A Handbook of Anglo-Saxon Studies

Remembering the Medieval Present: Generative Uses of England's Pre-Conquest Past, 10th to 15th Centuries, 2019

This introduction prefaces a collection of ten essays focusing on how individuals living in the late tenth through fifteenth centuries engaged with the authorizing cultural and political fiction of Anglo-Saxon England.

JEGP, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 2018

this is a useful historical survey of the discipline of Anglo-Saxon studies—or what is going to be such a discipline. As its title indicates, the book sets its beginning in the year 1066, when Anglo-Saxon England became an object of scrutiny. Scholars of the pre-Conquest period have long been fascinated by the subject, and many books and essays have been written on different phases and areas of Anglo-Saxon studies. What makes John D. Niles’s The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England unique is its historical sweep, as it “offers a step-by-step review” of the changing idea of AngloSaxon England during the later part of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance period, the eighteenth century, the Romantic period, and the Victorian era, together with shorter and yet equally fascinating histories of this subject in North America and the british Empire (p. vii). Niles’s book will appeal to Anglo-Saxonists in different stages of their career. Graduate students who are just beginning their work will benefit f...

English Studies, 2019

The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 2013

Anglia, 2021

In the historiography of Anglo-Saxon studies (i. e. the study of the language, culture and history of the early medieval Anglophone inhabitants of the British Isles), the eighteenth century was for a long time an understudied period. It was believed that the achievements of the first generations of Anglo-Saxonists, from Laurence Nowell's pioneering work in the later sixteenth century to George Hickes's Thesaurus and Humfrey Wanley's Catalogus Historico-Criticus, published in 1703-1705, constituted a scholarly saeculum aureum, and that the following generations reaped the fruits that they planted. Another reason for this lack of attention to the eighteenth century was a focus in historiographical scholarship on the study of the Old English language and of editions of Old English texts. While a paradigm shift towards a more inclusive approach was initiated by Allen J. Frantzen's Desire for Origins in 1990, 1 and while the last two decades have witnessed a burgeoning scholarly interest in the cultural and historical significance of Anglo-Saxon texts and their appraisal, especially in the works of Rebecca Brackmann, John Niles, and Rosemary Sweet, many aspects of Anglo-Saxon studies in the eighteenth century remained uncharted territory. Dustin Frazier Wood's monograph, titled Anglo-Saxonism and the Idea of Englishness in Eighteenth-Century Britain, redresses this imbalance in the historiography of Anglo-Saxon studies in a magisterial way by filling the lacunae in our knowledge of what he terms "Anglo-Saxonism" in the eighteenth century. In an Open Access.

The Review of English Studies, 2016

It is in this long and rich tradition that we have to consider John D. Niles's The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066-1901, which presents in xvii + 425 pages a history of Old English scholarship up to and including the King Alfred centenary celebrations in 1901. This book is the result of Niles's profound interest in all matters Anglo-Saxon for over forty years, and provides a reflection of his wideranging knowledge and engaging insights. It is important from the start to bear in mind what Niles says about the book's intended audience: "younger scholars who are [...] staking out a place in the field of Anglo-Saxon studies", "scholars who wish to situate their research in relation to that of their predecessors", and "readers who know very little about the Anglo-Saxon period and its modern recovery, and who doubt that they need to know more" (x). This statement of purpose by implication also makes clear what the book is not, and is not intended to be: a

2012

2015

The Anglo-Saxon period is often seen as a distinctive phase in the history of these islands (see in general Stenton 1971; Whitelock 1974; Lapidge et al. 1999). But before the Anglo-Saxons came, in the fifth century, the native Britons had already established an enviable culture that, while assuredly Christian, tried hard to ensure that a proud sub-Roman legacy lived on (Collingwood and Myers 1963; Lapidge and Dumville 1984; Todd 1999). Not for nothing did they despise the Germanic invaders who took their lands, illiterate, un-Latinate, and pagan as they proved to be, requiring a second Mission at the end of the sixth century to complete a second Conversion, several centuries after the first had been wholly achieved. For even though they came from the edge of the known world, the Christian learning of certain Britons was legendary right at the heart of the Christian establishment on the Continent: if Jerome (who died in 420), the irascible and in many ways obnoxious translator of the...

Medieval settlement Research Group Journal 2019

22 x 29 cm. xxiv + 471 pp, 109 colour pls and figs, 43 b&w pls and figs. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0-691-16298-0. Price: £49.95 hb.

Parergon, 2015