Freedom, Slavery, and England's Medieval Past

Anglo-Saxonist Entanglements
Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80270-051-0
Verlag: ARC Humanities Press

Buch, Englisch, 196 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 231 mm, Gewicht: 567 g

This book is a study of how ideas drawn from the English Middle Ages have been used to preserve and withhold freedom in the modern world. Broad in scope, it draws on canonical and ephemeral texts, including chronicles, memoirs, novels, political pamphlets, archival material, and works of history by scholars, colonizers, abolitionists, and Lost Cause apologists. Using three generations of a single family to frame its analysis, it reveals an intellectual genealogy that moves from medieval England to modern Africa, the Caribbean, the plantations of the US, and back again, to the academic disciplines of medieval studies and the very fabric of England’s medieval heritage. It argues that England’s medieval past has been a source of tenacious bonds—of family, freedom, slavery, nation, and race—and suggests that better understanding how those bonds were formed and resisted will enable full analysis of their legacy.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Davies, Joshua

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Europäische Länder
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein Historiographie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Alte Geschichte & Archäologie Vor- und Frühgeschichte, prähistorische Archäologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations

Preface

Introduction. Chosen Pasts

Chapter 1. “Useful Liberty”: Genealogies of English Liberty, the Norman Yoke, and the Anglo-Saxons

Chapter 2. “Confined to Complexion”: Histories of Unfreedom and Granville Sharp’s Anglo-Saxonist Abolitionism

Chapter 3. Temporal Bonds: The Kembles’ Anglo-Saxon Family Ties and the Problem of Slavery

Chapter 4. White Possessions and the “Negro Yoke”: Proximity, Distance, and Communities of Memory at the Butler Plantations

Afterword. Intimate Histories: Journeys, Names, Ruins

Bibliography

Index

Über Autor(innen)

Davies, Joshua
Joshua Davies is Senior Lecturer in the English Department at King’s College London. He is the author of Visions and Ruins: Cultural Memory and the Untimely Middle Ages (2018) and co-editor of Caroline Bergvall’s Medievalist Poetics: Migratory Texts and Transhistorical Methods (2023).