Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England: Essays in Cultural Geography

Description

Eminent Anglo-Saxonist Nicholas Howe explores how the English, in the centuries before the Norman Conquest, located themselves both literally and imaginatively in the world. His elegantly written study focuses on Anglo-Saxon representations of place as revealed in a wide variety of texts in Latin and Old English, as well as in diagrams of holy sites and a single map of the known world found in British Library, Cotton Tiberius B v. The scholar's investigations are supplemented and aided by insights gleaned from his many trips to physical sites. The Anglo-Saxons possessed a remarkable body of geographical knowledge in written rather than cartographic form, Howe demonstrates. To understand fully their cultural geography, he considers Anglo-Saxon writings about the places they actually inhabited and those they imagined. He finds in Anglo-Saxon geographic images a persistent sense of being far from the center of the world, and he discusses how these migratory peoples narrowed that distance and developed ways to define themselves. Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction: Book and Land 1 Part I. Local Places 1. Writing the Boundaries 29 2. Home and Landscape 47 Part II. Geography and History 3. Englalond and the Postcolonial Void 75 4. Rome as Capital of Anglo-Saxon England 101 5. From Bede's World to "Bede's World" 125 Part III. Books of Elsewhere 6. Books of Elsewhere: Cotton Tiberius B v and Cotton Vitellius A xv 151 7. Falling into Place: Dislocation in Junius 11 195 Conclusion: By Way of Durham 225 Notes 233 Index 269