Living through Conquest: The Politics of Early English, 1020–1220 by Elaine Treharne (review)

The book belongs to the series Oxford Textual Perspectives, which is intended to “question conventional frameworks and provide innovative interpretations” primarily “by engaging with the contexts and materiality of the text, its production, transmission, and reception history” (p. vii). This is exactly what this remarkable, thought-provoking, and beautifully written survey of the use of English between 1020 and 1220 accomplishes. By a new perusal of texts and contexts—with both terms used in their broadest possible sense—Treharne’s book reveals motives, functions, and strategies of post-Conquest literary productions in English, focusing on trauma and the silence of the unvoiced. She overturns the traditional, derogatory views on English texts written after the Norman Conquest—vitiated by the antiquated concepts of “originality” and “poetic creativity”—and shows how significant and current these texts appear, even when they are “only” later versions of earlier texts, once analyzed within their historical context.

The study comprises an introduction and eight chapters, each introduced by a quotation from Kipling’s poetry, a reference to “the complexity and longevity of colonialism” (p. 1). The first four center on Cnut’s conquest, while the remaining chapters focus on Norman England. In the first chapter—“‘And Change May Be Good or Evil’: The Process of Conquest”—Treharne shows the conqueror Cnut seeking self-validation through a strategic use of the English language. A “master of public relations” (p. 14), Cnut used the English vernacular for a Letter he sent to his English subjects from Denmark in 1020. This choice of English “as an authorized language of regal declaration” (p. 24), Treharne argues, allows Cnut to portray himself as a legitimate king pursuing unity, integration, and acceptance, rather than a Danish usurper aiming to rob the English of their legitimate possessions and privileges. The present manuscript context—York, York Minster, Additional 1, f. 160r—emphasizes the sacrality of the Letter by juxtaposing it to the sacred word of the Gospels. The author shows, however, how the “Englishness” of Cnut’s Letter, apparently aiming to overcome the division between English and Danes and promoting ethnic unity between the two peoples—an attitude that she labels “pragmatic ethnicity”—contrasts heavily with the Nordic nature of the Knutsdrapur, the preeminently exclusive, elite, martial, and encomiastic Skaldic poems performed in Old Norse at the king’s court and portraying the “real” views and feelings of the conquerors.

The Letter Cnut sent to the English in 1027, after his penitential visit to Rome, forms the subject of the second chapter: “‘Some Would Drink and Deny It, and Some Would Pray and Atone’: The Propaganda of Conquest.” The Letter only survives in Latin copies inserted in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum and in John of Worcester’s Chronicle, but it may have been originally in English. Treharne shows that Cnut uses this Letter to portray himself as a fair, pious, and efficient leader, equally devoted to both his subjects: the English and the Danes. This image of Cnut as “an advocate of equal opportunities” (p. 34) is again in contrast with Skaldic verse performed at court, which tells a totally different story, celebrating a powerful Danish king who has defeated the English monarchy and aristocracy. Here the importance of English lies in its absence, since “there is little similar praising of the king in the other recorded vernacular of English” (p. 43). The silence of the English, Treharne argues, reveals trauma and absence of voice, regardless of what contemporary and modern historians say.

The third chapter—“‘The End of That Game Is Oppression and Shame’: The Silence of Conquest”—moves away from propagandistic texts to investigate other documents that might reveal the English perspective and “represent the unrepresentable” (p. 54). Here Treharne focuses on “the many English texts that utilize familiar tropes of societal fragmentation and spiritual damnation, but with specific historical positioning and determinable...