Anglo-Saxons Documentary Series on BBC4

The ASNC Department has seen some preview clips of this forthcoming series by Michael Wood and we highly recommend it!

St Samson Colloquy Report

Dr Caroline Brett writes:

At the University of Sydney’s Eighth Australian Conference of Celtic Studies on 11-14 June 2013, Dr Lynette Olson organised a special colloquy on the First Life of St Samson of Dol.  The aim was to assess what progress has been made in recent years in understanding this key text for early medieval British and Breton ecclesiastical history, and whether it can be taken any further.  The answer to the second was a resounding yes, although not all the delegates agreed on the detail!

The First Life of St Samson of Dol is potentially a key source for early medieval British (and Irish) Christianity and the politics of early Brittany.  Ostensibly the biography of a monastic founder and bishop from south-east Wales who ended his life at Dol in Brittany some time in the second half of the sixth century, it has aroused controversy among scholars for more than a hundred years.  The problems turn on the date of the text’s composition, on the reality or otherwise of an earlier biography which the author of the existing text claims to have used, and on the relationship between this existing biography and its putative model.  Various dates between the early seventh century and ca.850 have been proposed for the existing text, and the model or Vita primigenia has been characterised as everything from an eye-witness account by a relative of the saint, to a literary figment of a ninth-century propagandist’s imagination.  The arguments seemed to have reached an impasse by the time the full range of them was presented in Joseph-Claude Poulin’s encyclopaedic Hagiographie bretonne in 2009.  However, the debate has been potentially re-animated by Richard Sowerby in an article in Francia, 2011, in which he suggested new grounds for distinguishing between the successive authors’ contributions, and put in a powerful argument for a date around 700.

Dr Lynette Olson saw this as an opportunity for a renewed attempt to make some solid progress on the understanding of Vita Prima Samsonis, and invited a group of Samson scholars, or ‘Samsonites’, to the University of Sydney to offer their responses to Sowerby’s article and their thoughts on various aspects of the text.  The original line-up of Samsonites included, in alphabetical order, Caroline Brett, Karen Jankulak, Constant Mews, Lynette Olson, Joseph-Claude Poulin, Richard Sowerby, Ian Wood and Jonathan Wooding.  Unfortunately Ian Wood and Richard Sowerby were eventually unable to attend, but it is hoped that their contributions will be included in the published conference proceedings.  Karen Jankulak too was unable to attend, but her paper was brought and read by Jonathan Wooding.

For the five remaining contributors the upshot was a highly stimulating two days in which we went ‘head to head’ with St Samson and discovered ... if not a final solution to our problems, nevertheless a feeling that, as Wooding memorably put it, ‘our history is moving in the direction of our text’ and that the potential exists to put Vita Prima Samsonis at the centre of early Insular Christianity.

More recent ASNC news

Dr Brittany Schorn has been appointed Research Associate on the Interpreting Eddic Poetry project at St John's College Research Centre, University of Oxford, from 1st October 2013.

Dr Elizabeth Boyle has been appointed Lecturer in Early Irish at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, from 1st September 2013.

And, in the recent round of senior academic promotions, Dr Elizabeth Ashman Rowe and Dr Fiona Edmonds have been appointed to a Readership and a Senior Lectureship respectively, in the Department of ASNC.

Congratulations all round!

Some recent news

Congratulations to Dr Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, ASNC alumna and recent PhD graduate, now at the University of Oxford, who has recently been announced as one of Radio 3's New Generation Thinkers. This initiative, run in association with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, will allow Eleanor to bring her research on the worldview of the medieval Icelanders to a wider audience.

Congratulations also to Dr Philip Dunshea, a PhD graduate of ASNC, who studied as an undergraduate with Dr Alex Woolf at the University of St Andrews, and who has recently been appointed to a temporary lectureship in Celtic History here in the Department of ASNC. Phil will be covering the teaching of Dr Fiona Edmonds, while she is on maternity leave (congratulations Fiona!).

And finally, while we wouldn't normally allow commercial advertising here on the ASNC blog, we must make a brief mention of recent ASNC alumnus, George Potts, who stars in a new advert for Virgin trains. We'll try to resist the urge to make a joke about ASNCs going far ...

Sir Frank Stenton (1880–1967), The Anglo-Saxon Coinage and the Historian

Dr Rory Naismith writes:

Sir Frank Stenton was professor of history at the University of Reading, and a leading scholar of Anglo-Saxon history in the twentieth century. He is best known as the author of Anglo-Saxon England, still widely regarded as the leading survey of the subject. Stenton possessed an abiding interest in the conjunctures between Anglo-Saxon history and numismatics, and served as founding chairman of the British Academy's Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles committee (1956–66).

On 28 April 1958, Stenton addressed the British Numismatic Society on the points of contact between numismatics and history in the study of Anglo-Saxon England. Dr Stewart Lyon made a recording of this lecture (approximately 75 minutes in length), which has now been digitized and made available as an MP3 on the British Numismatic Society’s website. An annotated text adapted from this recording is included in a posthumous collection of Stenton’s papers, Preparatory to Anglo-Saxon England: Being the Collected Papers of Frank Merry Stenton, edited by Doris Mary Stenton (Oxford, 1970), pp. 371–82.

Report: The Orkney Viking Heritage Project Field School

Dr Brittany Schorn writes:

From April 14 to April 20, Kirkwall hosted the field school of The Orkney Viking Heritage Project. Eight current (and three former) members of the ASNC Department travelled to Orkney together with fellow students and colleagues from the universities of the Highlands and Islands, Oxford, Nottingham, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Birmingham, Cardiff, York and Kings College London. The Orkney Viking Heritage Project is an AHRC-funded interdisciplinary training programme. It brings together scholars and heritage professionals to explore the literature, history and material culture of Viking Orkney and provide hands-on experience of a heritage landscape.

[photo credit: Nicola Lugosch]

During the course of the week, we saw viking grafitti on neolithic monuments at the Ring of Brodgar and the spectacular burial chamber of Maeshowe, and visited the ruin of St Magnus Kirk on the small island of Egilsay where Earl Magnús was killed, along with the imposing St Magnus Cathedral, which St Rögnvaldr established on the Mainland.

[St Magnus Kirk, photo credit: Bernadette McCooey]

Through presentations, discussions and excursions, we reconsidered medieval texts and artefacts in situ in order to contextualise our understanding of the past within the reality of the physical landscape. With the help of local academics, heritage professionals and Orkney residents, we also explored how this past, and modern perceptions of it, continue to inform the way current islanders define and relate to the landscape around them.

For more information on the project, including our blog, photos, podcasts and other resources, see the Orkney Project website. You can also find information about our travelling exhibition, which made its first stop at the Midlands Viking Symposium at the University of Nottingham on April 27.

Modern Poets on Viking Poetry - A Reading

Rebecca Merkelbach, a PhD student in ASNC, writes:

The evening of Friday 26 April marked the high point and conclusion (at least of the Cambridge part) of Dr Debbie Potts' project ‘Modern Poets on Viking Poetry’. Members of the department and the public gathered in the Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio to listen to eleven pieces written by poets from a variety of backgrounds and ages. They had all been working with skaldic verses, composed between the 10th and 14th century, and translated for the project by scholars of Old Norse. Debbie Potts introduced each of the original verses, which were then beautifully read by Orri Tómasson, transporting emotion across centuries and languages (as one of the poets remarked).

Some of the poems we heard were translations of, some reactions to, and some inspired by the form or content of the original skaldic verse. Especially topical was Lucy Hamiton's ‘Ring of Brodgar’, a response to a lausavísa by Þjóðólfr Arnórsson – a number of members of the department have visited this sight only ten days ago. Rebecca Perry's interesting, feminist interpretation of ‘The Waking of Angantyr’, which she entitled ‘how the earth increases’, fitted in very well with this week's CUSU Women's Campaign's ‘I need feminism because...’ photos. Anna Robinson's translation of Kormákr Ögmundarson's verses turned them into dialogue between the poet and Steingerðr, the object of his desire, now herself transformed into a subject. Probably the most emotionally charged compositions of the evening were the poems after Egill Skallagrímsson's ‘Sonatorrek’ which framed the interval. Chrissy William's ‘The Bear of the Moon’ beautifully caught the immense grief of the original, while at the same time contrasting it with dense poetic language. The film poem ‘Sonatorrek’ by Alastair Cook, featuring ‘The Lost Boy’ by John Glenday, transposed the metre and imagery of the original to the pointless deaths of World War I, commemorating Glenday's uncle who died in November 1918. It can be watched on the project's website.

All poems were incredibly powerful and inspired pieces of art, taking a lost poetic tradition and transforming it into something new, translating it into our time while also keeping the beauty of the old. Not only did the project offer an opportunity for creative dialogue between poets and scholars. The evening also sparked several new ideas for projects among the graduate students of the department, and we hope that we will hear more of them in the coming months.

Conference report: 'Converting the Landscape'

Dr Brittany Schorn writes:

The ‘Converting the Isles Network’, based in the Department and supported by the Leverhulme Trust, held its fourth colloquium on the 22^nd and 23^rd of March at Bangor University. Despite somewhat hazardous travel conditions due to an unexpected freeze, all participants managed to make it to what turned out to be an extremely productive gathering. The subject, ‘Coverting the Landscape’, was considered from the perspective of different regions and methodologies, and led to an extremely productive and stimulating discussion of fundamental questions about the nature of Christian conversion.

The colloquium began with a session on burial evidence and problems of interpretation. Elizabeth O’Brien considered the variety of burial practices in early Christian Ireland, focusing in particular on the practice of inserting burials into ‘ferta’. She stressed that this could be read as a political rather than a religious statement, as it provided a means by which important people and newcomers could be incorporated into the existing landscape. Adrián Maldonado provided a fascinatingly nuanced discussion of Pictish barrow types, highlighting regional differences and also pointing out the difficulty in identifying the influence of Christianity itself with certainty. 

In the second session of the morning, Tomás Ó Carragáin and Morten Søvsø spoke on the difficulties involved in identifying ecclesiastical landscapes. Tomás Ó Carragáin examined the problem of how scholars can quantify the density of churches in the landscape in relation to secular sites, pointing out methodological problems that may significantly skew the broad pattern. Morten Søvsø spoke on recent and ongoing excavations at the church-site in Ribe, likely the oldest church in Denmark, which have important implications for our understanding of the history of the church in Viking-Age Denmark. 

Friday afternoon Nancy Edwards led a freezing, but fascinating, excursion to view inscribed stones on Anglesey. Moving through the southwestern part of the island, we took a chronological tour of the development of these inscriptions.

Our discussion of stone monuments continued as the subject of the opening session of the second day of the colloquium. Meggen Gondek discussed the distribution of the different classes of Pictish symbol stones, focusing in particular on a series of sites in Aberdeenshire, demonstrating what they can reveal as evidence of changing religious practice. Cecilia Ljung then examined a phase of early Christian stone grave monuments in Sweden, dated to a very limited period in the 11^th century. She considered their relationship to the already significant runic memorial tradition and using Västergötland and Øland as case studies, stressed regional differences in the nature of the church and conversion.

The next session, on technology as a tool of conversion, looked at the way that the conversion affected agricultural organisation and production. Thomas McErlean described the revolutionary changes that accompanied the introduction of mechanical mills at Nendrum, as well as improvements to the exploitation of fishing, forest clearing, and agricultural organisation that monasteries brought. Gabor Thomas then looked at the relationship between monastic foundations and intensification of rural production in Kent, taking the case study of Lyminge: a monastery which is currently the subject of a major interedisciplinary research project.   

Rory Naismith continued the theme of technology and economic impact through examination of monetization in relation to Christianization. He examined a series of areas across northern Europe, in each of which coinage enjoyed a different relationship with religious development. Finally, Lesley Abrams closed the colloquium’s papers with a review of the fascinating question of when and how the Vikings of Dublin converted to Christianity. Several important questions emerged of how conversion is to be defined and contextualized, which led effectively into the closing discussion.

The colloquium ended with a lively roundtable discussion of questions such as: is it possible to distinguish belief from the institution of the Church in the surviving evidence? What is the minimum requirement to identify as Christian and how did missionaries perceive their goals? And to what extent did economic change follow ideology?

The Network now looks forward to our final colloquium to be held in Cambridge on the 19^th–21^st of September 2013. The subject will be ‘The Isles and the Wider World’ and confirmed speakers include Rowan Williams, Bernhard Maier, Chris Wickham, James Palmer, Sven Meeder, Ingrid Rembold, Geneviève Bührer-Thierry, Jörn Staecker, Stanislaw Rosik, Jean-Michel Picard, Sébastian Bully, Krisztina Szilagyi, and Tomas Sundnes Dronen. A full programme will shortly be available from our website here, along with registration information.

Departmental Open Day 2013

The annual ASNC Departmental Open Day will take place on Wednesday 26th June. Booking is essential, and further details on the structure of the day and how to reserve a place are available here.

New Website on Medieval Welsh Law (Cyfraith Hywel)

Prof. Paul Russell notes:

A new website has been launched on Medieval Welsh law. This examines all aspects of medieval Welsh law, and includes bibliographies, discussions, details about the manuscripts, sections on Aneurin Owen’s Ancient Laws, and much more. This work is the result of a research project led by Dr Sara Elin Roberts, with ASNC graduate Bryn Jones as a research assistant; the project was funded by the Publications and Research Committee of the University of Wales, with the work of creating the website funded by the Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol. The website also represents the work of Seminar Cyfraith Hywel, and announcements of the meetings of the Seminar, new publications, and related matters will be included on the website from now on.