Anglo-Saxon Identity
Bibliography
All primary reading is drawn from Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and
Verse, fifteenth edition, ed. Dorothy Whitelock.
Ethnic, national and cultural identity
Bartlett, Robert. ‘Medieval and Modern Concepts of Race and Ethnicity’. Journal
of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31:1 (2001), 39-56.
Brooks, N. P. ‘English identity from Bede to the Millennium’, Haskins Society
Journal 14 (2003), 33-51
Davis, Kathleen. ‘National Writing in the Ninth Century: A Reminder for
Postcolonial Thinking About the Nation’. The Journal of Medieval and
Early Modern Studies 28: 3 (1998), 611-637.
Foot, S. ‘The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity Before the Norman
Conquest’. TRHS 6th ser. 6 (1996), 25-49.
------- ‘Remembering, Forgetting and Inventing: Attitudes to the Past in England
at the End of the First Viking Age’. TRHS 6th series 9 (1999), 185-200.
-------- ‘The historiography of the Anglo-Saxon “nation-state”’. Power and the
Nation in European History. Ed. by L. Scales & O. Zimmer. Cambridge,
2005. pp. 125-42
Hines, John. ‘The Becoming of the English: Identity, Material Culture and
Language in Early Anglo-Saxon England.’ Anglo-Saxon Studies in
Archaeology and History 7 (1994), 49-60. [not in library]
Howe, Nicholas. Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England. Cambridge
Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 29. Cambridge, 1989.
Innes, Matthew. ‘Danelaw Identities: Ethnicity, Regionalism and Political
Allegiance’. Cultures in Contact: Scandinavian Settlement in England in
the Ninth and Tenth Centuries. Ed. by Dawn M. Hadley and Julian D.
Richards. Turnhout, 2000. Pp. 65-88.
Kumar, Krishan. The Making of English National Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003.
Niles, John D. ‘Appropriations: A Concept of Culture’. Anglo-Saxonism and the
Construction of Social Identity. Ed. by Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles
Gainsville, FL, 1997. Pp. 202-228
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Pohl, Walter. ‘Conceptions of Ethnicity in Early Medieval Studies’. Debating the
Middle Ages: Issues and Readings. Ed. Lester K. Little and Barbara H.
Rosenwein. Oxford, 1998. Pp. 15-24.
Reuter, Timothy. ‘The Making of England and Germany, 850-1050: points of
comparison and difference’. Medieval Europeans: Studies in Ethnic
Identity and National Perspectives in Medieval Europe. Ed. by Alfred P.
Smyth. Basingstoke, 1998. Pp. 53-70. [other essays in this volume will
also be of use]
Reynolds, Susan. ‘Medieval Origines Gentium and the Community of the Realm’.
History 68 (1983), 375-90
------- ‘What do we mean by “Anglo-Saxon” and “Anglo-Saxons”?’ Journal of
British Studies 24 (1985), 395-414.
Sheppard, Alice. Families of the King: Writing Identity in the “Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle”. Toronto, 2004.
Thomas, Hugh M. The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation,
and Identity 1066 – c. 1220. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Tyler, Elizabeth M. ‘Trojans in Anglo-Saxon England: Precedent without
Descent’. Review of English Studies 64 (2013), 1-20. doi:
10.1093/res/hgs083
Wolfram, Herwig. History of the Goths. Trans. Thomas J. Dunlap. 2nd edn.
Berkeley and London, 1988.
Wormald, Patrick. ‘Bede, the Bretwaldas, and the Origin of the Gens Anglorum’.
Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society: Studies presented
to J. M. Wallace-Hadrill. Ed. P. Wormald with D. Bullough and R. Collins.
Oxford, 1983. Pp. 99-129.
------- ‘Engla lond: The Making of an Allegiance’. Journal of Historical Sociology
7:1 (1994), 1-24.
Yorke, Barbara. ‘Political and Ethnic Identity: A Case Study of Anglo-Saxon
Practice’. Social Identity in Early Medieval Britain. Ed. William O. Frazer
and Andrew Tyrell. London, 2000. Pp. 69-89.
------- ‘Anglo-Saxon Origin Legends’, in Myth, Rulership, Church and Charters:
Essays in Honour of Nicholas Brooks, ed. by Julia Barrow and Andrew
Wareham (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 15-29
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Bede
Brooks, Nicholas. Bede and the English. Jarrow, 1999.
Brown, George Hardin. A Companion to Bede. Woodbridge, 2009.
DeGregorio, Scott, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Bede. Cambridge, 2010.
Goffart, Walter. The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D.550-800): Jordanes,
Gregory of Tours, Bede and Paul the Deacon. Princeton, 1988.
Higham, N. J. (Re-)reading Bede: the Ecclesiastical History in Context. London,
2006.
Alfred and Alfredian Literature
Abels, R. Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England.
London and New York, 1998.
Bately, J. M. ‘World History in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: its Sources and its
Separateness from the Old English Orosius’. ASE 8 (1979), 177-94.
The Literary Prose of King Alfred’s Reign: Translation or Transformation?
London, 1980.
‘Those Books That Are Most Necessary for All Men to Know: The Classics
and Late Ninth-Century England, A Reappraisal’. The Classics in the
Middle Ages. Papers of the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Center for
Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies. Medieval Texts and Studies 69.
Ed. A. S. Bernardo and S. Levin. 1990. Pp. 39-78.
Davis, R.H.C. ‘Alfred the Great: Propaganda and Truth’. History 56 (1971), 169182.
Discenza, Nicole Guenther, ‘ “Wise wealhstodas”: the Prologue to Sirach as a
Model for Alfred’s Preface to Pastoral Care’, JEGP: Journal of English and
Germanic Philology 99 (2000), 488-99
Frantzen, A. J. King Alfred. Boston, MA. 1986.
Sealy Gilles, 'Territorial Interpolations in the Old English Orosius', in Text and
Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, ed.
Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1998), pp. 79-96
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Gneuss, Helmut. ‘King Alfred and the History of Anglo-Saxon Libraries’. Modes of
Interpretation in Old English Literature: Essays in Honour of Stanley B.
Greenfield. Ed. P. Rugg Brown, G. Ronan Crampton and F. C. Robinson.
Toronto, Buffalo and London, 1986. Pp.29-49.
Harris, Stephen J. 'The Alfredian World History and Anglo-Saxon Identity',
JEGP 100:4 (2001), 482-510
Huppé, Bernard F. ‘Alfred and Ælfric: a Study of Two Prefaces.’ The Old English
Homily and Its Backgrounds. Ed. P. Szarmach and B. Huppé. Albany,
1978. 119-37.
Kretzschmar, William A. ‘Adaptation and Anweald in the Old English Orosius’.
ASE 16 (1987), 127-145.
Lerer, Seth. ‘The Beautiful Letters: Authority and Authorship in Asser and King
Alfred’. Literacy and Power in Anglo-Saxon Literature. London and
Lincoln, Nebraska, 1991. Pp. 61-96
Liggins, E. ‘The Authorship of the Old English Orosius’. Anglia 88 (1970), 289322.
Lund, Niels, ed. Two Voyagers at the Court of King Alfred. York, 1984.
Nelson, J. L. ‘The Problem of King Alfred’s Royal Anointing’. JEH 18 (1967), 145163.
‘The Political Ideas of Alfred of Wessex’. Kings and Kingship in Medieval
Europe. Ed. A. J. Duggan. London, 1993. Pp.125-158.
Review article: ‘Waiting for Alfred’. EME 7: 1 (1998), 115-24.
Reuter, T., ed. Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary
Conferences. Aldershot, 2003.
Roberts, J. and J. L. Nelson with M. Godden, edd. Alfred the Wise: Studies in
honour of Janet Bately on the occasion of her sixty-fifth birthday.
Woodbridge, 1997.
Scharer, A. ‘The writing of history at King Alfred’s court’. EME 5:2 (1996), 177206.
Shippey, T.A. ‘Wealth and Wisdom in King Alfred’s Preface to the Old English
Pastoral Care’. EHR 94 (1979), 346-55.
Smyth, A. P. King Alfred the Great. Oxford, 1995.
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Whitelock, Dorothy. ‘The Prose of Alfred’s Reign’. Continuations and Beginnings:
Studies in Old English Literature. Ed. E. G. Stanley. London, 1966. Pp. 67103.
Maxims
Cavill, Paul. Maxims in Old English Poetry. Woodbridge, 1999.
Hansen, Elaine Tuttle. The Solomon Complex: Reading Wisdom in Old English
Poetry. Toronto, 1988.
Larington, Carolyne. A Store of Common Sense: Gnomic Theme and Style in Old
Icelandic and Old English Wisdom Poetry. Oxford, 1993.
Robinson, Fred. C. ‘Old English Literature in its Most Immediate Context’. Old
English Literature in Context: Ten Essays. Ed. by John D. Niles.
Cambridge, 1980. Pp. 11-29
Shippey, T. A. Old English Verse. London, 1972.
Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English. Cambridge, 1976.
The C-Manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Vol 5:MS C, ed. Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe.
Woodbridge, 2001.
Bibliographical resources
Further reading can be researched using the following:
Old English Newsletter Bibliography Database
http://www.oenewsletter.org/OENDB/index.php
[searchable version of the annual bibliographies published in the Old English
Newsletter. You’ll need to set up a password to use it, but it’s free]
Greenfield, Stanley, and Fred C. Robinson, A Bibliography of Publications on Old
English Literature to the end of 1972 (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1980)
From the series Annotated Bibliographies of Old and Middle English Literature:
Waite, Greg. Old English Prose Translations of Alfred’s Reign. Woodbridge,
2000.
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Poole, Russell. Old English Wisdom Poetry. Cambridge, 1998.
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