To mark this fiftieth volume of ASE – a golden anniversary of sorts – it seems appropriate to cast the briefest of glances backwards over all that the journal has achieved across the time since Professor Peter Clemoes (1920–1996) wrote to Michael Black, then Chief Editor of Cambridge University Press, on 12 November 1969, to propose ‘a new periodical concerned with the civilization of England before the Norman Conquest’ with the aim to ‘encourage studies distinguished by intellectual scope and quality and especially those which cross the artificial boundaries set up by modern academic disciplines’. The proposal had been preceded by a significant flurry of correspondence among those active in the field internationally, which it is hoped may be documented on another occasion. The first volume appeared in January 1972 with a preface by Peter Clemoes which is reproduced after this note, since it sets out the journal’s aims so eloquently.
Following that preface we here provide a full index of the contents of volumes 1–50: it is, alas, indexed by author only, even though a full index would be of great value but would run to very many pages (extremely useful full indices were printed in the journal every five years up to volume 30 and all put together are 232 pages long). Surveying the list, one is struck forcibly by the extent to which the vision of Clemoes and his co-workers for an interdisciplinary journal was fulfilled: it is hard to think of areas and disciplines that have not been represented, from numismatics, charters and onomastics, through linguistics, poetry and prose-style to medicine, palaeography, art-history and material culture, dipping from time to time into the most unexpected corners, such as cookery, milling, hunting and ants. More than seventy articles have manuscripts as their primary focus (not to mention the many more that draw them in as evidence), nearly a hundred articles discuss an Old English poem or poetics, Beowulf looming largest with over thirty articles mentioning it in the title, but Latin verse gets plenty of air-time too, as well as Skaldic verse. Bede just pips Ælfric to the post to be the author most frequently named in the title of an article (though of course both are outstripped by the Beowulf poet!). Anglo-Latin was highlighted in Clemoes’ preface as one of ‘the less commonly considered forms of evidence’ and the journal has done a great deal over its time to rectify that lack of attention. The preface refers also to the journal’s aspiration to ‘promote fresh areas of knowledge and to invigorate growth in new directions’ and ‘to encourage new thinking’: at a very rough estimate some forty articles have titles explicitly unveiling new discoveries, whether it be coins, artifacts, texts or authors, but other kinds of newness are beyond counting. Plenty of articles look outwards too, examining connections beyond England.
In various ways ASE has served also as the journal of record for the field in the broadest sense, not only through the reports of the biennial congresses of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (now the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England), listing all the papers given (many of which subsequently became articles in the journal), but also through nearly twenty articles that are either handlists or catalogues of some kind, for example, the first iteration of Helmut Gneuss’s fundamental handlist of manuscripts (with subsequent addenda and corrigenda), Patrick Wormald’s handlist of lawsuits, and Elisabeth Okasha’s regular supplements to the handlist of non-runic inscriptions. In its early years the journal also commissioned regular review articles and surveys of the state of scholarship in one area or another, a practice which we have sought to reinstitute in the current volume with the piece commissioned from Andrew Rabin to mark another anniversary, that of the death of Archbishop Wulfstan in 1023.
One other aspect of the journal mentioned in the preface to volume 1 is the mingling of contributions from those starting out in their career with the work of long-established scholars: although it is not now quantifiable, the journal has most definitely continued to carry the writing of doctoral students – often their first publication – alongside that of emeriti.
We turn our faces, then, to the next stage in the journal’s life. After long consideration, it has been decided that the future of ASE will be characterized not only by a reaffirmation of the goals so clearly stated at the outset but also a move towards wider perspectives. This will take a number of forms: we will broaden the journal’s remit to go more explicitly beyond ‘the civilization of England before the Norman Conquest’ by welcoming research that situates England in its Northern European and global context; we will return to commissioning review articles as well as hosting comparative and interdisciplinary scholarship; and the journal will fully embrace open access, removing subscription paywalls that limit its audience. By these means, it is our hope that Early Medieval England and its Neighbours will continue to fulfil the vision of Anglo-Saxon England’s founders and earlier editors by presenting high-quality content at the same time as accurately reflecting the breadth and vibrancy of the field in the twenty-first century. To quote Clemoes’ closing words, as we look to the next fifty years, ‘may the future of our studies be worthy of their past.’
Appendix
The Preface to ASE 1
This new periodical, to be published annually, expresses the growing sense of community among scholars working in the various branches of Anglo-Saxon studies in many parts of the world. It reflects their increasing realization that the different disciplines they represent aid each other and are but aspects of a common interest. This is all the more so because the surviving source materials of any one kind are inevitably limited. One type of evidence needs to be studied in relation to another if the connections they had originally are to be understood today. No other periodical meets this need comprehensively. This is the only regular publication devoted solely to Anglo-Saxon studies and to fostering cooperation between them all. The editors want to stimulate investigation of the less commonly considered forms of evidence – Anglo-Latin literature for example. In this way and by bringing related specializations into direct communication we hope to promote fresh areas of knowledge and to invigorate growth in new directions. In all fields we intend to encourage new thinking which is aware of the potential of evidence, while respecting its limitations, and which is supported by technical skill, rational argument and expressive writing.
The present volume, it is hoped, makes a worthwhile start. The span of ecclesiastical history that it represents begins early in the seventh century with the conversion of East Anglia and ends in fourteenth-century Iceland with material from a late-twelfth-century service-book from England supplying information on Edward the Confessor. Its contributions to intellectual history increase our understanding of two important schools: the Old English Orosius is examined afresh as a unique witness to the geographical knowledge in King Alfred’s court, and the leading part played by Bishop Æthelwold’s school at Winchester in the period of monastic reform is revealed more clearly both as regards the systematic training it gave in vernacular usage and as regards the composition of Latin poetry it encouraged and the Latin authors, such as Horace, that it knew. Allegory in Old English literature is a topic explored by several contributors – its roots in patristic thought, its subordination to an inclusive visionary image, its use for homiletic purposes, and the contrast between its relatively schematized, consistent method and the less conceptualized, less defined movement of thought in Beowulfian epic. Two articles deal with the relationship between the Old English poem The Phoenix and Lactantius’s De Ave Phoenice: in treating The Phoenix as a visionary poem one author emphasizes its differences from Lactantius, while the other elucidates three readings in the Old English by reference to Lactantius’s Latin and (as a slightly different contribution to lexical studies) identifies some previously unrecognized Lactantian material in the Cleopatra Glossary. Indeed, Anglo-Saxon relations with the continent in their many-sidedness form a constantly recurring theme: the new conclusion that the Leiden Riddle was copied at Fleury in the tenth century and the first publication of a poem on free will composed by a foreigner in Bishop Æthelwold’s Winchester are examples of only two of the several kinds of attention that these all-pervading connections with Europe receive in this volume; another kind – to mention no more than one – lies behind an account of the revolution in our ideas of Anglo-Saxon domestic buildings fomented during the last two decades by the excavation of comparable buildings on the continent and also gives rise to an appeal to follow recent continental precedent (in suitable cases) by using archaeology to assist the study of the fabric of Anglo-Saxon churches above ground. Concerning the relations between the Anglo-Saxons and the other peoples in the British Isles, a new answer is given to a major, basic question when, on the grounds of a Northumbrian palaeographical ancestry and affinities with Pictish sculpture, it is argued that the Book of Kells is likely to have been produced in a great insular centre in eastern Scotland during the second half of the eighth century. Another sort of synthesis is represented by a formulation of the principles that should govern the study of surviving Anglo-Saxon buildings; and a survey of our present knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon house – intended to be the first of a series of review articles – sums up a rapidly changing subject that is of great interest not only to archaeologists but also to those concerned with related evidence in documents, literature and the arts.
The bibliography, which covers publications in all branches of Anglo-Saxon studies in 1971 and which is to be continued annually, is meant to help a reader to keep in touch with current work in specializations other than his own and, perhaps, to save him from overlooking a piece of work in his own specialization which has been published in an out-of-the-way place. There is to be an index to Anglo-Saxon England after five issues.
The contributors link the generations as the well as disciplines, for early writings by some accompany the work of others with long experience, including the last article for a periodical by the late Kemp Malone. It is fitting that there should be this sign of continuity as Malone’s long-sustained and influential contribution draws to its close. May the future of our studies be worthy of their past.
My thanks go to the contributors (including the compilers of the bibliography), to my fellow editors and to the Cambridge University Press and members of its staff for actively supporting this venture at its outset. I am grateful to Mrs Janet Godden for help in preparing the typescript for the press and in checking the proofs.
Peter Clemoes
For the editors
Open access
