Conquests in Eleventh-Century England

This volume emerges from the stimulating Oxford conference on ‘Conquest: 1016, 1066’ commemorating the thousandth anniversary of Cnut’s accession to the English throne. The editors, Laura Ashe and Emily Joan Ward, seek to put the first conquest of the eleventh century in conversation with the much better-known process of 1066, through three overlapping sections: ‘Conquests, King and Government’; ‘Conquests, Society and Culture’; and ‘Conquests: Perspectives from Beyond England’. They achieve their desired conversation though a guiding Introduction would have been helpful. Most of the essays could have incorporated recent scholarship more convincingly, particularly that which addresses trauma and postcolonial theories, multilingualism and materiality. It is clear, then, that additional research, perhaps carried out by a more diverse and interdisciplinary group of scholars, is still needed to understand critical issues, such as continuity and rupture, the form and function of the extant record, and eleventh-century propaganda and politics. Questions generated here

Ancient history · CONQUEST · Conversation · Eleventh · Extant taxon · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Throne · Classics · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History