The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England 1066–1901: RRemembering, Forgetting, Deciphering, and Renewing the Past, by John D. Niles

From the gossipy, and occasionally salacious, accounts of pre-Conquest England produced by historians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, to the records of the inspectors tasked with demolishing England’s monastic establishment in the sixteenth, to the vibrant exchanges that ricocheted back and forth in the pages of society magazines in the nineteenth, the Anglo-Saxons were rarely too far from the popular and academic imaginations in the millennium that followed the Conquest of 1066. This interest was motivated by a range of factors: alongside antiquarian and scholarly curiosity, political and religious controversies, and even nineteenth-century racial theory (explored by the author, John D. Niles, in two fascinating chapters at the end of this book) all played their part in maintaining the Anglo-Saxons’ relevance. The modern Anglo-Saxonist’s interest in the more recent past, however, has been intensified by the effects of a single, devastating event which took place on 23 October 1731. That night, the ominously-named Ashburnham House, where the vast manuscript collection of Sir Robert Cotton (1571–1631) was kept, suffered a major fire, which tore through the library, destroying or damaging about a quarter of the manuscripts housed there. As a result, the transcripts and editions made of such works as ‘Beowulf’ (which was badly singed in places) and ‘The Battle of Maldon’ (which was completely destroyed) by early modern scholars, who saw them before the fire, have become essential to our understanding of those texts. Just as the historian or the literary critic might interrogate the palaeographical and codicological features of an Anglo-Saxon manuscript, or speculate about the backgrounds of Anglo-Saxon authors, so has it been necessary to subject the training, mentality and scholarly methods of these later collectors and transcribers to close scrutiny in order to focus more sharply the lens through which we, in the twenty-first century, are compelled to view our subjects. There is, therefore, a very great need for a book such as this, which charts the transmission and reception of Anglo-Saxon history and literature across the centuries in a single, highly accessible work.

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