The Norman conquerors of Anglo-Saxon England have traditionally been seen both as rapacious colonizers and as the harbingers of a more civilized culture, replacing a tribal Germanic society and its customs with more refined Continental practices. Many of the scholarly arguments about the Normans and their influence overlook the impact of the past on the Normans themselves. The Continuity of the Conquest corrects these oversights.
Wendy Marie Hoofnagle explores the Carolingian aspects of Norman influence in England after the Norman Conquest, arguing that the Normans' literature of kingship envisioned government as a form of imperial rule modeled in many ways on the glories of Charlemagne and his reign. She argues that the aggregate of historical and literary ideals that developed about Charlemagne after his death influenced certain aspects of the Normans' ruling approach, including a program of conversion through “allurement, political domination through symbolic architecture and propaganda, and the creation of a sense of the royal forest as an extension of the royal court.
An engaging new approach to understanding the nature of Norman identity and the culture of writing and the problems of succession in Anglo-Norman England, this volume will enlighten and enrich scholarship on medieval, early modern, and English history.
Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE: Introduction
Continuity and Carolingian Kingship: The Case of the Early Normans
An “Obsession with the Continent”: A Reconsideration of Insular Continuity
CHAPTER TWO: Conversion Politics and the Ideology of Imperialism
The Politics of Allurement: Conversion and Charlemagne’s Civilizing Impulse
Conversion Politics: Rituals of Submission and Unification
The Pygmalion Effect: Dudo of St. Quentin and the Rituals of Empire
Converting the British Barbarian: “Sitting at High Table” at the
Anglo-Norman Court
CHAPTER THREE: Making Their Mark: The Imperial Ideology of Topography
Imperial Unification and Sacral Kingship: Henry of Huntingdon’s Via regia
Charlemagne’s Imperial Memory and the Symbolic Landscape:
Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Castles
CHAPTER FOUR: Taming the Wilderness: A New Look at the New Forest
Keeping It in the Familia? NormanForest Law and its Carolingian Ancestry
In the Dreams of Snoring Monks: The King’s Body in the New Forest
Addicted to the Chase: Expressions of Royal Power in Marie de France’s Forests
CHAPTER FIVE: Epilogue
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
“Landscape and architecture; mythmaking and historical writing; imperial expansion and the ideology of kingship: all of these themes are addressed in ways which will offer new perspectives and which are sure to be thought-provoking to scholars of the Anglo-Norman era.”
