Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity (review)

218 Reviews discussed in detail, so the lack of clarity here is quite unfortunate. But on the positive side, it does not detract from the best parts which are clearly the narrative summaries of the miracle stories, all of which are described with great attention to the emotions and humanity of these medieval peasants, townspeople and nobility. The book concludes with this strong point. The appendix includes testimony from the papal commission of 1307 concerning Thomas Cantilupe's proposed canonisation. The testimonies here are vivid and touching—a mother and father describe their actions and reactions at finding their daughter first dead and then revived through miraculous intervention—and they certainly confirm Finucane's thesis that even these more or less official sources can provide us with access to medieval hearts and minds, joys and sadnesses. Elizabeth Freeman Department ofHistory University ofMelbourne Frantzen, Allen J. and John D. Niles, ed., Anglo-Saxonism and the Construction of Social Identity, Gainesville, University Press o Florida, 1997; cloth; pp. 242; 3 b / w illustrations; R.R.P. US$49.95. Anglo-Saxonism has been a negotiable concept for the past millennium, but it is only recently that critics have considered the reception history of the Anglo-Saxon past. The nine articles in this collection advance the discussion by exploring the construction and social exploitation of Anglo-Saxonism as an influential idea from pre-Conquest through to modern times. By 'Anglo-Saxonism', the contributors refer to 'the process through which a self-conscious Reviews 219 national and racial identity first came into being...and how...that identity was transformed into an originary myth'. Throughout the essays, Anglo-Saxonism is presented as a self-conscious political and literary concept of wide-ranging import for cultural history. In their introduction, the editors announce their aim to 'point the way to a more sharply historicised understanding of Anglo-Saxon scholarship as it exists today', as a contribution to the 'new medievalisms' of the contemporary academy. The contributors fulfil this theoretical agenda by articulating the contingent relationship between portrayals of an Anglo-Saxon past and contemporary political and social concerns. The volume is divided into two parts: the first four articles deal with medieval and Renaissance manifestations of AngloSaxonism , and the remaining five articles explore ninteenth- and twenieth-century exploitations of an Anglo-Saxon past. The twin foci are the sense of national identity developing during the AngloSaxon period and the participation of Anglo-Saxonism in the construction of subsequent national identities, in Scandinavia, in the postbellum American south, and in Victorian England. The innovation and value of the collection is detailed in a useful introductory essay which traces the history of the term 'AngloSaxon ', situates the studies in recent scholarship, and celebrates their theoretical diversity. In thefirstsection, the articles by Frantzen, Thorman and Richards explore the deployment of vernacular textuality for the construction of a sense of nationhood, though Frantzen progresses beyond this subject to consider a later reconstruction of the idea. After analysing Bede's account of Pope Gregory's meeting with some Anglian boys in a R o m a n marketplace, he turns to the polemical sexual interpretation of this nation-building episode by the Reformation historian John Bale. Frantzen contrasts two sites 220 Reviews of Anglo-Saxonism: Bede's construction of Anglo-Saxon identity in terms of a united Christian people, and Bale's anti-Catholic representation of that nation as one which participated in both slavery and sexual abuse. In the last article in this section, the early modern reception of Anglo-Saxon texts is examined more broadly. H a g e d o m traces the cultural heritage of Anglo-Saxon scholarship using the example of Alfred's Preface to Gregory's Pastoral Care and inferring from codicological and other material evidence the successive circumstances of its reception. The second half of the volume treats more recent manifestations of the Anglo-Saxon myth of origin, and here AngloSaxonism develops more negative connotations. Bjork's study of the nationalistic agendas of early modern Scandinavian scholars in the field of Anglo-Saxon studies is offered as a cautionary tale on the dangers of ethnocentric scholarship, and more precisely seeks to explore the ideological...