The Continuity of the Conquest: Charlemagne and Anglo-Norman Imperialism

by Wendy Marie Hoofnagle

Overview

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’ approach to ruling, 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 problems of succession in Anglo-Norman England, this volume will enlighten and enrich scholarship on medieval, early modern, and English history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780271074023
Publisher:	Penn State University Press
Publication date:	12/15/2017
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Wendy Marie Hoofnagle is Associate Professor of Languages and Literatures at the University of Northern Iowa.

Table of Contents

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? Norman Forest 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

Editorial Reviews

The Continuity of the Conquest further expands the horizons of an already expanding body of work on the medieval Charlemagne legend. That Frankish king and emperor loomed large in the imaginations of the Anglo-Normans, in ways both tacit and explicit. Wendy Hoofnagle forces us to reconceptualize what we think we know about Englishness, and indeed England itself, in the central Middle Ages.”

—Matthew Gabriele, Virginia Tech

“In The Continuity of the Conquest, Wendy Hoofnagle presents a wide-ranging and learned study that will be an important contribution to a variety of fields within medieval studies and beyond.”

—Anne Latowsky, University of South Florida

“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.”

—Lindsay Diggelmann Parergon

From the Publisher