Remembering the Medieval Present: Generative Uses of England's Pre-Conquest Past, 10th to 15th Centuries ed. by Jay Paul Gates, and Brian T. O'Camb (review)

Jay Paul Gates and Brian T. O'Camb's edited volume Remembering the Medieval Present is the eleventh in the Explorations in Medieval Culture series. In the interdisciplinary style characteristic of the series, it combines historical, philological, and manuscript approaches to political, religious, and literary sources in order to explore how the history of pre-Conquest England was engaged with, rewritten, and reinterpreted in the tenth to fifteenth centuries. At the centre of these essays sits an investigation into history, time, and community—collectively they explore how the past was used to create and navigate identity in the present.

Medieval historiography and its utilization in identity building in medieval England is an area of considerable recent focus. The editors situate the anthology as an extension on the works of Brett Martin and David A. Woodman (The Long Twelfth-Century View of the Anglo-Saxon Past, Ashgate, 2015), Elaine Treharne (Living through Conquest, Oxford University Press, 2012), and Renée Trilling (The Aesthetics of Nostalgia, University of Toronto Press, 2009), which all explore a similar theme of how medieval people engaged with and represented history. Taking undertreated sources like Poema Morale or new angles on greater-known ones, including Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, it builds upon these works to 'trouble simple definitions of identity and period' (p. 3). The interdisciplinary approach of this collection is a great strength here. It contributes a comprehensive analysis into diverse usages of history, drawing out how different genres of sources in various ways worked to a similar goal of identity building.

The first three chapters analyse sources that invoke the authorizing figures of kings. How these invocations were used to smooth over conflict and changes is a question addressed by Gates and Nicole Marafioti. Marafioti explores how the Laws of Archbishop Wulfstan construct continuity by calling upon King Edgar, and Gates suggests that Aelred of Rievaulx's genealogy of Henry II sought to create a common identity and foster national cohesion. Providing a convincing analysis of great breadth, Erin Michelle Goeres analyses how Edward the Confessor's story was retold and rewritten in Anglo-Norman, Middle English, and Old Norse sources to reflect on nostalgia, exile, and migration.

How historical works centred around spiritual communities both authorized them and built their identity is the focus of the next two chapters. Analysing the interpolators of William of Malmesbury's De antiquitate Glastonie ecclesie and Orderic Vitalis's Ecclesiastical History, Maren Clegg Hyer suggests that both sought to unify the Anglo-Norman and early English ecclesiastical traditions to foster unity. Looking at communities of nuns, Cynthia Turner Camp presents a clear and convincing argument as to how they searched for ancestral figures, of their nunneries and elsewhere, as spiritual models.

Literary usages of the past occupy the next four chapters. Continuing the focus on women, Larissa Tracy explores early English queenship in Havelok the Dane, arguing that Goldeboru is modelled on examples of historical and literary queenship who provide a paradigm for rule. The next three chapters investigate how these literary works used history and adapted from earlier works. Kathleen Smith, in exploring the addition of the narrator's incredulity in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, crucially highlights how national legends could be created and recreated by poets, while O'Camb explores the relationship between audiences, editors, and authors in the stylistic continuities of Old English poetics in The Proverbs of Alfred. Greatly benefited through a study of the Poema Morale manuscripts, Carla María Thomas analyses how early Middle English verse crossed boundaries of time and purpose. She notably stresses the importance of reading the Poema Morale within the context of all manuscripts rather than...