Writing the Map of Anglo-Saxon England: Essays in Cultural Geography

By Nicholas Howe

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 030011933X
• ISBN13: 9780300119336
• Release Date: December 2007
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 1.24 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.6" x 9.3"