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.