Ideas of the World in Early Medieval English Literature ed. by Mark Atherton, Kazutomo Karasawa, and Francis Leneghan (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Ideas of the World in Early Medieval English Literature ed. by Mark Atherton, Kazutomo Karasawa, and Francis Leneghan
• Georgina Pitt

Atherton, Mark, Kazutomo Karasawa, and Francis Leneghan, eds, Ideas of the World in Early Medieval English Literature ( Studies in Old English Literature, 1), Turnhout, Brepols, 2022; hardback; pp. 442; 17 b/w, 4 colour illustrations; R.R.P. €115.00; ISBN 9782503599571.

Ideas of the World in Early Medieval English Literature was awarded the 'Best Book' prize at the biennial conference of the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England (2023). It is the first book in the Brepols series 'Studies in Old English Literature', centred on Old English literature and its contexts. The book stems from an international collaborative research project between scholars associated with the Department of Letters, Rikkyo University, Tokyo, and the Faculty of English, University of Oxford. The central enquiry of that project (and therefore these essays) is how the pre-Conquest English thought and wrote about the world and their place in it, from the time when Old English was establishing itself as an authoritative language through to the eleventh century. There are fifteen contributors.

The essays are arranged thematically. The first strand looks outward, exploring the relationships between the pre-Conquest English and other peoples and English ideas about the world, particularly those parts of the world considered faraway and alien. The second strand turns inward, considering how the English conceptualised and situated themselves. The essays in this section use the modern theory of landscape as an inhabited space to analyse their sources, acknowledging the agency of the physical environment to shape and reflect mental states and understandings. The third strand pivots from an analysis of how the pre-Conquest English understood themselves to chart the connection between situatedness and concepts of collective identity, of a unified people. This section traces the deployment of the new communal identity of the English to legitimise expanding claims of overlordship outside traditional English boundaries and fuel aspirations of empire.

A wide range of documentary sources is considered: theological texts, maps, Old English prose and poetry, as well as historical sources such as annals and vitae. Those sources deal with diverse topics: travel and culture contact, migration and conversion, and the grounding of identity in the experience of landscape/seascape/soundscape. Given the diversity of both the genres and the subject matters of the material considered, this collection sits on a spectrum between a handbook and a comprehensive 'last-word' analysis. Some essays focus on an individual text and use a close reading of language: Eleni Ponirakis's contribution 'The Place of Stillness: Greek Patristic Thought in Cynewulf's Juliana' is an example of that approach: a fine-grained analysis of Cynewulf's alterations to his [End Page 303] source text. Others take a text as a starting point—Hannah Bailey's 'St Rumwold in the Borderland' reads a puzzling eleventh-century vita through the evidence of contemporary cultural and social geographies to reveal a narrative about kings and kingdoms. Kazutomo Karasawa explains through an analysis of map-making conventions a confusing passage in Ælfric's Homilies which describes Christ's posture on the cross, demonstrating English ideas of the tripartite world ('Christ Embracing the World: Ælfric's Description of the Crucifixion in De Passione Domini'). Francis Leneghan's essay 'End of Empire? Reading The Death of Edward in MS Cotton Tiberius B I' analyses an often-overlooked panegyric on Edward the Elder through the lens of the apparently disparate prose and verse texts of the codex in which it is preserved. Reading the poem through its manuscript context brings important political themes to the foreground. Embedded in these individual texts was an imperialist mindset, a claim of translatio imperii made by the West Saxon royal house.

Other essays take the reverse approach—starting with a broad proposition or an established area of controversy rather than a specific text. Daniel Anlezark's essay ('Alfred and the East') examines the intriguing evidence for Alfred the Great's economic and political links with Asia. Ryan Lavelle's contribution, 'From (North-)East to West: Geographical Identities and Political Communities in the Ninth- to Eleventh-Century Anglo-Scandinavian...