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Families of the King: Writing Identity in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Toronto Old English Studies)

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Families Of The King: Writing Identity In The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle by Alice Sheppard (Assistant Professor, Department of English, Pennsylvania State University) directly addresses the central interpretative question with respect to the student of five primary manuscripts that together offer a contemporary history of Anglo-Saxon English ranging from the ninth to the twelfth centuries, and materially contribute to understanding the body of Old English prose and poetic texts which in turn, enabled scholars to document how the Old English language evolved and changed. The question is how those five manuscript function as history. Professor Sheppard shows just what has been read as a series of disparate entries and peculiar juxtapositions are upon closer scrutiny a compelling articulation of collective identity and provide academia with a coherent approach to writing the secular history of invasion, conquest, and settlement. The central theme for Families of the King is that the king's performance of his lordship obligations was recorded and transformed by annalists into literary representations of a political ethos offering insights and an understanding of the Anglo-Saxon aristocratic culture and the impact upon that culture by the Normans who conquered them. A work of impressively articulate scholarship , Families Of The King is an invaluable, core addition to academic library collections and will prove to be of immense interest to students of Medieval Studies.