t amount to slow execution.) However, when Tracy and Gate get down to specific detail, their arguments about any given work and what it’s doing contain quite a few leaps of logic and… well, I’d call it stretching a fair ways from the cited text.

Medievalists spend a lot of time arguing that the people of the middle ages weren’t torture-happy brutes. (They weren’t! They were people. People generally have to be socialised into hurting other people, and have arrays of justifications for it.) On the other hand, torture did have a legal function in coercing proof, and the medieval world spent a lot of time and effort on violence and the cultural scaffolding of what kinds of violence were acceptable, and against whom it was acceptable to direct that violence. (Much as we do.) So while their argument here is interesting, parts of it also seem a little disingenuous.