Members Only 75 – Shop Talk on Cultural Hegemony
Month: June 2016
207 – Christianity in Early Danelaw
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Here is part two to our story of religion and religious life at the age of the Great Heathen Army and the Danish invasion of Britain.
Last episode, I told you about how the stories we’re often told – of violent atrocities committed against Christian spaces and against Christendom itself – didn’t actually originate from the 9th century, when they supposedly occurred, but only appear in our record during the 12th Century. Two hundred years later during the height of the Crusades. We spoke about how the idea of the pagan zealotry of the Vikings doesn’t align with reports that they converted to Christianity eagerly and easily. And I showed you how the archaeological and contemporary record doesn’t comport with the popular story of a religious war against the Christians of Britain… a story that relies entirely upon records that were written centuries after the fact.
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206 – Did the Great Heathen Army Persecute Christians?
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Last week we covered the events of 869. The situation was dire. We have at least one dead Anglo Saxon king, two Anglo Saxon kingdoms that were now under the thumb of the Danes, and as far as the record tells us, everyone else was just keeping their heads down. They may have taken comfort in the fact that at least Ivarr the Boneless was gone… and we don’t know how many warriors he would have taken with him back to Ireland (or would have left, if the one oddr eport was correct and he died in Britain) but the Danes still held East Anglia and Jorvik.
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The playful nod at the end was the theme to Serial (bad dream) by Nick Thorburn. Please don’t sue me. I love the work you’re doing!
205 – Saint Edmund the Martyr
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Last episode we ended with the engagement of Prince Alfred to Ealhswith, daughter of Ealdorman AEthelred Mucel of Mercia and descendant of King Coenwulf of Merica, and I briefly mentioned political implications of such a match. But there was a personal aspect to this as well. Not the marriage itself, though that was certainly personal… so personal, in fact, that we have no real knowledge of how Alfred felt about his wife… we know how he felt about his piles, we know how he felt about hunting, we know quite a bit about his feelings for a variety of things… but not his wife. It’s entirely possible that he was desperately in love and the silence in the record was just part of the culture of the time and one didn’t speak of such things. But the fact remains that we don’t know much about how he, or Ealhswith, felt about the marriage.
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