Imagined Communities, Rational Choosers, Invented Ethnies

Preface. Introduction: The Theoretical Debate. 1 The Concept and its Varieties. 2 Ethnic and Religious Roots. 3 Community in the Ancient World. 4 Hierarchical Nations. 5 Covenantal Nations. 6 Republican Nations. 7 Alternative Destinies. Conclusion. Notes. References

The Cultural Foundations of Nations: Hierarchy, Covenant, and Republic

The persistence of ethnic communities is a neglected area of research. The study of ethnies over long time‐spans requires comparison of different patterns of ethnic survival, in terms of symbols and myths of ethnic election. Such myths can be found in the ancient Near East, in Judea, Greece, Armenia, Persia, as well as Byzantium, Russia and Western Europe, mobilizing and inspiring ethnic survival. Four main patterns of ethnic survival are outlined: imperial‐dynastic, communal‐demotic, emigrant‐colonist and diaspora‐restoration. In each case, modern nationalism reinforces and politicizes the old myths of ethnic election and its forms and intensity can be explained in terms of these patterns of ethnic survival.

Chosen peoples: Why ethnic groups survive*

Recent research on both old and new excavation data from Anglo‐Saxon burial sites reveals a widespread and frequent practice of reusing monuments of earlier periods. Both Roman and prehistoric structures provided the focus of cemeteries, burial groups and single graves between the late fifth and early eighth centuries AD. It is argued that this practice was central to the symbolism of Anglo‐Saxon mortuary practices, and was important for the construction and negotiation of origin myths, identities and social structures.

Monuments and the past in early Anglo‐Saxon England

How were the dead remembered in early medieval Britain? Originally published in 2006, this innovative study demonstrates how perceptions of the past and the dead, and hence social identities, were constructed through mortuary practices and commemoration between c. 400–1100 AD. Drawing on archaeological evidence from across Britain, including archaeological discoveries, Howard Williams presents a fresh interpretation of the significance of portable artefacts, the body, structures, monuments and landscapes in early medieval mortuary practices. He argues that materials and spaces were used in ritual performances that served as 'technologies of remembrance', practices that created shared 'social' memories intended to link past, present and future. Through the deployment of material culture, early medieval societies were therefore selectively remembering and forgetting their ancestors and their history. Throwing light on an important aspect of medieval society, this book is essential reading for archaeologists and historians with an interest in the early medieval period.

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Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain

A revisionist interpretation of Anglo-Saxon England. Nicholas Howe proposes that the Anglo-Saxons fashioned a myth out of the 5th-century migration of their Germanic ancestors to Britain. Through the retelling of this story, the Anglo-Saxons ordered their complex history and identified their destiny as a people. Howe traces the migration myth throughout the literature of the Anglo-Saxon period, in poems, sermons, letters and histories from the sixth to the eleventh centuries.

Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England.

https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/renref/article/download/11807/8697

Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England

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.

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

The old English catalogue poems

This collection of original essays serves as a set of case studies for exploring the ways in which people experienced home and homelessness between the eighth and sixteenth centuries. Arranged in reverse chronological order, the volume considers precise examples of the need for (or lack of) shelter and a place to call one's own in cultures ranging from Venice, Spain, and Latin America to Iceland and Anglo-Saxon England. Patricia Fortini Brown translates the floor plans of houses and the layouts of neighborhoods of Renaissance Venice into a broad understanding of that city's social and political arrangements. Mary Elizabeth Perry examines the ways in which the physical spaces and protected courtyards of Spanish homes allowed Moriscos to maintain their Islamic faith after the Reconquista. Sabine McCormack articulates the paradox that arose in sixteenth-century Peru when the conquering Spaniards made a triumphant new home for themselves by forcing homelessness on many of the indigenous peoples. William Ian Miller considers the unique case of home and homelessness in medieval Iceland, in which scattered settlements in "the middle of nowhere" were held together by a complex legal system. Drawing on the lexical and textual evidence that survives from Old English, Nicholas Howe supplements the available archaeological materials and offers new ways of examining home and homelessness in Anglo-Saxon England. Featuring the writings of some of the most influential scholars in history, art history, and literary studies, Home and Homelessness in the Medieval and Renaissance World presents fascinating studies that cover a wide breadth of cultural sites and moments.

Nicholas Howe

Papers

Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England.

Migration and Mythmaking in Anglo-Saxon England

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

The old English catalogue poems

Home and Homelessness in the Medieval and Renaissance World