UID:
almahu_9949447587002882
Format:
1 online resource (xiv, 237 pages) :
,
digital, PDF file(s).
ISBN:
9781787448926 (ebook)
Series Statement:
Medievalism ; volume XVIII
Content:
Long before they appeared in the pages of Ivanhoe and nineteenth-century Old English scholarship, the Anglo-Saxons had become commonplace in Georgian Britain. The eighteenth century - closely associated with Neoclassicism and the Gothic and Celtic revivals - also witnessed the emergence of intertwined scholarly and popular Anglo-Saxonisms that helped to define what it meant to be English. This book explores scholarly Anglo-Saxon studies and imaginative Anglo-Saxonism during a century not normally associated with either. Early in the century, scholars and politicians devised a rhetoric of Anglo-Saxon inheritance in response to the Hanoverian succession, and participants in Britain's burgeoning antiquarian culture adopted simultaneously affective and scientific approaches to Anglo-Saxon remains. Patriotism, imagination and scholarship informed the writing of Enlightenment histories that presented England, its counties and its towns as Anglo-Saxon landscapes. Those same histories encouraged English readers to imagine themselves as the descendants of Anglo-Saxon ancestors - as did history paintings, book illustrations, poetry and drama that brought the Anglo-Saxon past to life. Drawing together these strands of scholarly and popular medievalism, this book identifies Anglo-Saxonism as a multifaceted, celebratory and inclusive idea of Englishness at work in eighteenth-century Britain.
Note:
Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 18 Jan 2023).
Additional Edition:
Print version: ISBN 9781783275014
Language:
English
URL:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/9781787448926/type/BOOK
