England and the Continent in the Tenth Century: Studies in Honour of Wilhelm Levison (1876–1947) (review)

Wilhelm Levison is perhaps best known for his monumental England and the Continent in the Eighth Century, a part of the canon of twentieth-century medieval historiography. Levison spent his early career expanding the content and scope of the MGH with definitive editions of lives of Willibrord and Boniface, but in 1939 took up a post at Durham University to escape Nazi persecution. It was there that he composed his most influential work, arguing for clear connections between England and the Continent; in his opinion, Anglo-Saxon missionaries had saved a barbaric pre-Christian continent, a pattern he hoped to see repeated in his own life. Levison’s impact has been far-reaching: he put the first crack in the insular exceptionalism which had plagued medieval English scholarship to that point; his work inspired many to take up his questions and aims in other places—Story, Rollason, Nelson, Reuter, and Leyser, among others, have all drawn on Levison’s work.

This volume is the result of one of the five conferences held in 2007 to honor the sixtieth anniversary of the death of Wilhelm Levison. With contributions by more than twenty-five scholars who met at St John’s College, Durham, it explores Levison’s interests in connections between England and the Continent in the tenth century. The period, in the view of the editors, often “plays Cinderella to her sisters, the ninth and the eleventh” (10). There is a tendency in the scholarship to look to the Carolingians or the Gregorian Reforms, rather than treating the tenth century in its own right; this volume is aimed at addressing this problem, and does so with aplomb.

England and the Continent is divided into five thematic parts, each containing between three and eight papers. The first section, on pathways and communication between England and the continent is—given the title, perhaps unsurprisingly—the longest, and examines actual points of contact between England and the Continent. This part is followed up by a section on kingship, royal models, and dynastic strategies in a comparative perspective, while the shorter third section takes a similar approach to law and government administration. The fourth section analyzes the organization and culture of the church, often reading Continental patterns through lenses honed in Anglo-Saxon England, while the fifth and final section considers how the past was shaped and represented in the tenth-century’s historiography. Nearly all of the papers are comparative in focus, taking to heart the concept of England and the Continent as framing principle; even when papers focus solely on England, they tend to do so to question the historiographic assumptions of English exceptionalism that have haunted the field of English history. In fact, as a publication looking back on the life of one of the last century’s great historians, England and the Continent is refreshingly forward-looking.

With so many contributors and essays, it would be too much to list them all, so I offer my apologies to any not specifically enumerated here. The essays are wide-ranging, both topically and methodologically. Particular stand-outs include Stéphane Lebecq and Alban Gautier’s economic, historical, and technological consideration of trade patterns and pathways between England and the Continent; Richard Gameson’s careful art historical and closely read analysis of a single, anonymous artist’s manuscript illuminations; Michael Wood’s biographical sketch of the little-known but influential Irish master, Israel of Trier, whose career spanned Anglo-Saxon England and Carolingian Europe alike; Sarah Foot’s consideration of West Saxon dynastic strategies in the reign of Aethelstan; Wendy Davies’s consideration of parochial care and parish churches in tenth-century northern Spain; and Jesse Billett’s detailed liturgical history, which challenges the role of the divine Office in the monastic reform. Again, there are many other chapters in this collection which deserve mention, but for the sake...