Changing Perspectives on England and the Continent in the Early Middle Ages, by Anton Scharer

In the course of his career, Anton Scharer has made numerous important contributions to the study of early medieval diplomatic, ideas of rulership, and conversion and Christianisation. This Variorum collection, which gathers fifteen articles from across the last three decades, brings into focus common themes from his wide-ranging scholarly output: notably, the importance of networks in reconstructing cultural shifts (chs. I, III, V, VII, X), the influence of ideology in the creation of political communities and identities (IV, V, VI, VIII, XI, XIII, XIV), the mechanisms of top-down socio-political and religious change (I, III, V, VI, XI, XIV), and, above all—shared among all the articles contained in this volume—the rich interconnections between England and the Continent. This volume does a great service in making Scharer’s work more accessible to Anglophone readers by presenting his papers in translation. Only two articles remain in German: a re-examination of the various factors—political, religious, ideological and economic—which contributed to the unification of Anglo-Saxon England (V), and Scharer’s seminal 1988 study on royal styles in Anglo-Saxon diplomas, which persuasively argued for royal involvement in the construction of royal titles and further reconstructed the contexts in which kings assumed and promulgated such titles in order to legitimate their rule (VI). Four articles, meanwhile, have been translated into English from the original German, or, in one case, French. These include a comparative analysis of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon kings, and of the decisive role played by social networks (be they marriages, alliances or amicitiae) in facilitating this fundamental religious realignment (I); an interesting against-the-grain reading of Bede’s erudite and Latinate Ecclesiastical History, which reveals the ultimate importance of the vernacular for pastoral ends (II); the identification of the so-called ‘Lombard ordo’ as an Anglo-Saxon document dating to the end of Alfred’s reign, the focus of which on coronation and insignia exposes still further contact between England and the Continent (IX, as translated from his 2000 monograph Herrschaft und Reprӓsentation: Studien zur Hofkultur Kӧnig Alfreds des Grossen, with which many readers will be familiar); and an extended and revised version of a 2011 article, which implicitly built upon his 1988 study to explore how Carolingian, Ottonian, and Salian kings, in a manner similar to their Anglo-Saxon counterparts, consciously shaped their own memoria in royal charters (XI).

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