CFP: Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas

This is a final reminder that the deadline for the submission of paper proposals for the Spring Meeting of the Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas is 31st January. The meeting takes place on 19th March. Further information can be found here.

Chadwick Memorial Lecture 2011

The next public lecture in ASNC will be the 2011 H. M. Chadwick Memorial Lecture, on Thursday 17th March, at 5pm, in room GR.06/07, English Faculty Building, 9 West Road, Cambridge.

Professor Wendy Davies (University College London) will speak on: 'Water mills and cattle standards: probing the economic comparison between Ireland and Spain in the early middle ages'.

Hector Munro Chadwick (1870-1947) was second Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Cambridge (1912-41). Through the immense range of his scholarly publications, and through the vigorous enthusiasm which he brought to all aspects of Anglo-Saxon studies -- philological and literary, historical and archaeological -- he helped to define the field and give it the interdisciplinary orientation which characterises it still. The Department of ASNC, which owes its existence and its own interdisciplinary outlook to H.M. Chadwick, has wished to commemorate his enduring contribution to Anglo-Saxon studies by establishing an annual series of lectures in his name.

The H.M. Chadwick Memorial Lecture, established in 1990, is delivered by a scholar who is invited to Cambridge for the occasion, on a subjected calculated to be of interest to the whole Department.

Everyone welcome.

ASNC awarded Junior Research Fellowship

Congratulations to Levi Roach, a PhD student in the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic, and a member of Trinity College, Cambridge, who has just been elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at St John's College, Cambridge, beginning in October 2011. Levi proposes to work on the following project for duration of his Fellowship:

Over the next three years I will embark on an exciting new research project, provisionally entitled ‘Apocalypse and Atonement around the Year 1000: Æthelred “the Unready”’ and Otto III in Comparison’. My intention is to investigate how discourses of penance and apocalypticism influenced kingship and politics at court in England and Germany in the 990s and early 1000s. Specifically, the study will focus on how the rulers of these two kingdoms, Æthelred II (better known to posterity as ‘the Unready’) and Otto III reacted to contemporary apocalyptic and eschatological fears. It has long been noted that a degree of millennial anxiety is visible in this period, and it has likewise long been appreciated that discourses of penance and repentance played an important role at Æthelred’s and Otto’s courts. My intention, however, is to look at the intersection between these two, which has yet to receive detailed commentary. The aim will be to investigate both how fears of the Last Judgement may have helped fuel concerns about penance and atonement, and how on the other hand such apocalyptic anxieties themselves may have been in part a product of contemporary concerns about sin and repentance. It is my contention that these concerns about apocalypse and atonement came together in a unique fashion in the 990s, in part—though certainly not only—in response to the approaching millennium. It is, therefore, no accident that both Æthelred and Otto are known to have performed penance, and equally no accident that in both cases this seems to have taken place in the later 990s.[1]

[1] That Otto III performed penance is well established and S. Hamilton, ‘Otto III’s Penance: a Case Study of Unity and Diversity in the Eleventh-Century Church’, Studies in Church History 32 (1996), 83–94, surveys the evidence admirably. The evidence for Æthelred’s penance is more circumstantial, but compelling nonetheless. It has yet to receive detailed treatment in print, but will be discussed at length in two forthcoming studies: C. Cubitt, ‘The Politics of Remorse: Penance and Royal Piety in the Reign of Æthelred the Unready’, Historical Research (forthcoming); and L. Roach, ‘Public Rites and Public Wrongs: Ritual Aspects of Diplomas in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century England’, Early Medieval Europe 19 (forthcoming 2011). I am grateful to Dr. Cubitt for making her paper available to me in advance of publication. For the time being, see also her insightful remarks in ‘Ælfric’s Lay Patrons’, in A companion to Ælfric, ed. M. Swan and H. Magennis (Leiden, 2009), pp. 165–92, at 171–5.

Sutton Trust Summer School in ASNC

Dr Elizabeth Boyle writes:

In 2011 the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic will once again be running a Summer School in association with the Sutton Trust. This year the Summer School will take place from 22nd - 26th August. More details can be found via the University's Summer School pages, and in the film below, which features participants from last year's Summer School in ASNC: