Matthew Firth has recently published an edited collection with York Medieval Press/Boydell & Brewer: Pre-Conquest History and its Medieval Reception: Writing England’s Past. The book includes contributions from ANZAMEMS members Daniel Anlezark and Julian Calcagno, among others.

The Norman Conquest brought about great change in England: new customs, a new language, and new political and ecclesiastical hierarchies. It also saw the emergence of an Anglo-Norman intellectual culture, with an innate curiosity in the past. For the pre-eminent twelfth-century English historians – such as Eadmer of Canterbury, William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon – the pre-Conquest past was of abiding interest. While they recognised the disruptions of the Conquest, this was accompanied by an awareness that it was but one part of a longer story, stretching back to sub-Roman Britain. This concept of a continuum of English history that traversed the events of 1066 would prove enduring, being transmitted into and by the works of successive generations of medieval English historians.

This collection sheds new light on the perceptions and uses of the pre-Conquest past in post-Conquest historiography, drawing on a variety of approaches, from historical and literary studies, to codicology, historiography, memory theory and life writing. Its essays are arranged around two main interlinked themes: post-Conquest historiographical practice and how identities – institutional, regional and personal – could be constructed in reference to this past. Alongside their analyses of the works of Eadmer, William and Henry, contributors offer engaging studies of the works of such authors as Aelred of Rievaulx, Orderic Vitalis, Gervase of Canterbury, John of Worcester, Richard of Devizes, and Walter Map, as well as numerous anonymous hagiographies and histories.

Introduction: The Pre-Conquest Past in Post-Conquest England – Matthew Firth

Part I – Writing the Past
1. The Authorship of Late-Eleventh-Century Annals of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – Daniel Anlezark
2. Making All Things New: Eadmer of Canterbury and the Pre-Conquest Church – Eleanor Parker
3. Usable Pasts in Angevin England: Gervase of Canterbury and Richard of Devizes – Michael Staunton
4. ‘A Little Handbook of Chronology’: Contexts and Purpose of Libellus de primo Saxonum aduentu – Stanislav Mereminskii
5. The Libellus de gestis regum Anglorum, a Cistercian Excerpt of William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum from Late-Twelfth-Century Normandy – Elisabeth van Houts
6. What’s in a Tomb? Language and Landscape in Robert Mannyng’s Story of Inglande – Jacqueline M. Burek

Part II – Writing Identity
7. ‘Terre ipse loqueretur’: Pre-Conquest Space in Post-Conquest Monastic Institutions – Cynthia Turner Camp
8. ‘I will give myself to the work of reading history’: Lessons from the past in the Relatio de Standardo of Aelred of Rievaulx – Connor C. Wilson
9. King Offa of Mercia: Damnatio Memoriae or Vir Mirabilis? Transmission and Adaptation in Post-Conquest England – Julian Calcagno
10. ‘Cesare splendidior’: Anglo-Norman Memories of Æthelflæd of Mercia – Matthew Firth
11. Eadric Silvaticus: Walter Map’s Parable on the Colonisation of Wales – Kimberly Lifton

Sarah A. Bendall and Serena Dyer have recently published and edited collection with Amsterdam University Press: Embodied Experiences of Making in Early Modern Europe:
Bodies, Gender, and Material Culture.

The book is currently available at 20% off with the discount code AUP20.

Processes of making in early modern Europe were both tacit and embodied. Whether making pottery, food, or textiles, the processes of manual production rested on an intersensory connection between mind, body, and object. This volume focuses on the body of the maker to ask how processes of making, experimenting, experiencing, and reconstructing illuminate early modern assumptions and understandings around manual labour and material life. Answers can be gleaned through both recapturing past skills and knowledge of making and by reconstructing past bodies and bodily experiences using recreative and experimental approaches.

In drawing attention to the body, this collection underlines the importance of embodied knowledge and sensory experiences associated with the making practices of historically marginalised groups, such as craftspeople, women, domestic servants, and those who were colonised, to confront biases in the written archive. The history of making is found not only in technological and economic innovations which drove ‘progress’ but also in the hands, minds, and creations of makers themselves.

Chris Jones and Takashi Shogimen have recently published an edited collection with Routledge, Rethinking Medieval and Renaissance Political Thought: Historiographical Problems, Fresh Interpretations, New Debates. The book includes contributions from ANZAMEMS members Clare Monagle, Constant Mews, Jason Taliadoros and others.

This collection of essays showcases historiographical problems, fresh interpretations, and new debates in medieval and Renaissance history and political thought.

Recent scholarship on medieval and Renaissance political thought is witness to tectonic movements. These involve quiet, yet considerable, re-evaluations of key thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and Machiavelli, as well as the string of lesser known “political thinkers” who wrote in western Europe between Late Antiquity and the Reformation. Taking stock of thirty years of developments, this volume demonstrates the contemporary vibrancy of the history of medieval and Renaissance political thought. By both celebrating and challenging the perspectives of a generation of scholars, notably Cary J. Nederman, it offers refreshing new assessments.

The book re-introduces the history of western political thought in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the wider disciplines of History and Political Science. Recent historiographical debates have revolutionized discussion of whether or not there was an “Aristotelian revolution” in the thirteenth century. Thinkers such as Machiavelli and Marsilius of Padua are read in new ways; less well-known texts, such as the Irish On the Twelve Abuses of the Age, offer new perspectives. Further, the collection argues that medieval political ideas contain important lessons for the study of concepts of contemporary interest such as toleration.

ANZAMEMS members receive a 20% discount until 31 December using the code AFL03 at www.routledge.com/9781032380544.

About the Book
I especially welcome the fact that this prose translation is aimed at understanding the text, rather than preserving a certain style. This is a most valuable contribution to the field and of great value to both students and scholars.

Henrik Williams
Professor of Runology, formerly of Scandinavian Languages, at Uppsala University

This book is an edition and translation of one of the most important and celebrated sources of Old Norse-Icelandic mythology and heroic legend, namely the medieval poems now known collectively as the Poetic Edda or Elder Edda.

Included are thirty-six texts, which are mostly preserved in medieval manuscripts, especially the thirteenth-century Icelandic codex traditionally known as the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda. The poems cover diverse subjects, including the creation, destruction and rebirth of the world, the dealings of gods such as Óðinn, Þórr and Loki with giants and each other, and the more intimate, personal tragedies of the hero Sigurðr, his wife Guðrún and the valkyrie Brynhildr.

Each poem is provided with an introduction, synopsis and suggestions for further reading. The Old Norse texts are furnished with a textual apparatus recording the manuscript readings behind this edition’s emendations, as well as select variant readings. The accompanying translations, informed by the latest scholarship, are concisely annotated to make them as accessible as possible.

As the first open-access, single-volume parallel Old Norse edition and English translation of the Poetic Edda, this book will prove a valuable resource for students and scholars of Old Norse literature. It will also interest those researching other fields of medieval literature (especially Old English and Middle High German), and appeal to a wider general audience drawn to the myths and legends of the Viking Age and subsequent centuries.


Access this Title
This book is freely available to read and download in PDF and HTML formats at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0308. Remember that if you belong to an institution part of our library membership programme, you are entitled to discounts on physical copies and free digital editions.