Introduction: Global Perspectives on Early Medieval England

Summary

Brittania Oceani insula, cui quondam Albion nomen fuit, inter septentrionem et occidentem locata est, Germaniae Galliae Hispaniae, maximus Europae partibus, multo interuallo aduersa.

Breoton is garsecges ealond, ðæt wæs iu geara Albion haten: is geseted betwyh norðdæle and westdæle, Germanie 7 Gallie 7 Hispanie þam mæstum dælum Europe myccle fæce ongegen.

Britain is an island in the ocean, formerly called Albion, lying between the north and the west, opposite, though far apart, to Germany, Gaul and Spain, the chief divisions of Europe.

Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People I.i

BRITAIN, as Bede notes, may be an island in an ocean, but its diverse inhabitants in the early medieval period were neither insular nor isolated. Global Perspectives on Early Medieval England examines some of the ways in which the emergence of an English cultural identity and polity within a culturally contested island was fundamentally joined to and interpenetrated by other parts of the world. Ideally, a global perspective can work to undermine anthropogenic borders, combat nationalistic ideologies, and reveal connections and commonalities. Less ideally, globalization as a universalizing or totalizing perspective has been adopted as a tool of power colonizing other peoples and their histories. This volume focuses on the complex interdependencies that develop through human mobility in zones of contact, while remaining cautious about the limits and abuses of global and comparative methodologies.

For the study of early medieval England, a global approach offers the opportunity to break free of the ethnic nation-state paradigms of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century western historiography, not coincidentally the defining stage for the field of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ studies. The interdisciplinary essays in Global Perspectives present various starting points for rethinking the subjects specialists in the field engage with, and how they do so utilizing diverse frames of reference. First of all, a global perspective suggests closer attention be paid to the ways in which ethno- linguistic English communities inhabiting the island of Britain during the period circa 450–1100 were not only not a singular homogeneous ‘Anglo-Saxon’ polity, but were also part of a North Atlantic Insular world connected to the Eurasian continent and the Mediterranean in complex ways.