Imagining Anglo-Saxon England: Utopia, Heterotopia, Dystopia by Catherine E. Karkov (review)

Catherine Karkov's Imagining Anglo-Saxon England: Utopia, Heterotopia, Dystopia is one of the most important studies of early medieval identity published in the past twenty years, offering a novel, refreshing assessment of the conceptual frameworks, terminologies, and scholarly attitudes that have constrained Anglo-Saxon studies to date. Karkov begins with a definition of the Anglo-Saxon period as a construct, "an imaginary place" and "an empty space onto and into which identities and ideologies have been written" (1–2). What she perceives to be a major flaw in her discipline serves as the impetus for the project: that scholars of Anglo-Saxon England have traditionally ignored (or at least not fully appreciated) the early medieval origins of an exceptionalist cultural identity grounded in hypocritical presentations of the past. At the center of Karkov's analysis is a deconstruction of the exodus narrative on which early English identity was based—that the Germanic migration to (or conquest of) Britain was "divinely sanctioned" (3), facilitating the justification of the violent subjugation of the native Britons. This reconfiguration enables Karkov to examine the "encryption" of colonial violence in the so-called "golden age" of the seventh and eighth centuries and to reconstruct its applications in the Alfredian ninth century and the modern Anglophone world (14).

The titular concepts provide the lenses through which Karkov reinterprets well-known Anglo-Saxon sources, touching the utopian ideal, the opaque other, and the often grim realities of the present. Her first chapter presents King Alfred's famous prose preface to Pope Gregory I's Regula pastoralis as an idealized expression of a "planned social utopia" that juxtaposes the violence and poor state of learning in England with the comparatively peaceful age of Bede, when wars were supposedly external and England was an important center of scholarship and wisdom (14). Karkov notes the complex relationship between violence and Alfred's planned utopia, pointing to the king's desire for peace and prosperity on the one hand, with aspirations of territorial expansion and political consolidation on the other. Linguistic exegesis of the Alfredian utopia is but one of the numerous analytical frameworks artfully woven together throughout this study. Karkov convincingly positions Alfred's (successful) efforts to emphasize the relationship between English and Latin within a wider attempt to "establish English as one of the sacred languages of translation, a successor to Greek and Latin, and [to establish] language as a defining element of community and nation" (15). Of equal consequence, the absence of any reference to the contemporary Viking wars in Alfred's preface is cogently shown to reflect societal trauma tied to the violent arrival of Germanic peoples in Britain in the fifth century—an argument to which Karkov consistently returns.

From ninth-century identity politics, Karkov pivots chronologically backward to the Franks Casket, a whalebone chest made in early eighth-century Northumbria—Alfred's "lost golden age" (77). She frames the artifact as a Foucauldian heterotopia "set apart while still coexisting within the larger world of which [it was] a part" (83), whose Roman and Germanic imagery reflected eighth-century Northumbria's expansionist aspirations contemporaneous to Bede's famous classification of the English-speaking people as gens anglorum. That England was simultaneously "within" and "without" enables Karkov to explore the pre-Alfredian conception that England was both on the fringe of the known world and yet simultaneously "central," laying the foundation for her later arguments surrounding the unappreciated medieval origins of English exceptionalism (122). What is sacrificed in the way of chronological cohesion is therefore a major strength of this study, beginning with Alfred's identity-building programs and following with earlier presentations of England as "an otherworldly inherently sacred place" and of the English as a "chosen people," centuries before Alfred's application of these maxims to his political advantage (123).

Karkov's analysis continues with a discussion of utopia and dystopia in the Nowell Codex (ca. 1000, in British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A XV, more commonly known...