Christine Rauer (University of St Andrews)

A Literary History of Mercia: Scribes, Stories, Scholarship c. 600-1100

I'm currently working on this monograph project, under contract with Brepols. The literature of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia has never been studied as a thematic whole in its historical and cultural context. I'm hoping to include more than a hundred texts written in Old English and Latin, prose and poetry (including the famous poem Beowulf) and a wealth of manuscripts and inscriptions in this first literary history of Mercia. My monograph will draw on literary contextualisation, linguistic evidence, ecclesiastical and political history, and theories of early medieval ethnic identity and text production to analyse the written output of this most central of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Mercian authors and scribes were instrumental in helping English establish itself next to Latin as an important literary language in the British Isles, combining the height of early medieval Latin scholarship with an interest in traditional Germanic legend and an impressive knowledge of Christian materials. Their literary innovations will be at the centre of this monograph.

I was fortunate in having been awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant to employ two Research Fellows, Dr Rachel Burns and Dr Jessica Hodgkinson during the academic year 2022-3.

They assisted me in compiling registers of relevant primary materials (registers of primary texts in Old English and Anglo-Latin, lists of manuscripts and inscriptions) and secondary literature on the literary history of Mercia. Together we presented an update on our research at the International Medieval Congress at Leeds in the summer of 2023.

For the resulting lists of primary texts, lists of manuscripts, bibliographies and teaching materials included in my project, please go to the website of our new Mercian Network, a group of some 80 researchers interested in early Mercian culture.

Background

'Mercia' has meant different things to different people across history: this kingdom and the people associated with it have had a complex identity, both in the early Middle Ages as well as in modern times. 'Literature' will here be broadly understood, and my approach will be inclusive, taking account of as many different aspects of Mercia as possible, in a multi-disciplinary study. Special attention will be paid to the cultural and historical relationships between Mercia, Kent and Wessex, particularly at the time of its cultural climax, the eighth and ninth centuries, where Canterbury and Worcester (for example) played such an important role as a literary centre. I will present a chronology of Mercian text production, surveying the impressively wide range of literary genres associated with this kingdom, which includes glosses, charters, some of the earliest Old English prose and poetry (for example Beowulf, Andreas), and Latin literature, such as the riddle tradition, grammatical commentary or the Staffordshire hoard inscription. Famous individuals linked to Mercian literary culture, including authors and scribes (such as Tatwine, Cynewulf and the Beowulf-poet), as well as royal and other aristocratic individuals associated with literary activity (such as Offa, Cynethryth, Unwona, Ealhswith and Godiva) and manuscripts (such as the productions of the famous 'Tiberius' group of books) from cultural centres such as Worcester, Lichfield, Leicester, Canterbury, and other sites, will also be surveyed, across five centuries. My project will ask what cultural ambitions, linguistic skills and literary innovations can be shown to underlie this wealth of literary production. I hope to show that Mercian literary culture not just rivals but exceeds the famous corpus of texts produced by the neighbouring kingdom of Wessex which is much better understood and more often researched. My monograph will contain comprehensive and newly compiled reference materials, including five appendices presenting texts, named individuals, linguistic features and timelines. This will be complemented by a website containing more comprehensive registers of texts and manuscripts and bibliographies relating to Mercian text production for future updating.

The monograph builds on the pioneering effort of Dutch academic Rudolf Vleeskruyer (1953), who first attempted to chart the extent of the Mercian literary corpus, but was somewhat overshadowed by scholarship on the longstanding mythologization of the West Saxon King Alfred and his cultural programme which bookended the climax of Mercian cultural production in the ninth century. Focusing on the dominating Victorian cult of King Alfred (highlighted, for example, by its millennial celebrations in 1899), twentieth-century scholarship largely neglected the literature produced by King Alfred’s great rival, Mercia and its authors, scribes and sponsors. Only in more recent decades have Mercian manuscript studies and Mercian political history come to the fore again, particularly in the work of Simon Keynes, Michelle Brown, Joanna Story, Robert Gallagher, Ben Snook, Stefany Wragg, and the anthologies of articles by Michelle Brown and Carol Farr, ed., Mercia: An Anglo-Saxon Kingdom (2001) and David Hill and Margaret Worthington, ed., Æthelbald and Offa (2005). Another example of renewed interest is the considerable Mercian component of the highly successful, recent British Library ‘Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms’ exhibition (2018-19). Poetic publications like Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns (1971) and popular educational material like Tom Holland’s Æthelflæd: England’s Forgotten Founder (2019) testify to the enduring appeal of Mercian culture and Mercian heritage to the non-academic reader. The proposed monograph will for the first time bring together the more isolated scholarly discussions and bodies of evidence to build a more coherent, clear and multi-disciplinary picture. In particular, my monograph aims to cover literary, linguistic, historical and codicological evidence in conjunction. The challenge in this will be to ensure that the various definitions of what can be regarded as 'Mercian' show sufficient interesting and meaningful overlap between the various disciplines, such as dialectology and political history. I want to show how Mercian authors, scribes and sponsors themselves habitually crossed cultural boundaries in bringing together Old English and Latin, fiction and historiography, Germanic legend and Christian traditions, prose and poetry, ornate style and more functional content, to produce truly innovative literature which still underlies much of our modern literary culture written in English. The impressive extent of early Mercian literary culture collected and contextualised in this new monograph will resonate both with researchers and readers who are themselves linked to Mercian backgrounds, locations and research areas, as well as those from other academic specialisations and educational levels interested in this major, central part of early England.

For some background reading, recent preparatory article-length publications on my project include:

C. Rauer, ‘Old English Literature before Alfred: The Mercian Dimension’, The Age of Alfred: Rethinking English Literary Culture c.850-950, ed. F. Leneghan and A. Faulkner, Studies in Old English Literature (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming), pp. 51-71

C. Rauer, ‘The Earliest English Prose’, Journal of Medieval History 47 (2021) 485-96

C. Rauer, ‘Early Mercian Text Production: Authors, Dialects, and Reputations’, Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 77 (2017), 541-58

This website last updated 08 March 2024