Alice Jorgensen

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is among the earliest vernacular chronicles of Western Europe and remains an essential source for scholars of Anglo-Saxon and Norman England. With the publication in 2004 of a new edition of the Peterborough text, all six major manuscript versions of the Chronicle are now available in the Collaborative Edition. Reading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle therefore presents a timely reassessment of current scholarly thinking on this most complex and most foundational of documents. This volume of collected essays examines the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle through four main aspects: the production of the text, its language, the literary character of the work, and the Chronicle as historical writing. The individual studies not only exemplify the different scholarly approaches to the Chronicle but they also cover the full chronological range of the text(s), as well as offering new contributions to well-established debates and exploring fresh avenues of research. The interdisciplinary and wide-ranging nature of the scholarship behind the volume allows Reading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to convey the immense complexity and variety of the Chronicle, a document that survives in multiple versions and was written in multiple places, times, and political contexts.

Language, Literature, History

Reading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

Jonathan Wilcox

Frances McCormack

Research into the emotions is beginning to gain momentum in Anglo-Saxon studies. In order to integrate early medieval Britain into the wider scholarly research into the history of emotions (a major theme in other fields and a key field in interdisciplinary studies), this volume brings together established scholars, who have already made significant contributions to the study of Anglo-Saxon mental and emotional life, with younger scholars. The volume presents a tight focus - on emotion (rather than psychological life more generally), on Anglo-Saxon England and on language and literature - with contrasting approaches that will open up debate. The volume considers a range of methodologies and theoretical perspectives, examines the interplay of emotion and textuality, explores how emotion is conveyed through gesture, interrogates emotions in religious devotional literature, and considers the place of emotion in heroic culture. Each chapter asks questions about what is culturally distinctive about emotion in Anglo-Saxon England and what interpretative moves have to be made to read emotion in Old English texts, as well as considering how ideas about and representations of emotion might relate to lived experience. Taken together the essays in this collection indicate the current state of the field and preview important work to come. By exploring methodologies and materials for the study of Anglo-Saxon emotions, particularly focusing on Old English language and literature, it will both stimulate further study within the discipline and make a distinctive contribution to the wider interdisciplinary conversation about emotions.

Alice Jorgensen

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