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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.
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Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England NICHOLAS HOWE Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England E S S AY S I N C U LT U R A L G E O G R A P H Y Yale University Press New Haven & London Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund. Copyright ∫ 2008 by Nicholas Howe. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. All photographs are by the author. Set in Sabon Roman type by Keystone Typesetting, Inc, Orwigsburg, Pennsylvania. Printed in the United States of America by Thomson-Shore, Inc., Dexter, Michigan. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Howe, Nicholas. Writing the map of Anglo-Saxon England : essays in cultural geography / Nicholas Howe. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-300-11933-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Anglo-Saxons. 2. Great Britain—History—Anglo-Saxon period, 449–1066. 3. Civilization, Anglo-Saxon. 4. Civilization, Anglo-Saxon, in literature. 5. English literature—Old English, ca. 450–1100—History and criticism. 6. Great Britain—History—Anglo-Saxon period, 449–1066—Historiography. 7. Cultural geography—Great Britain. 8. Manuscripts, Medieval—England. I. Title. da152.2.h69 2008 942.01—dc22 2007016407 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Georgina, as always Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction: Book and Land 1 Part I. Local Places 1 Writing the Boundaries 29 2 Home and Landscape 47 Part II. Geography and History 3 Englalond and the Postcolonial Void 75 4 Rome as Capital of Anglo-Saxon England 101 5 From Bede’s World to ‘‘Bede’s World’’ 125 viii Contents Part III. Books of Elsewhere 6 Books of Elsewhere: Cotton Tiberius B v and Cotton Vitellius A xv 151 7 Falling into Place: Dislocation in Junius 11 195 Conclusion: By Way of Durham 225 Notes 233 Index 269 Preface To the writing of place in Anglo-Saxon England there is, I have learned, no end. Choose a topic or genre, trace out the possible senses of place that each displays, and you will discover far more than can easily be accommodated in even a full-length study. I could assemble several tables of contents to place beside the range of materials surveyed in this book, alte