Chapter 10 - Cross-Channel Networks of History Writing: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

Summary

The vernacularity of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle can seem to isolate it from contemporary European history-writing and to invite literary interpretations which emphasize its preoccupation with ‘Englishness’. This chapter focuses on form and social networks at three key points in the keeping of the Chronicle: its inception in Alfred’s cosmopolitan court, Æthelweard’s late tenth-century Latin translation for his cousin Matilda, abbess of the Ottonian nunnery of Essen, and the bringing together of the Old English Orosius and the Chronicle in the mid-eleventh century to create an ambitious universal chronicle. The Chronicle emerges as embedded within the multilingual fabric of Europe, from Ireland to the Bosporus, and alert to the linguistic politics of history-writing across the Latin West.