133 DE LAS OPCIONES, ESCOJA LA FÓRMULA CORRECTA DEL SIGUIENTE COMPUESTO:

This study is necessarily interdisciplinary in terms of its subject and the types of secondary literature that are relied on throughout. The focus is on archaeological research and the ways in which the early medieval texts were materialized through scholarly interpretation of physical remains. This is a process that cannot be separated from the larger context of medievalism and Anglo-Saxonism: a context that combines historical, philological, literary, theological, art historical and political scholarship. Unlike the history of Anglo-Saxon archaeology as a discrete discipline, the history of Anglo-Saxonism has been well documented in the literature. Particular attention has been paid to the use of the Anglo-Saxon past in the creation of racialist and nationalist identities in the nineteenth century, a subject that concerns many of the authors explored below. It is important to note that archaeology and antiquarianism are often included in these large-scale studies of the history of Anglo-Saxonism, but their unique relationship to the material remains can be overshadowed or lost altogether within a large-scale study of the wider scholarly climate.

In 1917, Eleanor Adams wrote the history of sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century linguistic scholarship, published as a book entitled Old English Scholarship in

England from 1566-1800 (Adams 1917). This early analysis recognized the primary

importance of the Reformation in stimulating academic and popular interest in the Anglo-Saxon, a theme that has carried through all subsequent work:

So confusing was the unrest of the Reformation that men could not distinguish clearly between the affairs of civil and ecclesiastical life. In order to lay any foundation for the new institutions, the Reformers had to establish a precedent for their beliefs. Such precedent they sought in the liturgy and sermons of the ‘primitive church’, and in the laws of their Anglo-Saxon forebears. Their first concern was to justify, by historical documents, their attitude towards the sacrament, the secular privileges of the clergy, and the use of the Scriptures in the vernacular (Adams 1917: 11).

Adams’ analysis was focused on the projects undertaken during the early modern period to translate and interpret Old English texts. This early attempt to provide a contextualized history of Anglo-Saxon scholarship was not taken up by the wider academic community, however, until the 1980s and 1990s, when both “medievalism” and “Anglo-Saxonism” began to be studied by historians of academic culture.

One of the most important books for understanding the study of the medieval past in context is Norman Cantor’s Inventing the Middle Ages, a book which exposed the twentieth century origins of academic interest in the later medieval period (Cantor 1991). In Cantor’s view, the increase of interest in the medieval past after the end of the Victorian period “allows medievalists to find in the Middle Ages a mirror image of themselves or parallel manifestations to trends and happenings in the twentieth century”, which makes for an environment of what he calls “provocative image making of a medieval past that conforms to our current emotional and public needs” (Cantor 1991: 28). In Cantor’s work, we see the strong influence of the postmodern idea of “lenses”, or as he puts it, “the prism of the dominant concepts of our own thought worlds” (Cantor 1991: 37) through which we cannot help but view the world. Cantor’s study has been influential in the development of a history of scholarship of the later Middle Ages, and has also been influential in the development of our understanding of the uses of the early medieval past.

Although related to the larger trends in medievalism, Anglo-Saxonism has also been studied separately. The study of Anglo-Saxonism can be said to have begun in the early 1980s with two key texts: Reginald Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of

American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (1981) and Hugh MacDougall’s Racial Myth in English History (1982). These studies explored the history of the idea of English racial superiority

and the ways in which the Anglo-Saxon past was called upon to support this racial mythology in both the United States and the United Kingdom. In the following three decades, several studies were published which took up this theme, including Allan J. Frantzen’s Desire for Origins (1990) and the edited volume Anglo-Saxonism and the

Construction of Social Identity (Frantzen and Niles 1997). Together these studies argue, as

John D. Niles writes in his afterword to the latter volume, that “Anglo-Saxon England is

nothing other than what it has been perceived to be by historically grounded human beings,

from the time of the Anglo-Saxons to the present moment. It is an idea, not a thing” (John D. Niles 1997: 209, italics in the original). All of these studies and the others that have been written in their wake have attempted to approach an understanding of the power of that idea and how it influenced the people and institutions that have lived with it since it was conceptualized in the writing of the early medieval historians.

A less controversial approach to the subject was taken by Carl Berkhout and Milton Gatch, who edited the volume Anglo-Saxon Scholarship: The First Three Centuries (1982). In their introduction they justify the necessity of their volume by stating that “Serious students of Anglo-Saxon literary history, perhaps more than scholars in other areas of medieval studies, constantly encounter their predecessors in the field” (Berkhout and Gatch 1982: ix), and therefore require a way to evaluate and contextualize previous work. Although one might question their implication that this is somehow unique to Anglo- Saxon studies (surely all academics encounter their predecessors), the collection includes some useful papers on the study of the Anglo-Saxon past between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Although this volume was clearly not intended to project a unified narrative, the authors of this varied collection of papers presented a view of Anglo-Saxon scholarship as a discipline with a past.

Several scholars have written about the importance of the Norman Conquest as a significant historical moment in the formation of Anglo-Saxonism. In 1954, the Marxist historian Christopher Hill wrote an essay entitled The Norman Yoke, in which he traced the development of the idea of an Anglo-Saxon origin for democracy and equality throughout the period from 1066 to the mid-twentieth century (C. Hill 1954):

Before 1066 the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of the country lived as free and equal citizens, governing themselves through representative institutions. The Norman Conquest deprived them of this liberty, established the tyranny of an alien king and landlords. But the people did not forget the

rights they had lost. They fought continuously to recover them, with varying success (C. Hill 1954: 11)

In Hill’s view, Anglo-Saxonism, defined in opposition to the Norman past, lay at the heart of nearly every English rebellion and revolution, and periodically (in the late seventeenth century and mid-nineteenth century, for instance) played an important role in the mainstream historical discourse as well (C. Hill 1954: 58). The myth of a lost Anglo-Saxon democracy can be likened to the myth of a lost Anglo-Saxon religious purity. Both concepts have been put to similar political and religious uses in the past. In 1990 Clare Simmons published Reversing the Conquest, in which she argued that “The Saxon-and-Norman opposition reveals the extent to which self-definition is reflexive; having written themselves into history, nineteenth-century writers and readers could find themselves there” (Simmons 1990: 5). Simmons, a scholar of nineteenth-century literature, highlighted the Victorian desire to locate their origins in the Saxon rather than the Norman past in the works of many of the great writers of the day (Simmons 1990). In a subsequent paper on the study of Old English in the Victorian period, Simmons shows that the English people and the royal family were seen to be of Teutonic origin, whilst the unpopular aristocracy were considered to be of Norman descent, and therefore less than English (Simmons 1992: 210). This seemingly contradictory state of affairs pitted the Hanoverian monarchy and the strongly Teutonic-identified lower classes against the modern incarnation of the Norman overlords. Thus Hill’s notion of the Norman Yoke can be seen to permeate the nineteenth-century literary culture as well as the political environment.

The most recent exploration of the history of the study of the Anglo-Saxon period can be found in Paul Hill’s The Anglo-Saxons: The Verdict of History (P. Hill 2006), a book that analyses the methods by which the Anglo-Saxon past has been explored and the socio- cultural influences that have had an impact on the conclusions drawn by historians and antiquarians. In it, Hill exposes both the popular and the scholarly visions of the Anglo- Saxon past and the relationship between them, in what he calls “an attempt to restore the balance in favour of an analysis and celebration of how the Anglo-Saxons have been variously treated over the centuries without the recourse to invective or triumphalism this sometimes engenders in people” (P. Hill 2006: 9). Hill’s book is exceptionally wide- ranging, taking a holistic view in order to scrutinize the variety of ways in which the idea of the Anglo-Saxon past has been received by successive generations. This analysis, unlike many of those mentioned above, uses the historical context as its unit of analysis, including the perspectives of historians, antiquarians, writers, artists and non-specialists

in order to show that ideas about the Anglo-Saxon past transcended disciplinary and cultural boundaries.

In 2006 a short pamphlet, entitled Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, explored the history of Anglo- Saxonism through the study of both the body of knowledge about the Anglo-Saxon past and, using the analogy of Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, Anglo-Saxonism as an essentialized and essentializing cultural concept (Hilton 2006: 7). This pamphlet is little more than an annotated bibliography, but compressing the literature in this way reveals larger themes, many of which are reflected in this thesis, such as the Romantic Anglo- Saxonism of the late eighteenth century and the Victorian obsession with the Teutonic past (Hilton 2006: 21-4). Both Hill and Hilton’s books are written for a general rather than a specialist audience, and their style reflects this. The production of books on the subject for a general audience demonstrates that in the twenty-first century, the idea of Anglo-Saxonism is established as a popular topic – no longer confined to the academic sphere.

Many of the studies discussed above include the work of antiquarians and archaeologists in their conceptualization of Anglo-Saxon studies, including it alongside history, philology, English literature, art history, architecture and various other disciplines. This is entirely appropriate for the scale at which they are considering the topic; it would not be useful to isolate the contributions of any one of these disciplines and archaeology is only a small part – as well as a relatively late addition - of the larger dialogue. The unique position of archaeology, however, as a subject that brings together the written and linguistic evidence but also the material remains, necessitates a short exploration of its own individual history on a smaller scale.