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what he rejects in others. Indeed, if his ideas echo the sentiments that underwrote memories of the Anglo-Scandinavian Middle Ages, they also share some qualities with the ones he reviles. One of the things that motivated Tacitus, and something of particular interest to Himmler and other Nazis, was a sense that Rome had become weak and debased. By imaginatively confederating a diverse group of tribes into the Germanic people, Tacitus could set them off as constitutionally different from the citizens of Rome. In effect, he imagined Germanic ethnicity and so allowed
This book provocatively argues that much of what English writers of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries remembered about medieval English geography, history, religion, and literature, they remembered by means of medieval and modern Scandinavia. These memories, in turn, figure in something even broader. Protestant and fundamentally monarchical, the Nordic countries constituted a politically kindred spirit in contrast with France, Italy, and Spain. Along with the so-called Celtic fringe and overseas colonies, Scandinavia became one of the external reference points for the forging of the United Kingdom. Subject to the continual refashioning of memory, the region became at once an image of Britain’s noble past and an affirmation of its current global status, rendering trips there rides on a time machine. The book’s approach to the Anglo-Scandinavian past addresses the specific impact of Nordic materials in framing conceptions of the English Middle Ages and positions the literature of medievalism less as the cause of modern Anglo-Nordic interests than as the recurrence of the same cultural concerns that animated early modern politics, science, and natural history. Emphasising multilingual non-literary traditions (such as travel writing and ethnography) and following four topics – natural history, ethnography, moral character, and literature – the focus of Northern Memories is on how texts, with or without any direct connections to one another, reproduced shared tropes and outlooks and on how this reproduction cumulatively furthered large cultural ideas.
The intention of this chapter is to view several of the Old English riddles through the prism of fear: how fear and memories of fear act in the riddles as vehicles of interpretative and moral transformations. I will argue here that, once the concepts of fear and memory are applied to the study of the riddles, a number of them reveal themselves as little short of meditative parables. This is because fear and memory are connected to ideas intrinsic to riddles: to what initially appears unknown, shadowy and uncertain, as well as to the experience of recognition
115 3 Medievalist double consciousness and the production of difference: Medieval bards, cultural memory and nationalist fantasy Thomas Gray’s 1757 poem ‘The Bard’ sits at the centre of a complex network of medievalist cultural memory. Gray was an accomplished scholar and historian as well as poet, familiar with many works of medieval as well as Classical literature, and his poem was first published at his good friend Horace Walpole’s press at Strawberry Hill. An image of Walpole’s astonishing medievalist building is printed on its title page (see Figure 3
18 1 Ruins and wonders: The poetics of cultural memory in and of early medieval England In the beginning there is ruin. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins1 When is the now of a medieval text? How might a text be situated in, or free from, historical process? These are the questions posed by Benjamin Thorpe in the preface to his edition of Cædmon’s Metrical Paraphrase of Parts of the Holy Scriptures, in Anglo- Saxon, a foundational work of Anglo-Saxon studies first published in 1832. Although he justified his edition by
65 2 Queen Eleanor and her crosses: Trauma and memory, medieval and modern Although he was one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated ruinologists, Sigmund Freud gave medieval culture little attention in his writing. In the first of his ‘Five lectures on psychoanalysis’, however, Freud used a famous medieval monument to formulate his reflections on the dynamics of personal and collective identity: I should like to formulate what we have learned so far as follows: our hysterical patients suffer from reminiscences. Their symptoms are residues and mnemic
. Such visibility was generally because of the concentration of Jews in certain locations, often linked to their place in the local economy. Until the early twentieth century, however, the Jews of Southampton were neither numerous enough nor sufficiently focused in particular occupations and residential areas to be a specific visual feature of the town’s topography. Post-expulsion, for example, the memory of medieval Anglo-Jewry in Southampton was limited to a particular house, rather than a major street as was the case in Winchester. 3 Similarly, after the
noblewomen, because the above historians are, for example, interested in the meaning of gift exchange ceremonies, or of the consent of relatives, rather than the power of women. White’s suggestions that countergifts served to memorialise T 107 noblewomen and power social status, were an aid to memory and were always exchanged to secure a gift are a useful way to consider the significance of countergifts as a guide to women’s power.7 Thus countergifts may also have had an important role in the creation of social memory, in which women had a role in commemoration of the
poetic fields.2 Elisabeth van Houts confirmed the importance of female patrons of historiography, and their role as repositories of family history and in the instruction of their sons, and more importantly their central role in the creation of social memory.3 Susan Groag Bell traced a tradition whereby medieval noblewomen were important as cultural ambassadors and in the literary education of their daughters.4 The importance of female patronage in providing distinctive, innovative forms of literature is an important element in Lois Huneycutt’s reassessment of the
argues that women had a role to play in social memory: ‘the memoria, the commemoration of the dead . . . the ancestors, of the dynasty of the gens’.32 The confirmation of a sense of community that is represented by group witnessing was part of the purpose of witnessing: charters preserved memoria as well as the legal implications of the transaction recorded.33 This places women’s power in religious benefaction in its cultural context, but if the analysis is extended to apply to female witnessing it provides one paradigm which explains why women witnessed documents