Cultures in Contact: Scandinavian Settlement in England in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries (review)

200 Reviews spirituality really was. While Garay and Jeay do not mention the debate, the thesis posed by A m y Hollywood is especially pertinent here. That is, we suspect that male authors such as Thomas ofCantimpre seem to have been able to envisage female religious experience only in terms ofbodily activities, while, according to Hollywood, female authors on the contrary had no such preoccupation with the somatic. Douceline's vita is important because it is a female-authored hagiography, as opposed to the more frequently studied female-authored autobiography. The fact that a female-authored hagiography shows such concentration on the body, whereas the autobiographies do not, perhaps shows us the overwhelming power of the hagiographical genre and its literary conventions. References in the vita indicate that the aims of the text were to justify the existence of Douceline's Beguine communities as houses similar to, but still quite separate from, Franciscan communities and also to assert that Douceline truly was a saint, despite some contemporary assertions to the contrary. With such an agenda, Philippine Porcellet seems to have recognised that discussion of Douceline's bodily piety was both socially acceptable and indeed generically essential. Whether it be instances ofa Beguine exhibiting praiseworthy religious practice, or a Beguine trying to stop herself exhibiting such practice, or a doubting lay-person testing a Beguine's spiritual credentials, or,finally,a religious community promoting a Beguine's spiritual credentials, in all these instances the female religious experience is concentrated on the tangible, visible, and audible site of the body. Elizabeth Freeman School of History and Classics University of Tasmania Hadley, D a w n M . and Julian D. Richards, eds., Cultures in Contact: Scandinavian Settlement in England in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries (Studies in the Early Middle Ages 2), Turnhout, Belgium, Brepols Publishers, 2000; hardback; pp. viii, 331; 29 illustrations; R R P E U R 50.00; ISBN 2503509789. This collection of 15 essays aims to re-examine the Scandinavian impact on England in the ninth and tenth centuries. O f especial interest is the interaction between the native Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian populations, and the volume's Introduction lays great stress on how 'new interdisciplinary dialogue' between a range ofspecialisations, from archaeology to physical anthropology to linguistics, Reviews 201 can further our knowledge of what is at the same time a well-traversed and an obscurefield,obscure at least in some kinds of evidentiary data, such as what happened to the Church and its organisation in the Danelaw, a question well surveyed by Lesley Abrams and Julia Barrow. M a n y of the essays do in fact throw new light on the subject, though in the main they do so from the vantage point of a particular specialisation rather than because of their interdisciplinary approach. In this regard, some ofthe archeological chapters (by Halsall, Richards and Hall) are extremely valuable, especially to non-archaeologists. There is a brief Introduction by Hadley and Richards and a rather noisy, posturing piece by Simon Trafford, which takes Viking scholars to task for their outmoded attitudes to questions ofethnicity and population movement, and their insistence on giving primacy to linguistic evidence (which, as Matthew Townend reminds us in an excellent chapter, remains primary, even though it needs to be more adventurously deployed sometimes). The art-historical approach to material culture also comes in for criticism, some ofit deserved. After Trafford has vented his spleen, the volume settles down to being a series of largely well-researched and well-presented essays which survey old evidence, often present new material and/or show how old material can be re-interpreted in a new light, with very interesting results (cf. Stocker's chapter on the distribution of stone sculpture in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire and Sidebottom's on stone monuments in Derbyshire). This is a useful collection for students and scholars aiming to gain an overview of recent research on the important subject of the Scandinavian settlement of England. However, it does have some slightly annoying features, not least the tireless insistence by some of the 'young Turks' in the group on lambasting earlier Viking scholars for their narrowness of vision (justified to some extent...