Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England: Essays in Cultural Geography - Hardcover

"[Howe's] passion for his subject matter is evident in these rich and allusive readings, which combine textual analysis, personal observation, theory, philology, manuscript study, and archaeology in a way that will be sure to invigorate (or reinvigorate) the reader's interest in the field of Anglo-Saxon studies more generally. Like Migration and Mythmaking before it, Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England is scholarship that is learned and elegant while also being exciting and heartfelt."-Jacqueline Stodnick, Speculuma Journal of Medieval Studies -- Jacqueline Stodnick * Speculuma Journal of Medieval Studies * "Howe's broad and humane perspective makes this not just a landmark work in Anglo-Saxon studies, but a powerfully evocative meditation on land and culture, homeland and exile, conquest and colony, landscape and life, and the human condition of being 'at home' in the world."-Roy Liuzza, University of Tennessee -- Roy Liuzza "Nick Howe was the Anglo-Saxonist of my generation. This book, with its inquiries from Beowulf and Bede to post-Conquest England, eloquently testifies to his legacy and maps a future for our scholarship."-Seth Lerer, Stanford University -- Seth Lerer

Eminent Anglo-Saxonist Nicholas Howe explores how the English, in the centuries before the Norman Conquest, located themselves both literally and imaginatively in the world. His elegantly written study focuses on Anglo-Saxon representations of place as revealed in a wide variety of texts in Latin and Old English, as well as in diagrams of holy sites and a single map of the known world found in British Library, Cotton Tiberius B v. The scholar's investigations are supplemented and aided by insights gleaned from his many trips to physical sites. The Anglo-Saxons possessed a remarkable body of geographical knowledge in written rather than cartographic form, Howe demonstrates. To understand fully their cultural geography, he considers Anglo-Saxon writings about the places they actually inhabited and those they imagined. He finds in Anglo-Saxon geographic images a persistent sense of being far from the center of the world, and he discusses how these migratory peoples narrowed that distance and developed ways to define themselves.