Reading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

Few sources can be as significant for the history of a period as the vernacular texts collectively known as ‘the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’ are for early England. They are the primary guide to events and dates before c.1100 AD. As such, they have a status, but also a historiographical baggage, linked to the long-standing nexus between these centuries, the English state and Englishness. A new collection of essays devoted to them is thus welcome, and doubly so since it is, perhaps surprisingly, the first. The volume prints a selection of the papers presented at a conference in York in 2004, under three headings: ‘The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as Literature’ (Thomas Bredehoft. Susan Irvine, Malasree Home, Jacqueline Stodnick and Alice Jorgensen); ‘The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as History’ (Barbara Yorke, Scott Thompson Smith, Ryan Lavelle, Alex Woolf and Anton Scharer), and ‘The Language of the Chronicle’ (Jayne Carroll and Sara Pons-Sanz). It is thin on historians’ contributions: Stephen Baxter’s original paper has already appeared in the English Historical Review (ante, cxxii [2007], 1189–227), others on sources and palaeography have disappeared. But it has acquired an excellent introduction by Alice Jorgensen. As that makes clear, the bias of the collection towards literary and linguistic approaches is an accurate reflection of the state of recent work. Their peculiarity as vernacular annals, stressed by Scharer, has had a profound effect on scholarly work on these texts; recent new editions of the seven surviving chronicles were all produced by students of Old English language and literature, as were the only two monographs, by Bredehoft and Alice Sheppard. That same peculiarity has tended to isolate study of them from early medieval Latin historiography. It also underlies the recurring temptation to treat these texts as a collective chronicle, ‘THE Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, a temptation of whose dangerous seductions Jorgensen’s Introduction is well aware, but an occasion of sin succumbed to throughout much of the collection, as titles, content and—often—treatment attest

Annals · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Historiography · Literature · Marginalia · Vernacular · Classics · History · Medieval Literature and History