The Study and Editing of the Vernacular Chronicles

Abstract

This chapter surveys interest in the vernacular Anglo-Saxon chronicles from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, together with their study and editing. It sees these endeavours as both scholarly and antiquarian, but they also as linked to periods of definition of, and concern with, England and Englishness from the Reformation through to nineteenth-century medievalism. It discusses successive editions and their presentation of these chronicles, and argues that editions have not been neutral but have played a role in constructing these texts as a single national chronicle. It stresses the importance of the most recent editions, which present each chronicle separately.